Great Britain: Edinburgh

Welcome to Edinburgh - our first view from the train station. What a tall, grey jumble. (I really like the unique Crown Spire of the cathedral.)

Part of Edinburgh Castle.

At the gate of the castle; Daisy and Chris are flanked by statues of Robert the Bruce and Sir William Wallace. We really liked seeing the "Honours" and the Stone of Scone, but weren't able to take pictures.

In the Great Hall of the castle, period instrumentalists and dancers put on a great show, and Daisy and I had front row seats. It made me wish that I could have that job! Apparently, this is the kind of event that Daisy can sit through.

Listening to the amazing bagpipe and drum corps in the New Town.

Our visit would just have not been complete without the beautiful, sunny hike around the Salisbury Crags, below Arthur's Seat. We enjoyed a "Scottish Highlands" experience without having to leave Edinburgh!
Snowy peaks could be seen in the north and south.
Muah, I love you!
Yes, bonding with my new scarf.
A nice family photograph.

Great Britain: Scarborough

We had talked - joked - about coming to Scarborough for a long time. We are so happy to have seen it. It's a great little city with a historic castle, a lighthouse, and 2 beautiful bays - the carnival-like South Bay and the less built-up North Bay. Here is one of our first views of the castle wall on top of the hill, as we were walking into town from the train station.
We really liked our bed and breakfast on top of the cliff, steps from the castle and with a view over the North Sea. The owners were super, bringing Daisy special kid dishes and serving us a private afternoon tea in the parlour. We all enjoyed our furnishings - I began to think that Daisy might be ready for The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe.

After our breakfast (with a cute "7 Dwarfs" toast rack for Daisy...she concluded that Snow White must be around somewhere, too, and from then on called the vaguely similar woman decorating the hearth "Snow White"), we made our pilgrimage to the castle.
It felt very huge and ancient. We learned a lot about the history of the castle, which I can try to condense here, especially for those of you with Scarborough blood! Experts have dated pottery found on the cliff to 2000 BC, and they display other artifacts that suggest two distinct periods of habitation, 800 BC and 500 BC. There are remains of a Roman signal station (380 AD), where they lit those fires that could communicate disaster up and down the coast. Vikings were here and Scarborough ("Skardi") is mentioned in several Icelandic sagas.

The castle has ties to royalty! In 1154, King Henry II decreed that all royal castles become his, and he invested huge sums to build up Scarborough's tower, the keep. In the early 1200's, King John spent more on building projects in Scarborough's castle than on any other castle in the kingdom. In that time, kings were mobile and would move their entire possessions around their lands to different cities and homes. John, Henry III, and Edward I used Scarborough Castle as royal lodgings several times. The last king to stay here was Richard III in 1484 while he was busy assembling a fleet to resist the invasion of Henry Tudor, later Henry VII.

In the Civil War (1640's), Scarborough became a Royalist stronghold against the Parliamentarians and there were terrible battles here.

Later, the castle was used as a prison, and a notable prisoner was George Fox, founder of the Quakers.

After this, Scarborough became known as a fashionable spa town and resort, and sea bathing was the new "in" thing.

Early in the First World War, Scarborough's town and castle were fired upon by German warships arriving through the thick morning fog. 17 civilians were killed. "Remember Scarborough!" became a rallying cry across the nation.



Unexpectedly, we were able to tag along with part of a Good Friday procession through the castle grounds. Our voices chimed in with the other lusty ones in an unfamiliar hymn. A good memory.


Anne Bronte is buried at a cliff-side church's cemetery near the castle. I read Agnes Grey in preparation for our trip. I really liked it, especially since I knew her sister's Jane Eyre so well, and could compare the stories of the young governesses.


The Beaches:
Here's a picture of us walking on the North Bay. All this sand was covered with water in the morning, and it would quickly go out during the day. Though we are no strangers to beaches, the army of seagulls, diving and screeching, had us in giggles the whole weekend. We saw families playing cricket, lots of dogs, and bundled up kids.

Beach-side Huts:
A landmark of the beaches were these adorable rainbow huts you can see behind us. People apparently rent these and can store stuff like grills, chairs, bikes, whatever.


And I forgot to mention: fish and chips! We had quite a lot of that, too, sometimes even with tea.

Great Britain: Castle Howard

Oh yes...the unexpected, long train ride...
Castle Howard - another misleading use of the word "castle." It is a huge estate, a noble family's home since the 1700's, and the Howard family still lives there (get this: the kids' names are Merlin and Octavia!). They have some great art, porcelain, and library collections displayed, but the main draw is just the amazing harmony of the beautiful architecture and the vast, serene landscaping. Not to mention the peacocks. They also do a lot of farming and gardening on the property. I read that it's over 1,000 acres.

Brideshead Revisted, a book turned movie about a wealthy family who lives in a large home called Brideshead, was filmed here. We made sure to watch it before we visited. So it was almost like REvisiting.



In every room, friendly guides told us about what room we were in and what was special in it. It seemed really personal.


We saw at least 5 peacocks roaming the grounds - and we heard even more squawking to each other over the fields. I got so excited and took about 100 pictures of one who gradually shook open his feathers and spun in a circle for us!

Great Britain: York

Cheers! We went up north (brrr) to Great Britain on an extended Easter holiday and spent 2 nights in York, 2 in Scarborough, and 2 in Edinburgh. The highlights:

• We got to speak English. Not that we were always understood, but the possibility was there!
  
• We now have more of a context for British history: seeing abbeys that Henry VIII destroyed, being in the room where Mary Queen of Scots birthed James, and seeing where Cromwell's Parliamentarians had laid siege to Scarborough Castle!
  
• Daisy's new favorite food is baked beans. They are part of the traditional English breakfast. In the mornings, she would gobble up her portion and we'd end up giving her ours, too! She'd also have them with dinner. I just bought a can and served them this morning, much to her delight.
• Chris' new favorite food is scones with cream and jam. He has been talking about various job possibilities in England and Scotland, but I know that really his mind is on the teatime tradition. (ha)
• By train, you glide by fluffy green grass spotted with fluffy white sheep. But we also had a springtime bonus: hundreds of frolicking baby lambs!!! Oh my.
• We heard some great live street music, including a huge, talented drum and bagpipe ensemble on Easter Sunday.
  
• In Scotland, I bought a cashmere tartan scarf that complements my red wool coat, and we also got a nice red wool throw blanket. I love them.
• On the subject of souvenirs: Scarborough. Final count: 3 posters, a "Scarborough Castle" souvenir guide, 2 bookmarks, a souvenir plate, a magnet, a patch, 3 pencils and a pen.
  
• Scarborough was better than we imagined; a very fun seaside resort, with a changing tide like I've never seen! It was actually the first such resort in the UK, beginning in the 17th century. (Now, though, there are cheap airfares to the Mediterranean islands.)
• Not quite sure if I want to call this a highlight, but rather a memorable (painful?) experience: We took a wrong train. Not just any wrong train, but one that was an express, nonstop service to London from York. 2.5 hours there, 2.5 hours back, and then we continued with our original plan. (How did this happen with English over the loudspeakers?! We were on the right track for our train, but this express train had been delayed by an hour and a half and zoomed in on our track minutes before ours was supposed to arrive, and we just didn't check. Grrr.) We were wondering if this was the worst travel mistake we'd ever made, but then Chris brought up the time we had driven to Canada, and we were halfway through Michigan before he remembered that his passport was still at home! Yep, that was worse...
  

Here are some York pictures with explanations. Scarborough and Edinburgh are coming soon. (Later, I will also post a link to a larger picture collection.)

YORK

York Castle Museum: This is on the site of the 13th century castle, but does not really have anything to do with a castle. Instead, it is a wonderful collection of English civilization from the 17th century to the present, filled with furniture, appliances, clothes, toys, all presented in a very clever and engaging way. Daisy was unleashed from her buggy and we all explored the recreated rooms and streets. For example...

A recreated Victorian street with changing weather and times of day
and costumed guides roaming around or sitting in their "shops."

A recreated Victorian parlour. You can't see the stuffed doggy or the fireplace,

but those were Daisy's favorites.

A collection of swimming attire - notice the Scarborough ads featured on the wall?

(We bought a print of the one on the right.)

The Heslington Baby House, circa 1715, one of the earliest dolls' houses in the country.

(Some of the tiny pewter plates are stamped "1695.")It was made for the Yarburgh children, who lived near York. I loved imagining children playing with these wood-and-wire

little dolls, also from the 1700's...

Ruins of St. Mary's Abbey

An old street called The Shambles.

York Minster: We toured this in the afternoon, and then later came back heard an exquisite rendition of Psalm 88 by the choir during the Evensong service. Sadly, the coloring book then lost its charm and we had to go.

We walked on the old city walls and finally got some
reasonable views of this huge cathedral.

The pretty heart window on the facade.

Constantine was in York when his father died and the Roman troops declared him

Roman emperor here in 306 AD. (In 312, he legalized Christianity,

and in 314, the first bishop came to York.)

National Railway Museum: wow, there are a lot of old trains here. We didn't see much, but did enjoy seeing the first Japanese "bullet train" and Queen Victoria's fancy royal train. They actually filmed part of Chariots of Fire here, as well as a few places in Edinburgh. We'll have to watch that movie again.

Part of our afternoon tea. Daisy had chicken tenders, baked beans (surprise) and hot cocoa. (But she calls it Kakao, or, actually, "cow-cow.")

So fun! More to come...

Happy Easter!

We colored (only 5!) Easter Eggs this morning. We all had fun coloring, and Daisy only dropped 2 of the 5 eggs. I couldn't choose a reasonable number of pictures to share, so here is a fun collage! (Double-click on the image to enlarge.)


Also, I would like to share my beautiful vase with hanging eggs on (now flowering) branches. We were so happy to see the little white blossoms open up! These lightweight, plastic eggs are everywhere here, with people decorating the bushes on their lawns or doing this branches thing. We are leaving on Tuesday for an Easter vacation to northern England (York and Scarborough) and Edinburgh. It feels good to catch up with pictures that have been piling up so that I can provide an update when we get back. Sorry for the deluge; next time, I'll try to spread out the blog posts over a few days. Happy Easter!

Daffodils

One of our first signs of spring!

It is amazing to see this ocean of yellow life pop up after a year of dormancy.

In German, these are "Osterglocken" (Easter Bells). I keep telling everyone...I think that it is such a great name for the flower! (Grace, my friend living in Paris, says that in France it is not an Easter Bunny who delivers eggs, but the Easter Bells. Real bells, not daffodils.)

"O the Easter bells are gladly ringing,
Let the whole world join the happy lay,
Let the hills and vales break forth in singing,
Christ, the Lord of Life, is ris’n today."

Scenes from Home: March

Here is Daisy's new birthday toy from a German family. It is this complicated association matching game with about 20 cards at various levels. (For example, this pictures shows bi-colored shoes in the top row, and matching blobs of color on the bottom row.) Daisy asks us to play this with her - and check her answers - morning, noon, and night.

Stickers. I don't think that I need to explain this one.
Although the potty is a popular conversation topic and a good place to read books, we are still 100% in diapers. There have been 3 different successful attempts, though. We'll get there someday.

We are in a new era with Daisy's sleep habits. For both nap- and bed-time, she falls asleep to music instead of nursing. She has also spent 3 whole nights this week in her room by herself, without waking. This also means that we're "up and at 'em" by 6:30 AM. (Germany just started its time change today, so maybe it will now be in the 7:00 hour.)

Besides 1) throwing the pillows and covers off of her bed and 2) jumping on her bed, Daisy has found another game to play with the creative toy, "The Bed."

And so on. Learning, playing, and growing up!

How to Draw a Face

A "how-to"
by Daisy Scarborough

1) Draw a circle for the face, two fast dots for the eyes, and a slow, gentle smile.

2) Add whiskers (!)

3) Sketch a little hair-do on top.

The Chemist

I feel your pain. When somebody starts asking about what - specifically - Chris is doing in Germany, what kind of chemistry he's working on...it's just a tough situation. Here is a {wordy} description of Chris' current workplace and research. You may plagiarize at will. This post should have come last year, but better late than never!

The Max Planck Society maintains over 80 institutes and facilities. They all pursue basic research (a loaded term) in the natural and social sciences. This is something special that attracted Chris to Max Planck Institutes. As opposed to research groups at American universities, which need to focus on the applications of research in order to get funding, these MPI's are already financed by the government and can examine the smallest particulars, making fundamental, textbook-worthy discoveries. Chris' group is in the middle of a controversy because they claim that something exists (singlet diradicals) - at the molecular level - that others say is not there. (And I will have to let Chris write his own post to flesh that one out.)

Pictures make everything better. The attractive (ha) white building is Chris' MPI for Bioinorganic Chemistry in Mülheim. About 150 scientists and support staff work here. (Around the corner is another institute, the much larger MPI für Kohlenforschung. A huge research complex plopped into a quiet residential area. We don't understand.) The support staff is its own issue; it is supposedly nice for Chris to just drop off a sample to the NMR tech guy instead of running it himself. However, it is something that he could have done in 10 minutes himself at UW, and here he sometimes has to wait until the next day to get his results back! It took a while to get into the slower rhythm here. He has compensated by always having simultaneous projects going on, so he's never waiting on one result.

In the Bioinorganic institute, there are 2 directors. Here is a picture of Chris' soon-to-be-retiring director, Prof. Dr. Karl Wieghardt. (Yes, to be formal, you would address him as Herr Professor Doctor Wieghardt.) About 12 scientists work under him, and he freely collaborates with many people around the world. Just last month, he invited 3 professors over from the US who had never worked together before, and they all discussed their research and traded favors ("oh, yes, I have equipment that can do that for you") and ideas.
Ok, now for the details I promised, directly from the Institute's English-language brochure that I picked up just for you:
The Institute is dedicated to basic research in selected fields of bioinorganic and biophysical chemistry. Currently in focus are topics like the coordination chemistry of the essential trace elements, the structure and function of metallo-proteins (non-heme iron and manganese proteins), artificial photosynthesis, the photolytic water oxidation, hydrogen production by biological systems, synthesis of protein structure motifs, structure determination by spectroscopic techniques, as well as the computer-assisted calculation of structures and spectroscopic parameters.


If you remember what Chris used to talk about while studying in Madison, it was something like carbenes, catalysis, palladium, and aerobic oxidation. He then took the "high risk-high reward" path and jumped to a new field for his post-doc. I can testify that he was scared. Now, he confidently talks about electronic coupling and spin-states, singlet diradicals, redox-noninnocent ligands, running calculations, magnetism, and spectroscopy. He's become a leader in the group, even though just last year he was a beginner. Chemistry ideas just spill out of him, which excites me because that will be his currency as a research professor, a job that more and more seems to be made for him. He is currently reading chemistry books as bedtime reading, dreaming up research proposals which he'll send out this fall. He'll send out an application to whoever is hiring, maybe about 30 schools, and then we'll see what we're left with. Exciting times ahead for our chemist!

Furthermore, I posted this without consulting Chris, a during-Daisy's-nap-time-activity. (Chris, I hope this shows that I've been listening during those dinnertime conversations!) Please look under "comments" to find any corrections he may have!