Around Great Britain in 11 days

Last week, Florence and I took a rapid tour of universities in Great Britain. The tour ranged in geography from the north of Scotland (Aberdeen) to southwestern England, and from Durham in the east to Cardiff in the west. Within 11 days (including the travel days), we saw nine universities!

Kings College Church,
with the Gibb building to the right
(designed by James's great great nth grandfather)

Rear gate of King's College

We saw so many sights, it is really hard to recap. Sadly, the blog program did not work on the ipad, or we would have written daily. Here is my attempt.

View of Gibb building from other side

Day one, we flew from Perugia to London, where our friends Ann and James picked us up and whisked us to Cambridge. We wandered around (including going into King's College, where James is an alumnus; we got to see the marvelous church where the choir records its heavenly music!), had a lovely tea (much anticipated, since lunch had been a no-go), and just got a general feel for the place. I loved its hushed atmosphere of deep quiet and study, and Florence liked the river!

Matthew's college

Cream tea, channeling Alice!

Bridge of Sighs, wanting to be Venice!

Oxford was next. Much more of a proper town with the colleges interspersed, it felt generally busier. This is where Dodgson had tea with Alice (yes, the one for whom Alice in Wonderland was written), and we three (Florence, Ann, and I) had tea in the exact same spot! The pub was torn down and then another rebuilt, but we did get to see the view they would have had. We had the chance to see Matthew's college (Ann and James's son), which was really lovely: ancient walls, hushed courtyard, and some modern architecture sneaked into the middle to provide extra space).

Royal Holloway

Then Royal Holloway. Florence and I had lunch in the Monkey's Forehead (which troubled me, since it was named in actuality the "Monkeys Forehead"). The original building is a Victorian splendor or horror, depending on your taste. We had the chance of an official tour, plus a meeting with one of the professors.

Clock Tower, Royal Holloway

My waking view!

Maths and other buildings, Warwick

Saturday, we woke up to snow and wondered how we would be able to get back! Warwick, a very modern campus built in the 1960s, had an open day that day, and we really didn't want to miss it.  It included a tour and the chance to talk to some of the students on campus. Situated in Coventry, it is more dispersed than I expected, and really felt like an American campus. Ann is a professor there, so she was kind enough to drive us there and tell us a bit about the university life and the students.

New library, Aberdeen

Main quad, Aberdeen

Alley, Aberdeen

Streetscape, Aberdeen

Sunday meant a flight up to Aberdeen, then a stay in the Station Hotel. The next morning, and we were on campus. Mostly a granite-block campus (the university was started in 1495 or something), it has the most beautiful modern library. We received a really warm welcome there: had meetings with one of the professors, had a personal campus tour, AND met with an admissions officer. We were really impressed by how kind everyone was to us, from the university officials to the shopkeepers.

View from train

Local train station

It was actually Caribbean green

Someone was eating haggis-flavored potato chips!

Monday afternoon, we took a gorgeous train ride down the coast...
through Edinburgh (near the Firth of Forth!), down and around into England, and ending in Durham.

Stained glass! Flowers!

Highly detailed floor

The whole thing is about 3.5 feet tall

In real life!

A night in a B&B (which offered a delicious, full breakfast...enough to keep us going until tea time!), then the next morning off to Durham University! The cathedral is really lovely, and they are currently involved in a fundraiser: for one pound, you can purchase a Lego brick to add to the model of the cathedral they are creating! Unfortunately, I didn't realize that they were closing until it was too late, so I didn't get to add anything to it.

The "Norman" keep actually dates to
the Victorian period!

Castle College

On the green outside Durham Cathedral

Off to the airport in Newcastle, and a flight to Bristol came next. Night in the Bristol hotel, then the next morning off in the rental car to the University of Exeter! We had a meeting scheduled with an admissions tutor, who then invited us to attend his speech and a presentation by current students that were part of the "Offer Holders' Open Day." This was a day designed to help those who had been accepted to the school decide between Exeter and any of the other universities which had accepted them.

Tea and dinner with my cousin Paula and her family! It was great to see how big Archie, Felix, and Daisy are becoming and to spend some time with Paula's husband, Chris. We really don't get to see them often enough, and are thrilled that Paula and the kids will be coming for a visit in just a few weeks! We're already making plans for fun things to do with them.

Next morning, University of Bath. On the way, there had been an accident: overturned tractor trailer! Luckily, everyone seemed okay, but there were a host of people herding sweet pink pigs towards an enclosure! Florence and I had a little giggle just because the pigs were so adorable. Having no appointment at the university, we mostly drove around the campus, and then went to visit the Roman baths after which the city was named. We also wanted to visit the Wookey Hole cheddar caves on the way back. What a great name, right? As it happened, it looked like a total tourist trap (and a local we stopped said that it was, in fact)...but the town was cute. One of these days, I WILL visit some of the cheddar caves; but it was not to be this time!

Another tea and dinner with Paula et al. and the next morning (after a bit of time with Paula and Chris after the kids had gone to school) it was time to sally forth to Wales. Phew!

The suspension bridge between England and Wales is really lovely, and Cardiff Castle was a lot of fun. Originally founded during Roman times as a fort, the castle itself was most lately added onto and duded up by one of the owners in the 19th century. A confection of Gothic Revival, it is simultaneously tremendously overdone and lovely.

View from the keep

View of the keep

Dining room

Bedroom, complete with mirrored ceiling

I loved the frog detailing in the clock tower

 The university itself has no real campus (it is very much a city university), but has a really nice location near the Sophia Gardens. We were very impressed with the extent of that facility. Since Florence wasn't feeling well (coming down with a cold), we needed to get to the hotel. So off we went!  Quick pub dinner, then bed.

Dining room

Ensuite bath with flush toilet

Nursery with story frieze

Arab Room floor

Ceiling of clock tower smoking room

Rooftop garden...originally intended as
a bath, but the water weight would have
been too much

Fireplace in one of the studies

Ceiling of Arab Room

The marble in the door was all
different types, each with its
provenance identified

The last day involved a driving tour of southeastern Wales. We went up to Abergavenny, then across to Monmouth, then down past Chepstow. Tintern Abbey was breathtaking: I had to turn in quickly (to an admittedly justified blaring of horns from the driver behind me) just to get a photo. Gorgeous! And then to the airport and home, utterly exhausted.

Tintern Abbey

Love,
Alexandra

A Fly-Free Meet in Città di Castello

Yesterday, Florence had a meet in Città di Castello, a town about an hour away from us (at the far north of Umbria). Since it was for fly and free (and IM as well, a favorite of Florence's and ours), Michael and I were all gung-ho to watch. So we rented a car and set off for the north.

We were struck again with culture shock that I thought it would be fun to note:

1. On tap, they offered Coke, beer, and wine.

 2. The "athlete's menu" consists of a primo (pasta), secondo (meat), and contorno (veg). So much for a hamburger, fries, and soda! No mention of dessert, either















3. The sweets are colorful, to say the least.

Standard equipment

4. Concession stand pizza is anything but: they get the dough and put it in a press to make a super-thin crust on the spot. Then they smear it with sauce and cheese, and bung it in the oven with their long-handled spatula. It was actually delicious, and only $1.40 for a huge piece.








5. Cookies are served bakery-style, individually. They looked beautiful.

Warmups were a bit tight

Still warming up

It was also really fun to see Florence so much in her element. She swam a beautiful race for her fly; her IM event cracked us up: she hates breast, and excels in underwater pulls, so she ended up taking long, slow strokes and spending most of her time underwater. Meanwhile, the others were pulling three times for every one of her pulls and barely keeping up with her! Because of the way the heats worked out, she won second for both her events, despite winning both of the heats.

Love,

Alexandra

Environmental Change

At least on a local level!

Florence loves her sense of cocooning, so I had long decided to make her a tent...a way to enclose her bed and give her a little nest. I finally finished it!

I made the quilt a while back

Closed! We bought the fabric in India

We also decided it was time for the boys to have a bunk bed, and a fresh coat of paint was definitely in order. Andrea painted one wall green for us, and the rest is newly whitened. Fun, huh? Plus, of course, they had done their "annual" shoveling-out, so it is currently relatively clean.

Love,

Alexandra

Skiing at Canazei

I've just got back from a wonderful week off work in which I participated in the Italian tradition of a settimana bianca, a "white week" being a ski vacation.  This one was organized by buddies from the running club, so I got to experience a ski week done the Italian way.

At 7:00 am last Saturday we all piled into a 9-passenger van and made the long drive from Todi to Canazei, which occupies a narrow valley in the Dolomites.  The drive to get there overrode the normal Italian desires for food, and we made only two brief stops in the 8-hour drive, neither of which were for lunch.  At 3-something we checked into the hotel and then dashed out for a much-needed bite to eat, then ski rentals and lift tickets.

We had rooms in a small hotel a couple of hundred meters from lifts to the slopes.  I think the hotel had about 15 rooms total.  Mine was perhaps the smallest, a single nestled under the eaves on the third floor.  The slope of the roof limited the ceiling height, and over the bed and toilet they had given up and squared it off at chest height.

No standing in front of this toilet.  And in fact watch your head when you get up!

And then the next morning it was off to ski!

And to ski and ski.  Canazei is a town, one of a number in the valleys of the region.  You sleep, eat, and party in those towns, and take the lifts up into the mountains each morning.  My first lift of the morning was a brand new 100-passenger cable car with a 800 meter vertical climb (three times the rise of the one at Stone Mountain).

Once on the mountain you are in a whole network of interconnected resorts and can visit others towns, make all-day circuits, or head off to distant corners.  Our lift passes covered 12 resorts and 1200 km of slopes.  We worked off a map of the four resorts that were within a one-day skiing range.

A popular set of lifts and slopes are those of the "Sellaronda", the ones that let you circle a prominence in the center called the Sella Group (the Sella Group looked large and was even larger, rising a full kilometer above the ski slopes).  The Sellaronda course is about 42 km long and takes 5-6 hours to ski.  And it is just a small part of the interconnected system.

My ski pass log--everything is electronic these days--tells me that I rode 79 different lifts in 6 days, averaged something like 43 km per day, and had a total vertical descent of 47 km.  In real terms it meant I had a blast and skied first lift to last lift six days in a row.  Actually, after last lift on our final day.  We hung around a slopeside bar until half an hour after the lifts stopped running, then made our final dusk descent into the town below as they brought out the snow cats.

Here is the gang minus one non-skiing wife:

Massimo and me in a cable car:

The weather turned out to be uncomfortably warm--mostly above zero--and that meant less-than-ideal snow conditions by midday.  One day we decided the best way to get around that was to go for altitude, so we skied to the highest peak in the Dolomites, Marmolada.

A system of three cable cars lifts you 1834 meters (over a mile!) from the base area and drops you off at 3250 meters.  Several flights of stairs later you are on the viewing platform, and as luck would have it we chose a day with fantastic visibility.  The mountains stretched off to the horizon in every direction.

Of course, then you have to ski down.  This turned out to be one of our most demanding days physically.

The gang before we started down Marmolada

This was a small church on the side of the slopes we skied the last day.  We were in Italy, after all.  Why wouldn't you have a church on the slopes?  We stopped in to pay our respects and look around.  Holy ice.

Speaking of Italy, no ski trip is complete without meals, preferably slopeside.

Dinners were included in our hotel package.  Here we are around the table at the conclusion of one, ready to head into the lounge for continued conversation and some mean rounds of cards.

Michael