London

After Exeter Julia got on a train, still a bit hungover and came to meet me at our prearranged meeting point in Waterloo station. After checking in chez Eddie's, a friend of mine from RMC and the navy who is doing his masters at King's College, we went out to a couple of pubs to meet some more Canadians that were also studying or working in London. It was nice to have some English beers again. Julia was particularly enamored with the bitters.

The next day we went to see the sights, and here they are:

Buckingham Palace,home of the Queen and of many well armed police officers. As you can see by the flag on top, the Queen was in that day.

Big Ben,
with some pretty gnarled trees around it.

The Eye of London,

with Big Ben in the background. This was taken 30 seconds walk from Eddie's dorm room so you can see we were quite central. You can also see that it was very mild out.

The River Thames,
also quite near to Eddie's and, although you can't see it, off to the right is the National Theater. More on that later.

Westminster Abbey,
It's big and important but so is the price for going to pray there (£11). So this is as close as we got to it. We got to see the inside a bit more in and old film of the Queens coronation they were playing were they keep the crown jewels. Again more on that later.

The Royal horse guard,
these high polish kids are not far from Buckingham Palace but I really don't know what they have to guard. I really liked the sign.


This was in the park in near the Palace. The squirrels there were pretty much domesticated. This one is moving a bit to fast for the camera, probably stole somebody's coffee. They really weren't shy and they got really close to the people feeding them to get their food.

Picadilly Circus,

with it's ridiculously large advertising.

Trafalgar Square,

with Nelson's Column in the middle. Here you can see him on top of his tall pillar.


Surrounding Trafalgar square were many embassies, including;

The Canadian embassy,

the Australian embassy was also there and many others exept for New Zealand, which Eddie told us was in a random Mini-Mall somewhere.

Statue of Oliver Cromwell.
Strange monument to the Women of world war II.

And here is Julia at the British Museum.

Here were showcased all sorts of important historical things that the Brits stole from the rest of the world, such as the Rosetta Stone the Elgin Marbles. We didn't get to see the main temporary exhibit that was about a Chinese emperor that was buried with hundreds of clay statues representing his army.

That night we went to brick lane to eat some curry. There are many Indian restaurants there and you haggle for better prices, free beer and free deserts. Plus we could also bring our own wine which of course we did.
In the forground is Julia and I, and in the background is Eddie and Alexandra. Alexandra is a friend of Julia's from CCCMA in Victoria. She now also lives in London and is doing research there.

After the curry we went out to a bar. It was pretty big and as you can see there was a lot of people outside were they also served drinks and food.

The next day we went to the Tate Museum of Modern Art, which was guarded by a giant metal spider.
The Tate is housed in an former power plant(coal probably) and is pretty big.

You can see it behind Julia who is standing on the Millennium Bridge which crosses the Thames.

This gives them the ability to exhibit such things as this;






a giant crack in a cement floor. Symbolic and interesting.

This museum like the British Museum and most of them in London are free. Even the Tours are free. We got the tour of the minimalist branch and the guide was very knowledgeable. Good thing to because the first piece of minimalist art was a collection of metal tiles on the floor that everybody could walk on.

At some point after that we passed by there again to see the giant spider being dismantled.




That night we went to Chinatown, which is rather small, and had some Pho (vietmanese beef noodle soup). Joyce, another friend of Julia's this time from McGill, also joined us. She also lives in London now and is a teacher there. That night Eddie wanted to take us to the Canadian Pub to see the hockey game. Unfortunately, it was undergoing some renovations. So we went to some other place instead and had fun all the same.

The next day we went for a walk along the Thames while Eddie was in class. We made it to the Tower of London. We got ourselves an audioguide and before starting went to see the Crown Jewels because we were told that the place were they keep them closed at 4:3o and it was getting late already. So we saw the many, crowns, maces, orbs, spoons, saltshakers and punchbowls and the various rocks that adorned them as well as the many Beefeaters that guarded them, including the first and possibly only woman Beefeater. Also in this picture probably the most sun London has seen all winter.


After that we started with the audio tour. Here you can see Julia next to the water gate where traitors where ferried into the tower while it used as a prison.

We kept on going with the tour until we saw that the Beefeaters were starting to usher people out. We had misunderstood the person that was renting out the audioguides and the entire place was shutting down at 4:30. Unfortunately, we had not yet seen the White Tower which is the main building in the Tower and the reason we were there. We were told that we could get free tickets for the next day since we had bought them so late. We got them and gave them to Eddie since we would already be back in Germany by the time the place opened the next day. It was very saddening.

But then we went to the Tower Bridge. We also got there as it was closing but they let us in and we got to get the full tour accompanied by all the staff that were almost done their work day. The Tower Bridge is a bascule or seesaw bridge (it opens for boats). We saw the view from the catwalks that connect the two neo-gothic towers as well as the original machinery that was used to pump water and make the bridge tilt up. Here's part of that machinery. Julia was very impressed by the aesthetic.

This is one of the actuator that was used to store bridge lifting energy.


Their were also a lot of historic posters about the bridge. One of them was about the bus that had to jump the gap while the bridge was lifting because somebody forgot to pull the rope across to tell cars not to go onto the bridge.

After that, for our last night in London we went to see Much Ado About Nothing at the National Theater. It was great. At one point the main actors even had to jump in to a pool. The set was well done and the actors hilarious. It was a good end to our London adventure.

Exept that wasn't the end exactly Right after the play we had to leave to get the last train back to Stansted, the airport out of which we were flying. To our dismay we missed it and had to wait until 3:30 am to get the bus. While waiting we did meet two American basketball players going to sweden were they lived and played, an Italian from Sardinia, and Mexican who was going to Sardinia and her niece. They kept us entertained until the bus came.

Lovely Exeter!

From the 14th to the 18th of January I was a meeting in Exeter, held at the UK MetOffice headquarters. (This is sort of equivalent to Environment Canada's offices in Downsview, except that Exeter is a bit out of the way, in the Southwest of England, and the MetOffice is actually part of the Ministry of Defence in the UK, so security is taken a bit more seriously.) This was my first time to the UK, so I was quite excited.

Unfortunately, when one has to travel from a somewhat out-of-the-way town in Germany to a somewhat out-of-the-way town in England, it can take quite a while, even though the total distance isn't so great. And so I ended up getting up at 3:15 to catch a train at 4:06 so that I could finally end up at my hotel at around 6:30 pm. (This was composed of a slow night train to the airport in Berlin, which took 3.5 hours instead of the usual 2, and then waiting there for 3 hours, and then a 1.5 hour flight to London Stansted, and then a 45 minute train ride into London proper. After that, a few tube transfers (more than usual because of construction on many of the lines on a Sunday), and then I could catch a 2.5 hour train from Paddington station. This finally brought me to the Exeter St. Davids rail station, which isn't quite in central Exeter. I'd managed to make it this far without actually having any pounds, using only visa, but this meant that I didn't have change for the bus. Still, I decided, I'd been sitting all day, why not walk? Not realizing that the train station was about 3.5 km from downtown, and that my hotel was a further 3.5 km in another direction. And it was pouring rain. The rain actually soaked through my suitcase and damaged a couple of books I had with me, not to mention soaking through my leather coat and jeans.)

And so I arrived at the lovely Red House Hotel, wet, cold, and tired.
The staff were lovely, as were the few men drinking at the pub downstairs. I went up to my room to shower and change, and then came back down for supper and to call Jeremi, using the wireless available in the pub. The waitress mentioned that at 8:30 there was a quiz, and that sometimes it was quite fun, so I had another beer and waited to see what would happen.

That was certainly the best decision of my time there. The quiz, like most trivia contests in bars in Canada, was played out in teams, and I was invited to join a team by one of the locals who showed up for the contest. I have to admit that I wasn't much help in the first round, which was all based on British TV trivia. I did a bit better later, with geography and history questions, but the British pop culture ones left me stumped. (I just don't know the names of BBC presenters from talk shows in the 1970s.) My team didn't win anything, but one of the team members was nice enough to invite me out later in the week. And so I had someone to go out for beers with on Wednesday and Thursday evening, getting an insider's view of the nightlife of Exeter. It was fantastic! And people were so friendly (at least as much as in Halifax)! And they all spoke English! I don't think I'd realized just how much I missed understanding everything that was going on around me.

But of course I wasn't just there to drink delicious ale and to revel in the novelty of having full-speed conversations with strangers. I was actually there to work, and that side of things was pretty good too. It was a good chance to talk to people who I collaborate with, who I ordinarily contact only via email.

The MetOffice's headquarters are only 5 years old, and are still quite shiny and new.They have a few really geeky touches in the building, not least of which is this patterned mirror-thing, which was mounted on a round wall where we had our coffee breaks and lunches.It's hard to photograph, partly because it's a mirror, but also because there's text written both on the reflective backing, and on the top surface of the glass. This makes it hard to read as well, as the eye tries to focus on the two depths simultaneously. And what are the words? Most definitely based on computer code. At first I just thought that it was their numerical weather prediction code, or maybe part the code from the Hadley Centre's GCM, not least because they had subroutines with names like "SOIL MOISTURE MODULE". But upon closer inspection, one could see that they'd altered the code to include the names of MetOffice employees, with both their names and job titles getting incorporated into the text. (If you blow this picture up, you can see a bit of this.)
And as you may be able to tell from my reflection above, there was something of a fun-house aspect to these mirrors - my legs aren't really that asymmetrical. And for those of you wondering, yes, I really am allowed to wear such casual clothes to international project meetings. Sometimes I really love my job.

One other funny thing about visiting the MetOffice was the evidence of their recent "rebranding". Their old logo was blue with a yellow wave pattern on it, instantly recognizable. They decided to pay an advertising firm untold sums of money to modernize this somehow, and from what I can tell, they changed the blue to black, the yellow to something closer to chartreuse, and put together a bunch of management-speak to publicize what the MetOffice is doing. These small banners are just the tip of the iceberg.
There were many, many larger banners, with similarly inane phrases, though many were less grammatically correct. I understand the need to make the public aware of what governmental agencies are doing with tax money (in fact I recall at CCCma in Victoria they looked to the Hadley Centre as a model of how to improve public relations), but they seemed to just gloss over so much of the important research that is being done there in favour of a new colour scheme and modernized graphics.

And finally, a couple of pictures from the rest of Exeter. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me when I went to visit their beautiful cathedral, but Wikimedia has supplied me with a couple of pictures to fill that void. It really was quite impressive, though not quite as sunny while I was there.In fact, it was more than just "not sunny" while I was in Exeter. While I did get a few moments of sunshine, that was more than balanced by periods of torrential rain. On the train on the way there and back I passed by fields completely submerged in water. Here's the river Exe, rushing over some dams that are hardly holding anything back any more.
Though it's not clear here, many of the trees along the sides have water well up their trunks.
One historic sight in Exeter that I did manage to tak a picture of was the old bridge. This bridge was a at one time lined with houses and shops, and served as the main trading centre of the town. This led to problems as the town's economy picked up due to a lively trade in wool, and eventually the bridge had to be replaced. I think they also redirected the river at this point, as what's running under the old bridge is really just a stream. (I didn't get around to asking anyone, as I was on my way to the train station when I thought of this, and I was running late and mightily hungover.)
In sum, Exeter treated me like a lady. The people were lovely and the town was beautiful. If anyone is considering a trip to the Southwest of England, I would heartily recommend it.

my department retreat

Back on January 10-11th was my department retreat. Not the whole institute retreat (that'll be in June), but just my group, to talk about future research directions, and to encourage more interaction between people who don't always talk together as much as they should. The retreat was held at the Augustinerkloster, an old Augustinian monastery, in Erfurt, the capital of our fair Bundesland. Erfurt is only about 50 km away from Jena, and is well connected by train, so getting there was quite easy.

The retreat was really good, a nice chance to talk to people about work without so many day-to-day distractions (among other things, there was no internet there, nor phones nor TV). The rooms were really simple but comfortable, and were well stocked with bibles and books about the history of the monastery and its most famous former resident, Martin Luther.

Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera along, so the only pictures I have are from the website of the monastery, and don't actually feature any of my group members. Still, it was such a beautiful place, I thought I should include a few. Here's the main entrance:

And here is one of the courtyards, known as the Renaissancehof because the wooden structure in the background, where many of my coworkers were staying, was only added during the Renaissance, unlike the main structure which dates back to the 12th century. The room where our talks were held each day were just to the right off this courtyard. This was the dining hall, which was a former small courtyard that had been glassed in. The meals were all served family-style, with a few big platters of food at each table from which you could serve yourself. The meals were simple, but good and hearty (and thankfully didn't involve sausage).
This is a view from one of the other gardens, where you can see the still-standing wall of the library, which was bombed in February of 1945. Luckily, the priceless collection of religious books and manuscripts, many predating Luther, had been removed for safekeeping, and can be visited there today. There are some 60,000 publications in total, 13,000 of which are hand-written, and predate 1850. Tragically, at the time of the bombing, the library was being used as a bomb shelter, and 300 people were killed.

This is a view in the cloister, across the courtyard. Even today, people are asked not to speak while walking through the cloisters.
If any of you saw the 2003 movie starring Joseph Fiennes about the life of Martin Luther, some of this may look familiar, as parts of the film were made there.
One of these notable scenes was in the monastery's church, where Luther laid himself prostrate before the altar, asking for guidance (this is a still from the film). That stone square in front of him is a tombstone of sorts, to commemorate someone who is buried below. (The guide explained the story in more detail, but it escapes me now. Yet another reason why one shouldn't wait two weeks before finally getting around to blogging about something.) The stained glass windows were quite impressive as well, some of which you can see in this picture. The oldest date back to the 12th century, though some panes have had to be replaced over the years. They're quite complicated, with one further to the left (not shown) which tells the story of the life of St. Augustine in something like 27 scenes.

All in all, the retreat was quite a success. Among the outcomes was our new group policy to have a semi-mandatory coffee break every day at 3:00, to encourage informal collaboration and discussion. Personally, I think this is great, as it's far too easy, even for a relatively social and extroverted researcher such as myself, to spend the day glued to the computer, wasting time on things that one of your colleagues has probably done before anyhow, and could easily help you with. So far the coffee break is going pretty well, but only time will tell if it'll be a long-term success. It's hard to make people social, if their personality tends to the other extreme...

I'm done the quilt

Just kidding. Haven't really started yet. But we did find some fabric pictures on the internet (from a store in Germany) and made a composite picture of what the real thing might look like with MS Paint. It was painful but here it is.


As you can see, it's made from 64 copied and pasted log cabin blocks like this one.

Now I just have to buy the fabric, cut it, sew it, realize I've done it wrong, start over......