July 28: Blenheim Palace

Tuesday, just like every other day this week, started out with a train. This particular train was going to Oxford. Our main goal there was Blenheim Palace. Blenheim Palace has always been the home of the Dukes of Marlborough, which also happen to be the Churchill-Spencer family, such as Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Diana Spencer (now known as Princess Diana). The house was given to the first Duke as a gift in honor of his leading to victory at the Battle of Blenheim against the French. The house is still lived in and owned by the family, more specifically right now, the 11th Duke of Marlborough. It was kind of a drab day (rainy, windy…how it’s been since we got here), so we decided to do all the gardens first in case the rain got worse. There is so much ground at Blenheim…2100 acres to be exact. There are multiple gardens situated all over the lands. My favorite garden by far, not just of Blenheim, but of all the gardens we’ve seen, was the Secret Garden. It was so beautiful. It was such a perfect setting, and there was so much attention to little details that made such a huge difference. It wasn’t a laid out garden like the French ones, instead it was walkways and paths laid out through very natural looking landscapes. There was a stream running through that occasionally went over a man-made waterfall. It was so pretty. We also went into the Rose Garden, which is pretty self explanatory. The roses were arranged going outward in a circle from a center point, and were all different colors. I have never seen so many different colors of roses. We tried to go up to the cascades, but apparently they were under construction, so we headed back to the house. The palace was designed by architect Sir John Vanbrugh. When he designed it, he designed it in perspective, so it is best viewed from a distance. It was still amazing to view it from right in front of it thought. The tour of the palace was split into two different sections. The first section that we went through was the State Rooms. This was the normal rooms of the palace, like bedrooms, dining rooms, halls, etc. The most famous person to have lived at Blenheim was Sir Winston Churchill. We got to see the room where he was born and some of his clothing from childhood. We also got to see original copies of letters he had written to his father when he was in school. Another famous resident was Lady Diana Spencer (later Princess Diana). We got to see a copy of the wedding announcement for her marriage to the Prince of Wales. Because of all of these things, Blenheim was not only really interesting architecturally, but also historically. The family of the Duke of Marlborough still lives in the palace now, in the same rooms as the first Duke and Duchess. Wouldn’t that be nice? Blenheim is a pretty popular place, being used to film movies such as Indiana Jones (Last Crusade) and Harry Potter 5. After the house, we took a little train (like the ones at the zoo, and I love them!) to get to other parts of the grounds, where we went into the Butterfly House. This is exactly what it sounds like…a greenhouse filled with different plants and butterfly species. It was such a different thing to see at a place like Blenheim. The butterflies were all different sizes and colors. One of them had about an 8 inch wing span…it was huge. We also went into an attraction area that had a hedge maze! Apparently, it’s the second largest hedge maze in the world. It was so much fun; way better than any of the corn mazes I’ve been too…Kylee and Megan really got lost though. I got out of the maze pretty quick, so I went in the café and got a cup of tea (really, just to warm up…it was freezing) and wait for everyone else. We started to head back to the main house so that we could catch a bus to go back to London…and found out that the last little train back to the house left at 5:30…this was at 5:35. So we had to walk up the road back to the main gates (about a mile or so). When we were almost to the gates, some people that had just walked up there stopped us to tell us that the gates were closed and that we would have to go around to get out of the grounds. So, we took the scenic tour past the bridge and the lake and across the rest of the grounds, out the side gate, through the village, and finally to the bus stop…just to miss the bus by 30 seconds (it was pulling away when we were trying to cross the street). Luckily, another bus was coming about 5 minutes later, so we didn’t have to wait long. The bus took us as far as city center, and then we walked the rest of the way to the train station. We barely made it to the last train back to London by 15 minutes. After the fiasco of getting there, we finally made it back to London and called it a night.

July 27: Sausage, Scaffolding, and Stones!

Monday was another early start day. Not 5:30 in the morning, but still pretty early. We were headed out to Wilton House. Wilton House is where the Earl of Pembroke lives and has for many generations. The current Earl has only held the title for about 7 years, and is getting married next year. He was the only son of 7 kids, so there is no ‘spare heir’, so it’s all on him to produce a son. The house was really pretty. Of all the famous homes and palaces that we’ve seen, Wilton House is the only one that I could actually live in. It was large and extravagant enough to be interesting, but small enough to be manageable and to not feel empty. I like it a lot. It also had more natural grounds, with just large grassy fields, and some hedge work with walkways and stuff like that. Much homier than huge manicured gardens. We had a guided tour through the house and over the grounds. We were able to go up on the bridge, which is something most tours don’t get to do. The bridge was built by one of the Earls, and it was inspired by the Rialto Bridge in Venice. We got to see the parts of the house where certain movies have been filmed. A couple of scenes from the Kiera Knightly version of Pride and Prejudice were filmed in the rooms at Wilton. It was small and humble, but it really was a great house.
After Wilton House, we headed back into the main town of Salisbury. We got dropped off by a bus and walked a couple of blocks to Salisbury Cathedral. We split into groups and went through different tours. The other group got to go on a tour of the cathedral as well as the roof tour, but we only did the roof tour. It was incredible though! We first climbed up to the second floor of the cathedral, where we could look out over the inside of the church, kind of like the dome at St. Peters. Then we went up and around into the roof above the cathedral, on top of the vaulting. We got to walk through the rafters and see how the roof was constructed and supported, as well as walk along the length of the roof on the inside. After that, we went into the room that holds that mechanism that controls the bells, and from there, up a staircase into the bell chamber. The cathedral has 4 quarter bells that chime on the quarter hour, and then on big bell that chimes on every hour. Our guide explained that it’s hard for older cathedrals to have multiple bells that ring a lot because throughout the years the vibrations from the ringing destroy the buildings. Also, the bells themselves don’t actually swing anymore, there’s just a mechanism on the inside of the bell that hits it to make the sound. From there we went up one more staircase, to the bottom of the spire, which used to be the top of the church. There is no public access allowed up the actual spire, but we got to stand at the bottom of it and look up through the scaffolding. The tower is the tallest hollow structure still standing in Europe. Also, the scaffolding is believed to be the longest standing scaffolding, because most scaffolding is taken down after the completion of the project. At the bottom of the spire we also got to go out onto a very narrow balcony to look out over the town of Salisbury. In some places, you can see up to 14 miles away. The views were amazing. This was by far one of the most interesting tours we’ve done.
After the cathedral, we got into taxi vans and headed out to Stonehenge. We got to do an audio tour around Stonehenge that talked about the history (what we know, anyway), and the different stones, and some of the speculations of what it was for, as well as the area around it. It was so great! Stonehenge is another one of those places where I felt like it was only a place in pictures and that I couldn’t actually get there…but I got there! Whoot whoot! They’ve had it roped off for the last couple of years, so the public can’t actually go up and touch the stones or anything anymore. In all reality, that’s probably for the better, but it’s still a little bit annoying. Too bad that some stupid people have to ruin things for everyone else! We spent about 30 minutes around Stonehenge, just looking at info and taking pictures. Afterwards, we took our taxis back to the train station and caught a late train back to London. We didn’t get back until almost 10, so we were out for over 12 hours, but it was such an amazing day, and completely worth the exhaustion.

PS: This post has absolutely nothing to do with sausage. I was trying to come up with a name, and asked Kylee and Amanda for words related to house that starts with and S, and Amanda said sausage...so there it is!

July 25th

This day was our second day in London. It was much more eventful that the first. We got up around 9:30 so that we could get ready and go to the Nottinghill Market. Apparently they do a big outdoor market on Saturday’s that’s one of the most popular ones in the surrounding area. People come from all around London and the smaller towns in and around it to shop at this market, so we thought it would be a lot of fun to go. We took more time than we planned getting ready, and didn’t actually make it to Nottinghill until about 11:30. We weren’t in much of a hurry though. When we got there it was so packed. We walked down Portobello Road, and the market is near the end of the road. We split into smaller groups, and I stayed with Julia and Amanda, and we didn’t actually make it to the market until after 1. Instead, we found really fun, cheap shopping on the way to the market. We found a couple clothing stores where everything was 5 pounds, so about $8. I got a pair of shoes and a shirt, and Julia and Amanda got quite a few shirts and some shoes. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, these were very small stores, leaving no room for fitting rooms, so we just had to try stuff on over our clothes in the middle of the store and look in mirrors…it was quite the experience. We eventually made it down to the market . . . I think (I’m not sure if we made it to the actual market, or just more stores that had stuff set outside), and it wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be. There were some cool things to look at, like little antiques and trinkets, but nothing that I would really want to buy. And there wasn’t as much stuff as I expected, which is kind of what leads me to believe that we didn’t make it to the actual market. But it was still a lot of fun, nonetheless. This was the first time on the trip that I had actually gone shopping, so it was nice to just go around with a couple girls and try on ridiculous amounts of clothing. After Nottinghill, we headed over to Shakespeare’s Globe, again crossing the Millennium Bridge, which made us think of Harry Potter. Our plan was to get tickets to As You Like It for that night, but when we got there we found out that it’s not like the other theaters where you can buy tickets the day of. Apparently, they usually sell out weeks if not months before the night of the show. Luckily, we were able to get tickets for Monday, August 3rd, so we’ll be able to go then. Our tickets are standing tickets, so we’ll have to stand for almost 3 hours, but they were only 5 pounds, and I don’t think it will be that bad. The play will make it go by quicker. After the Globe, I walked with Julia and Amanda down to Tower Bridge. They were going through the Tower of London, so I walked with them to there and then got on the subway. (Dad, I know you’re reading this, and don’t worry, I was safe. I stayed in populated areas and I was only by myself for about an hour. :) ) I took the subway to Kennington and transferred onto a different line to go to Leicester Square. I grabbed some lunch and went shopping for a few minutes (finally bought a sweater!), and then headed home. I was planning on going out to dinner with a couple of girls later in the evening, but they ended up going to a musical, so I just stayed in for the night. It was another really slow day, but it was actually a lot of fun.

July 24: Wicked!!

Friday was our first free day in London, and most of it was pretty uneventful. Megan came in around 9:30 to get us to go try to buy tickets to Billy Elliot. I didn’t want to see Billy Elliot, so I just stayed in bed, and Kylee had been up super late, so she stayed in bed as well, and Amanda and Julia went with her. When they came back, they woke us up to tell us that Billy Elliot was sold out, so they bought all four of us tickets to see Wicked!! For only 45 pounds! I was really excited. By this time, it was about noon. Yup, that’s right, we had stayed in bed until noon. It was amazing. This trip is great, but we are going all the time, and it is so exhausting, so having a chance to sleep in ridiculously late is a rare and beautiful thing. We finally got up and got ready. Kylee went out after about an hour to do a bunch of stuff that she and some other girls had planned. Julia and Amanda went running, and I was going to go to the Imperial War Museum with them when they got back. A few minutes before they came back, it got super stormy, and I decided that I didn’t really want to spend another day outside in the cold weather. So I just decided to stay in. I got to work on some homework, relax, and actually take my time to get ready for Wicked. Not to mention, I got some time by myself. I love hanging out with most of the girls here, but 5 weeks with the same people gets a little bit hard. It was nice to be by myself for a while. Wicked started at 7:30, but we were leaving at 6:30, so around 5, I started getting ready. I had offered to start making dinner before Amanda and Julia got home. We were having hamburgers, and I thought they would take a while to make because our stove doesn’t really work that well. I took the meat out of the fridge and figured out how to defrost it in our microwave, and I also found that one of our burners works just fine, so it only took about 20 minutes to make the hamburgers. Amanda and Julia got home about 10 minutes after they were done, so it was perfect timing. After we ate, I finished getting ready and we left for Wicked. We were supposed to be meeting Kylee at the Victoria station around 6:45. When we got there though, she wasn’t there. We waited for a while, and the rest of our group came, but we couldn’t find her. So we waited at the station and the rest of the group went over to the theater (it was only across the street). At about 7:10, right when we needed to leave to go into the show, Susie came back and said that they had found Kylee at the theater. So now that we were all together again, we headed into the theater. It was so amazing! The stage set up was so cool. And the show was fantastic! I will never be able to look at the Wizard of Oz the same way again. For those of you who don’t know the story, Wicked is a musical about how Glenda becomes the good witch and how the Wicked Witch of the West becomes known as Wicked. It also shows where the Tin Man and the Scarecrow come from. It was such a good musical. Afterwards, on our way home, I ran into Susie, Terry, and Becky, and they were going to eat, so I decided to go with them. It was too late to go to a restaurant, so they got Chinese food, and I went to Subway. Spending the evening watching Wicked more than made up for not doing anything else today!

July 23rd: Day at Cambridge

Thursday was our day trip out to Cambridge, located about 50 miles north of London. A bunch of us were running late, so we had to rush quite a bit to catch our train, but we made it with 4 minutes to spare! When we arrived at the train station in Cambridge, we stopped for some drinks and pastries. After two days in a row of having hot drinks and pastries in the morning, I’m convinced that it should become a daily occurrence. It makes for such a better morning. Our booking with our tour guides didn’t start for a while, so Darrin led us around Cambridge to the point where we would need to meet, and then gave us about 45 minutes of free time. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get stuff done. I ran back to the post office to grab some stamps, which was really convenient because it’s the only chance I’ve had to get to a post office during business hours since we’ve been in London. The woman at the post office was really annoyed with my debit card. Apparently, in the UK, writing ‘see id’ on the back of your card does not count as a signature (in the US, ‘see id’ is accepted as a signature as long as you can present id). She finally sold me the stamps, but was really discontent with the idea of my signature being on my driver’s license rather than my card. I had two credit cards with my name on them, a government issued card that also had my name and a photo, plus a copy of my signature, and she was still skeptical that the card was really mine. It was a little bit ridiculous. But oh well, I got the stamps. After the post office, I went back to our meeting point and waited on a bench. There was a little old man sitting next to me, who was quite entertaining. There was a map posted on the wall behind us, and every time somebody would come to look at the map, he felt the need to stand up and explain to them that the map was situated in the wrong direction (north was not up), ask them where they were going, and then proceed to show them where it was on the map and how to get there. I think he secretly wanted to be a tour guide. After a few minutes, the rest of our group started to come back and we headed off to meet our guides. We split into two different groups, and the group that I was in headed off to tour King’s College Chapel. Our tour guide, Sally, made various stops on the way to point out different sites and throw in different bits of Cambridge history. She told us about a Cambridge University holiday, May week. May week actually occurs in June, after final exams, and is two weeks long. It’s kind of like our spring break, where everyone just relaxes and has fun, regardless of how their grades are turning out. She explained that an old May week tradition is night climbing, which is where students climb up buildings to pull pranks on certain nights between the hours of midnight and 6am. Some of them over the years have been pretty creative. Big pranks don’t happen as much anymore, because measures have been added to make sure students can’t climb certain buildings. Eventually, we made it into King’s College Chapel. The architecture was similar to other churches that we’ve seen, but the interior was completely different. The stain glass windows were there, and there was beautiful fan vaulting, but that was the most elaborate of the decorations. Everything was unpainted inside. There were decorations on the wall that had been placed by Henry VIII. The chapel took over 100 years to complete, due to consistently running out of money. It is done in perpendicular Gothic style, which came late in the Gothic period. The building of the chapel was started by Henry VI, who wanted it to be very plain with no interior decorations, because he felt that this was more righteous than embellishing the chapel with décor. Even the small amount of decoration that was added by Henry VIII was more than Henry VI wanted. Our guide explained some of the implications of the decoration. Above one of the stained glass windows that has a full image of Christ in it is an H, for Henry VIII. This symbolizes that Henry was putting himself above Christ and God. She also pointed out interesting historical points, such as different parts of the church have the initial H with different attached initials, indicating the different wives of Henry VIII. It was interesting to be able to see exactly when certain parts of the church had been built due to the initials that were on that part. After King’s College Chapel, we went to All Saints Church, a much smaller church. The most interesting part of this church was a large stained glass window at the front with images of different saints. William Morrison helped design this church, and in one of the images on the window, the face of the saint is believed to be the face of William Morrison, and another is believed to be his wife.
After this we broke for lunch. We went to the Eagle Pub, which has been in Cambridge for many years. The ceiling in part of the pub is covered in signatures of American soldiers from WWII. Across from the pub is the laboratory where the double helix was first mentioned. For lunch, I had fish and chips for the first time. It was not what I expected. The fish is like an entire fish battered and fried. I was thinking strips of fish filets. The chips were fries that were very greasy and fried (but really good). It was served with ketchup and tartar sauce. For some reason, I was expecting different types of condiments. It was not quite as good as I expected (the fish was a little bland for my tastes), but it was still really good, and I had to try fish and chips in England. I’m sure I will try some again. I’ve heard that the best places to get it are actually little hole in the wall places rather than a pub or a restaurant.
After lunch, we met back with the rest of the group to complete our tour. Megan and I ended up getting switched into the other group, so now we had the other tour guide. He was still pretty interesting. We went to a museum, and he showed us different paintings from different movements. I actually really liked him because he analyzed the paintings and explained what was happening and the significance of that particular painting to the movement. It made it a lot more interesting that just looking at more classical paintings. We were in the museum for a little over an hour, but it really went by pretty quick. After the museum, we went punting, which was by far my favorite part of the trip. Punting is an activity where a group of people sit in a little row-type boat, and a punt chauffer stands on the back of the boat and ‘punts’. This is done with a 24 foot pole that the punt chauffer pushes off the bottom of the river with to propel the boat. It was so much fun. Our punt chauffer was a boy named Orlando, who actually was a student at Oxford, but he worked in Cambridge. He was hilarious. He was a classic example of that dry British humor. He chatted with us the whole time, occasionally tossing in historical facts about Cambridge. We learned about a couple of the different colleges (there are 31 total so it would’ve taken days to learn about all of them). We got to see the first bridge put over the river, which gave the town its name (the river is the Cam river, so when the bridge was built, the Cam had been bridged, making it Cambridge). Also, we got to see some of the spots that had been used to film the Harry Potter movies (we seem to be seeing a lot of those places here). Punting really was a fantastic way to end the day…I think it should become a worldwide activity. Punting down the Logan river? I think so.

July 22nd: Magic carpet ride...

Good morning…or not so much. We had to get up at 4:45 am today to be at the train station by 5:45. It was miserable. Trains should not run that early. Between the metro, train, bus and waiting time, it took us 3 hours to get to our destination: Brinton’s Carpet in Kidderminster. At least we had a little extra time to sleep on the train and bus though . . . and after getting up that early, we all took full advantage of that time. When we arrived, they took us into a room with chairs set up and design boards all over. They also had coffee, tea, water and cookies set out which made us all a little cheerier. I had a cup of tea (English breakfast tea in England? I think it’s pretty necessary), and some ginger cookies, which were incredible! The staff did an introduction presentation about Brinton’s Carpet, and then split us into groups. My group went to the archivist first. It was absolutely incredible how large of a design library and archive the company has. There were shelves and shelves full of binders from the floor to the ceiling with different collections from the past 200 years. There were tons of cabinets filled with books from different time periods, movements, regions, and designers that the company uses for inspiration. The archivist showed us some of the original patterns, and one was even signed by King Albert. It was really amazing. We got to look through the old Japanese stencils that have been kept for centuries, and original sketches and hand paintings from the company’s designers over the years. She explained to us that the archive in this building was the main archive for all of Brinton’s worldwide. Some of it is uploaded into an electronic database, but not all, and the manufacturers in different cities in the world all call there to get records and inspiration. Brinton’s still uses many of their traditional patterns, either as they are or with a modern twist. It really is incredible that a carpet company retained that much stuff over 200 years, because usually stuff like that gets thrown away because the designers and or company don’t think that the trends will come back. Styles come and go, and once they’re not popular anymore, what’s the point in keeping them? It’s a good thing they did though. After the archivist, we went to our session with the designers. One designer in particular, a residential carpet designer, is the one that talked to us about everything. He talked about the staff, and the differences between the company’s commercial and residential designers. Considering there are only a couple of designers on staff, they really do put out a ton of work. He explained the programs that they use, and the process from getting a pattern from a sketch to an actual carpet. He showed us some of their newer stuff that’s just starting to come out. They’re trying to do bolder, more modern patterns. I liked them a lot. Rather than a full pattern across, they’re doing patterns that fade to plain, either from the side out or the center out. He showed us some of the design boards that they’ve had to do from conventions and stuff. Their goal was to make the board itself a piece of art, rather than just pictures stuck on, so all of the pictures we’re in collages and cut out in patterns. They were really cool. And I definitely do not envy the person that had to cut them all out. These couple of sessions had filled our morning: 9 to 12, so after the designer chat it was time for lunch. Brinton’s was providing lunch for us, which was really great. It was a little weird, because they had some pretty classic British food, which includes sausages and other meats wrapped in breads and pastries. I tried one that wasn’t bad, but the others were a little strange. They also served normal sub style sandwiches, chips, and juice. I had a tuna sandwich…I think. It was definitely fish, and probably tuna, but with different stuff mixed in than I’m used to. It was still really good though, and free food is always a bonus! We ate pretty quickly and still had an hour left for our lunch break, so most of us curled up on the carpet strips on the ground to lie down and chat. Some people fell asleep for a while. Surprisingly, I did not. Whoot, go me! After lunch, our group went to tour the factory. We had to wear bright yellow vests for safety, and weird headphones so that we could hear our guide over the weaving machines. They made great accessories to our dress outfits…not. The factory was really interesting. We started in the area where they dye the yarn. The yarn comes in on pallets every day, and they have a machine that picks up a stack of like 4 pallets, sets them in a pot to be dyed, and then pulls them back out. It’s amazing that they can dye that much at once and still have all the yarn be a consistent color. After being dyed, the different colored yarns are stored on shelves that go from the floor to the ceiling until they need to be used. From there, we went to the part of the factory where they prepare the colors of yarn that they will need for a particular carpet. This is done by dropping a specific amount of yarn into one section of a big box. The sections are completely separated, so the different colors of yarn are placed in the different sections, corresponding to where they need to be in the weave. It really is an innovative process. And all of the machines used by Brinton’s were designed and built by the company, which is more impressive. From there we went to the looms, where the carpet is actually weaved. We got to watch them work for a while, which was really cool. It’s amazing to see what looks like a mess of yarn go into a machine and come out a large piece of patterned carpet. Unfortunately, we were moving too quickly to take in pictures of the archives and the designer works, and they don't allow pictures in the factory. So no pictures for today. But regardless, Brinton’s was a fabulous place to tour, and I think it would be a great place to work. They have a factory in Las Vegas, and the main USA headquarters is in Georgia…internship, maybe??

Patterns

These are my 3 museum patterns from London. The first one with the floral and stripes was inspired by the ironwork collection at the V&A Museum. The second one, the squares, was inspired from modern artwork at the Tate Modern museum. And finally, the third one, with the circles, was inspired by the coin collections at the British Museum.