There is too much. Let me sum up.

Okay, so. Weekend. Guess what I went to see?

Yep, Lisa DeLong and I went to see the awesome immortalness that is Agatha Christie's Mousetrap. Here she is, to take a bow.

Whodunnit? I can't tell you. I'm sworn to secrecy.

Sunday was an adventure into the wilds of south-of-the-river to reach the ward to which I have been assigned. It's a long way, but not unmanageable. It did involve a bit of walking, which resulted in some hot spots, but no actual blisters or bleeding. So success! The ward is filled with nice people from all over. It was . . . odd . . . to be in an LDS congregation and feel conspicuous, not because I'm tall, but because I'm white. Odd, but kinda cool.

I was informed I'd be serving in the primary. My compatriot Jo was informed she was serving in Relief Society. We had a conversation, and then informed the ward leadership that we would be switching. And everyone was happy.

Here are my compatriots resting their tired feet on the trip home. 

Wednesday was our first official trip out of the city. First stop: St. Alban's Cathedral. My gosh, so gorgeous. The day was gray and misty, but never actually rainy . . . just soft and cool. And the church was extraordinary, both inside and out. 

I couldn't get a huge dramatic shot of the inside of the church, because there was SO much going on inside. So here are some little shots. Here, for example, is the little chapel at the very top of the cathedral, which was tiny and lovely and adorable. 

Here's Molly, lighting her very first prayer candle. This was something a lot of the students had never done.

And here's the actual shrine of actual St. Alban, which means that maybe sorta I've completed a pilgrimage now. I started in London, I went to the cathedral, I visited the shrine and said the appropriate prayer . . . that counts, right? I need a medieval Catholic friend to clarify these things for me. 

Oh, and here's St. Alban getting martyred.

After the cathedral, we walked through a lovely park* over to the Museum of Roman Stuff, which was extremely cool. It was a small museum, but was very well put together and quite clearly had an awesome collection of artifacts. These were my favorites: 

I WANT ONE. 

Also very cool was the mosaic-ness going on, pictured below: 

And here are a couple of my fellow travelers doing what the adage recommends for such times as these.

And on our way back to the bus, we got a lovely parting look at St. Alban's, above the green fields and below the gray mist.

St. Alban's explored, we moved on to Cambridge, where I grabbed a quick pasty in the market square because I haven't seen any pasty shops yet. They were YUMMY.

Pictured: All the pasties I didn't get to eat. 

Cambridge is a very bicycle town. The things were everywhere. Also, in the market I could have purchased a used but road-ready mountain bike, plus a U-lock to secure it with, for 45 pounds. I didn't, but I was tempted. 

Our charming tour guide, a retired teacher named Hugh, took us around Trinity College and King's College, giving us a run-down of the history and how the college/university system works on this side of the pond. Here he is telling us about Henry VII's mum, who is actually not in the niche above this doorway (that's just a very feminine-looking John the Evangelist). 

And here we have Henry VIII, great patron of the school, holding a royal chair leg because the students stole his scepter so many times the administration was forced to just leave it like that. 

Not pictured is the Wren Library, as we were not allowed to take photos. But it is a beautiful space, filled with beautiful old books. On display were, among other things, the first folio of the collected works of Shakespeare, a first edition of Newton's Principles, and the original handwritten manuscript of Winnie-the-Pooh. The only thing that could possibly have upstaged that for me was a copy of Sir William Cavendish's treaty on horsemanship. After spending so many months buried under mountains of research on Sir William and Lady Margaret Cavendish, to actually see one of their books nearly brought me to tears. 

Crown jewel of the experience was the chapel at King's College, which had quite the most dizzying ceiling I have ever seen. 

The only bit of actual sunlight we got was while we were in here, so the stained glass just lit up and covered the pillars in all these crazy streaks of color.

The windows (a full set of 25, all as they were originally designed and intended by the original craftsmen, telling one coherent story of the life of Christ all the way around the building) could have been upstaged only by something really spectacular. Like a Rubens painting of the Adoration of the Magi. 

That's the whole altar. No cross, not even a raised platform. Just a table, two candles, and the painting, under the blazing windows, surrounded by plain white limestone walls. Just lovely. 

We got to wander Cambridge for a couple of hours, and I caught one shot of the lawn in the middle of King's College just as the light was starting to fade. 

At the end of the day, we got to hear Evensong sung by the choir that was endowed by the house of Tudor and is still singing the services, in Latin and in English, every day. It was truly truly lovely.

And now, happy but spent, I leave you. 

*I spent fully five minutes in this park just watching a duck dive. The water was clear enough that I could see it all the way down to the bottom. It was immensely entertaining to watch. 

Dead on My Feet . . . But Not as Dead as a French Aristocrat, Which is Nice

Whew! What a day.

I slept in and skipped breakfast in order to make it to the Tower on (something like) time. Not quite on time, but eh, who cares?

This was probably the prettiest morning I've seen yet in London: blue sky in every direction. The sunshine was simply blissful.

Our mass of 50-some people broke up into groups of six or seven to explore the Tower in relative independence. For those who were worried: the ravens are still there, and are looking lively. They must have just had fresh batteries put in.

Enjoying the King's view of the river.

Stained glass, all lit by the sun, in the chapel in Wakefield Tower.

Nice place to take a nap. They've even got ropes around the bed so everyone knows not to come up and disturb you.

I also was pleased to find a dragon, for Bethe. The signage informed me that this dragon's name is 'Keeper.' He is made of weaponry and objects representing the various uses of the tower. This isn't a very good picture of him, I'm afraid, so you'll all just have to take my word for it that it's very dramatic.

And I'll just include this tantalizing photo . . .

Sadly, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, so I'll just inscribe the word 'sparkly' and leave the rest to your imagination. Also, if ever you're in need of a one-meter-wide gold punch bowl, this is the place to enquire.

I was informed by signage that the golden mace representing royal authority must be present in order for the House of Lords or House of Commons to meet. That strikes me as a peculiar vulnerability; all someone'd have to do would be to steal the mace, and it'd bring the government to a standstill. Unless they went back to the collection here in the tower to get an older mace to use. But what if someone stole all the maces? Would they have to cast a new one before Parliament could sit? And how would they appoint funds to make the mace at all if they couldn't convene?

By the time we'd given the Tower a thorough going-over, we were all pretty hungry and tired, so we popped out across the road for Pad Thai. Since I hadn't had any breakfast, I ate everyone else's leftovers.

After that, it was time for our weekly London Walks assignment. We have awkwardly-shaped, spiral-bound walks books to act as tour guides. They're a little wordy, but whatever. Our assigned walk around the East End traced most of the route of the Londinium city walls, which do a C-shape against the north bank of the river.

We started the walk in good spirits, navigating rather haphazardly as our instructions were complicated by lots of construction in the neighborhood. We saw many cool things, including the memorial to those lost at sea during the Great War and this lovely church, designed by a student of Christopher Wren:

It's super pretty inside, but I didn't take any pictures as it is still an active house of worship and I thought that'd be rude. It had a beautiful modern triptych behind the altar, though: the left panel the Burning Bush, the right panel the sun, and the center panel a rainstorm on a plain . . . the kind that looks like the clouds are made of watercolor paints, and God has dragged his paintbrush through a puddle on the paper to pull it down onto the ground. A bolt of lightning cuts crosswise across the storm, so it looks like it is striking the plain gold cross that rests in the center of the altar. Gorgeous.

We also found some markets and a skating rink, and all that was fun . . . but it was suddenly gray and faintly rainy, and we'd all started to realize that our feet and backs were starting to hurt. Nonetheless, we soldiered on. (It must be admitted that we cut a few corners in our eagerness to be done.)

There was one corner that we didn't cut, and I'm very glad of it. Our guided tour took us into a little bit of grass and flowerbeds called Postman's Park, where we found this beautiful memorial wall.

The artist, one Watt by name, is the same guy who did the "You are now being run over by a horse" statue in Kensington Gardens, of which I've already given account. This very different project is just a wall of tile memorials, each one honoring a common person who lost his or her life trying to save others.

It's really a lovely piece, in this lovely, tiny garden tucked behind a tiny church in the middle of the financial district. And the sense of reverence it imparted helped us all to feel better, just as we were hovering between "Isn't this hilarious, being exhausted and wet?" and "No, this isn't hilarious, I'm ticked off and I want to go home."

So, at long last, having circled the entire Roman town, we dragged our tired feet onto the Tube and went home. I stopped on the way to pick up groceries, and the slightly-more-than-half-a-mile back to the house with grocery bags in hand was pretty darn exhausting. So now here I am, snuggled on the couch, watching an old and not very interesting adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities while I write this blog and let my legs and feet rest a bit.

Tomorrow being Saturday, and entirely at my own disposal, I propose to sleep in a bit, make a pot of mushroom-and-artichoke pasta, go for a wander in the National Science Museum, then grab dinner and see The Mousetrap with my friend Lisa. And then I can tackle the looming problem of which ward I'm supposed to be in.

Settling In

So, we're slowly figuring out what "normal" looks like here at Hyde Park Gate. Classes have started, so there is now work to be done. But we're still finding time to do some exploring and meet up with old friends. Like Prince Albert.

Thanks for the Christmas tree idea, man. That was awesome.

And the waterfowl at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens.

And this guy on a horse, who is not anyone in particular but represents . . . ambition. Or something. Mostly it represents (to me, at least) how it must look the split second before you get trampled to death by a horse.

And let us not forget Her Imperial Majesty, Queen Victoria.

Here is one of those fun panoramas of where Victoria is hanging out, which is just in front of Kensington palace at the west end of the park. Please print, wrap into a circle, and place around your head . . . you know the drill.

And last but not least, I spent tonight getting back in touch with two of my very dearest old friends at the Duke of York Theatre. Well, three, if you count the cow-creamer.

Dang, I look cute in this shot. Well selfied, self. 

And I've got to be at the Tower of London at 9:15 tomorrow morning, so here I sign off and go to bed, without further cleverness of any kind, for that rest that does something or other I can't remember just now to the ragged sleeve of care. 

Sunday in London . . . or Most of London

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

Dr. Seuss

---

This is where I walked on Sunday.

First, I woke up. Missed breakfast. Then I walked down to St. Paul's cathedral, where I head most of a service (I was late for that, too).

I now consider myself the inaugural member of the St. Paul's Cathedral 1st Branch.

Yeeeeeah. I got to go to church in that.

Then I thought to myself, "Self, I think we'd like to walk along the river aways." So we did.

You'll note it was a little cool and breezy, but nothing drastic. Much more temperate than I had anticipated.

I also encountered this old friend:

Obviously an earlier, prototype model. I tried to see what size it was on the inside, but it was locked.

At this point I was not planning to do the rest of the walking that I did . . . I figured I'd turn around when I got tired. You can see how well that turned out.

So after a while, the river turned south, and I came to this:

As I wanted to head west, I left the river at this point and went wandering through St. James's Park, which was very pretty and had lots of geese and ducks and things. Also some trees. Also this.

This turned out, on closer inspection, to be Buckingham Palace. 

I honestly wasn't planning on walking to Buckingham palace. I just stumbled across it. I swear. I didn't even realize it was there. But there it was.

So rather than stopping in to pay a call on the Royal Family, I went past Buckingham and through a park called Green Park (aptly named) until I got to the corner of Hyde Park. And then I thought, "Well, self, since we've come this far, we might as well head for the Hyde Park chapel and go to the YSA ward's sacrament meeting."

So I walked along the edge of Hyde Park for a while until I found the church marked on one of the Barklay's Cycle Hire maps. (Side note: There is a nice little 'what's around you' map at every bike rental station and every bus stop. You are never more than half a block from a map. It's very nice.)

As I was walking up Hyde Park, some tourists who did not speak English as a first language stopped me and asked me the way to Buckingham Palace. I set them in the right direction, feeling very pleased with myself.

I got to the chapel in perfect time for church, only to be informed by one of the visitor's center sisters that the YSA ward wasn't meeting that week, as everyone was off on holiday. So if I die this week I guess I'm going to hell or something. But I did try.

But as long as I was in the neighborhood, I thought I'd head over to my housing office and see what that was like. On the way, I stumbled upon this:

It looks like a large frosted brain, but really it's the Royal Albert Hall. For concerts and stuff.

My neighborhood is . . . um . . . 

It's filled with houses that were the houses that Downton-Abbey-esque families lived in when they were in Town with a Capital T. They have servants' entrances.

Most of these buildings have now been divvied up into flats, which are still absurdly expensive even if you don't have to pay for a household staff anyomore. The servants' quarters are another flat. The ones that haven't been divvied up are now embassies. 

So I went to the housing office, said hi, and then wandered around the corner to my own house, which I illustrate here: 

It is tall and skinny and deep and Victorian (or possibly Edwardian) and has an area railing. The red building on the right is the Embassy of the Netherlands. I'm not kidding. 

But I couldn't go into my house until Tuesday, so instead I went over to Kensington High Street and caught the tail end of a fish'n'chips lunch special. By then it was getting dark and wet and rainy, so I headed into the church of St. Mary Abbott to warm up a bit. And then I sat in the church, because it was nice, and read some chapters from Luke on my Kindle. And then the bells started ringing, and that was so nice that I sat to listen for a while. And then I fell asleep a little. And then I figured I'd been sitting there so long that I might as well sit a little longer and listen to the evening service, which I did. It was a service with lots of singing, which was nice, as I got to work some of the catches out of my still-scratchy voice. It was, all in all, a nice evening, just sitting in a Victorian church with nowhere to be. It was very restful.

And when the service was over, I finally got my rear in gear and headed back out into the rain and caught the tube to go back to my temporary housing at the London School of Economics (housing pictured below, not a reconstruction).

From the sublime to the ridiculous, as they say. 

The LSE was cramped and sketch, and I'm glad to say I'm now quit of it and am settled into my new digs, of which I will upload a video tour in a bit or so. 

In Dublin Town, or, RoseE Sleeps a Lot

What's the first rule of international travel? The cardinal sin of spending your first day in a foreign land?

What did I do?

That's right. I made it to my lovely accommodation . . .

Cute little bedroom just over the front entryway. Perfect!

. . . was treated so some tea and toast to warm my bones after my rainy journey from the airport, unpacked my bag, had a shower, and . . . 

You guessed it. I went to sleep.

I would like to cite the following pieces of information in my defense:

1. I had just done four flights in two days, two of which were red-eyes, and had slept on a sofa the night before that. 

2. It was pouring rain, and wet and drippy and chilly.

3. I was on day 5 of the never-ending common cold, which I hadn't been able to rest through because I was too busy getting ready for this trip.

4. I didn't have the wifi password, so I couldn't look up how to get to the museums I wanted to see. 

So I slept. I slept through most of the morning and part of the afternoon. Then I got up, popped across the road for some sandwich fixings and a hairbrush (always forget one thing; thank goodness it was a replaceable thing), had dinner with the family next door, watched Coronation Street, and went back to bed. And woke up again at half past one, of course, watched a movie on my laptop, fell back asleep, woke up at half past noon. Jet lag's a bear.

But it was sunny outside, I was feeling less cough-y, my internet was working, and I finally felt in shape to go see Dublin. 

Here is Miss Molly Malone, whom I wandered past on my way to the National Gallery, ready to sell you some shellfish and get that song stuck in your head for the next hour. 

 My tour today included the National Library, National Gallery, National Museum of Natural History, part of the National Museum of Archeology (gotta go back tomorrow), a real Irish pub, and a Tesco's.

The National Gallery had a truly lovely medieval collection. I like medieval art, partially because I tend to understand what's going on in it. So here we have the Virgin and Child, attended by St. John the Baptist and St. Lucy (Hi, Lucy!). Apparently St. Lucy is offering the Christ Child her own eyeballs. Maybe her future eyeballs or something, because she seems to have eyes in her face, too. At first I thought maybe she was Judith offering the head of Holofernes, and Holofernes had a head kind of like a frog, with the eyes all sticking up, but no. I'm assuming the eyeballs have something to do with the gruesome way in which she was martyred, which I'm not going to bother to look up because I already feel bad about giving my-niece-Lucy Dracula for Christmas. I feel I should limit her exposure to famous Lucys in history and literature who died in gruesome ways. 

 Here's the ascended Virgin healing Pope Leo I. This painting harked to a story I'd never head, and that fascinated me. Apparently Pope Leo had committed a sin, and he felt so guilty about it that in penance he cut off his own hand. The Virgin, hearing of this, healed his hand for him without permission.

The image really struck me. Here's Leo, trying to suffer for his own sins--trying to make himself acceptable in the eyes of God. And Mary's all "Nope. You don't get to do that to yourself on my watch." It was a very powerful image to me of the idea of grace. God will heal us whether we think we deserve to be healed or not. Deserving grace isn't our purvey or our business; it relies on God's merits, not ours. It's not just that we don't need to punish ourselves for being imperfect; it's that we are cruel to our Heavenly Father, and contemptuous of his Son's sacrifice, when we try to damage what He has died to save.

One other highlight of the day was wandering into Merrion Square, where I was greeted by this cheeky fellow:

 Couldn't put him on a column in the middle of a roundabout. Oh, no. Not Oscar Wilde. Not the greatest social satirist of this or any other age. He'd come back from the dead to vandalize such a memorial. Nope, he sprawls cheerfully in the corner of the park, in his smoking jacket, wearing a wicked grin that seems to say "Up yours, society! Love ya. Mwah."

Around the corner is another bit of social-commentary statuary, which I found really fascinating. This is the memorial to Ireland's military killed in action:

You can't see too well, but inside the pyramid are statues of four soldiers, standing around a flame. Which I thought was lovely. Because if we're going to have an eternal flame in our soldiers' honor, it should at least be keeping them warm, poor souls. And I love how encapsulated this memorial is. It simultaneously honors the war-dead and hopes that the idea of war in general can be someday entombed and forgotten.

Other un-photographed highlights included a coffee shop called Insomnia (sandwich and hot drink for five euros; the hot chocolate is fair trade and tastes like drinking a melted Cadbury bar) and a display on the strikes/lockouts of 1913 that led to Bloody Sunday. (Lesson: the British should not be allowed to run any other country until they've proved they can run their own in a sensible manner.) I also stopped in at a pub to listen to the music, which was lovely, but the place was crowded and I wasn't sure how to obtain a drink (or what to obtain) so I just stood around, looking rather idiotic but liking the music too much to leave before it was over.

I'll close with a parting word from my buddy Oscar Wilde, framed by a selfie in black marble.