This past year, we did a number of day or afternoon trips, and often, when I'm out and out, I just photograph random things that are interesting to me. While many of them are too minor to write a whole blog entry about, I thought I would compile a few photos and albums here and write the little tidbits about them.
National Army Museum
We've looked for lesser-known museums at times, and we discovered that the National Army Museum was not all that far from us, so we visited there in May. It's free entry, and we were pleasantly surprised how large and how well-maintained it was. It looked like a little out-of-the-way place, and from the outside, it didn't look like much, but inside, they had a great collection of army artefacts and information. We noticed that there was a bit of propaganda going on--as in, the museum is hoping to garner support for the army's existence, but then that's hardly unexpected. Most, if not all, museums, have some sort of goal in mind related to the user experience. What I also found interesting were representations of certain wars. As Canada and the US eventually gained national sovereignty, and in the case of the US, full independence, we have our names and perspectives for wars, but now I'm living somewhere that was on the losing side, and they have another name for these.
The American Revolution is referred to here as the American War of Independence (perhaps not so ideologically different). But the one that is really different is what in Britain is called the 1885 Canadian Rebellions: in Canada it is the Red River Resistance, Riel's attempt to gain rights for Métis people. It would be fascinating for me to learn about how that part of Canada's history is talked about in the UK compared with Canada! At the end there was an interactive quiz for kids to do that elicited their thoughts on the army, but the multiple choice answers were somewhat biased--again, leading the respondent to answer questions that support the army.
Bamboo Elephants
In the spring, I learned that a herd of life-sized elephant sculptures came to London. I missed their premiere at Buckingham Palace, which would have been quite the sight, especially as a statue of Queen Victoria looms over the palace, and she was Empress of India. The presence of the elephants has been made possible through a partnership between UK wildlife conservation charity Elephant Family and the Real Elephant Collective in India. The herd moved around the city and brought attention to the plight of elephants--and as I learned by seeing the elephants up close, various bird species as well. I spotted them in June first, at Duke of York Square, and later I learned that they had moved to Green Park, so I saw them there in July. The first sighting was just a few elephants, but the Green Park space had the entire herd.
Bank
There's a tube stop in central London called Bank. I've never needed to get out of the station here; it has always been a transit point. But one day in late September, we were walking around the area, for reasons I can't remember, and we came across this area that was filled with huge, old stone buildings with giant pillars. It definitely looked like a financial area, and as we passed by one of the tube entrances, we saw that it was called "Bank." That explained everything. The area is no longer used for any actual banks or reserves, but it was at one time a large financial district. All the buildings have been preserved but are now used for other enterprises. It was quite an impressive area. It makes you feel quite inadequate next to these powerful-looking buildings surrounding you. We had been heading to Liverpool Street Station that day to get to a store in the area, and we had to walk right past the train station. I wanted to get a picture of the statue there because I learned only in the past year that Jewish kids who managed to escape the Holocaust were brought by train on the kindertransport, some 10,000 of them. The train's destination was Liverpool Street Station. This fact has been commemorated with a sculpture of children arriving with suitcases and a sense of wonder on their faces. When I see Jewish kids in London, I wonder if some of them are descendants of these survivors.
The Bunker
With work, we had a conference in early October. It was supposed to be held at a nearby school, but for various reasons, the school had to cancel, so at the last minute, everything was switched over to the Battle of Britain Bunker. Frankly, I think we got a better deal out of it. It is a beautiful, relatively new building created as a small museum, and we ended up being able to get an official tour of the bunker, a WWII relic that is now part of the museum holdings. It was pretty neat to see the room where so much planning took place. I was also reminded what a significant role Poland played in helping Britain. It was something I had learned at Bletchley Park, as Polish mathematicians and technologists helped Britain with their code-breaking work. You just think of them as a former communist country without remembering that both Germany and Russia wanted them, and Poland had to try to resist both. I haven't read enough about Poland's involvement with the Allies, but I definitely wonder if their desire to remain independent from both countries caused them to want to help the Allies.
Guy Fawkes Day
While the big New Year's fireworks show was cancelled last year, we still get to see other fireworks from our flat. This year, we had contemplated going to Battersea Park for their Guy Fawkes celebrations the weekend of November 5, but we decided against it as it seemed like a fairly steep cost for what we felt we could get out of it. And we mainly wanted to see the fireworks--without thinking about the fact that we'd be able to see them from our place anyway. So when we started hearing them going off, we were thankful that we didn't pay money to see what we could clearly enjoy from our balcony. The history of this day is that Guy Fawkes and some Catholic co-conspirators attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament with King James I and MPs inside. Henry VIII had implemented the Church of England in the 1500s, and by the 1600s when James was in power, he refused to allow greater religious tolerance to Catholics. So the Gunpowder Plot was formed as an attempt to re-establish Catholicism in the country. Since Anglicanism is still the official denomination in England, you can guess that this plot was thwarted. All the conspirators were tried and executed.
So where do the fireworks come in? It's intended to commemorate the explosion that could have taken place. You can find out more about how this day became Guy Fawkes Day (a.k.a. Bonfire Night) here. When I was looking up information about this day, I was also interested by the fact that it was during the reign of James I that the first Authorised Version of the Bible became available--what I believe is the King James Bible--and it was this Bible that provoked the Puritans to leave England and set sail on the Mayflower. I love it when I learn about links in history like this!
US Embassy Tour
Through a local club I belong to, I got to take advantage of participating in a tour of the American Embassy in London around mid-October. It's a fairly new building only about 3 years old. Apparently their original building was in need of renovations, so much so that it was going to cost the same to build a new place, so they decided on the latter. It's a fairly impressive building, though it lacks the charm and character of the embassies and high commissions in the older buildings here, but what I enjoyed the most was the artwork and the different climate zones in the building where they grow different types of plants inside. We didn't get a tour of the artwork itself, so I don't know all the artists. They have a substantial collection of prints of various Native American Chiefs. We were told that the artist wanted to preserve all the chiefs in portraits and painted what appear to be about 100 or so of them, at least. I can't remember who the artist was said to be, but he created an incredible collection of these portraits. The lady who gave us the tour said that the originals ended up being destroyed in a fire after someone thought to make prints of them, so they are grateful to whoever thought of doing that because they can still preserve the memory of all these chiefs rather than lament for too long about the originals. There is also a model of the Lincoln Memorial. You might think that it's a replica, but in fact, it's a prototype. Apparently there were about 5 or 6 of them made as the sculptor was determining how to make the larger one, and the embassy is lucky enough to have one of them.
Frankfurt Christmas Market Birmingham
It has been my dream, since visiting a friend in Vienna 20 years ago who told about how beautiful these are, to visit continental Europe during the Christmas season to see a Christmas market. I was supposed to go to the Netherlands for work, but with the rising Covid cases, it was cancelled. As we haven't been able to travel to the continent yet, I was really disappointed that not only was I now not going there but also would miss out on getting to see a Christmas market there. (We changed our non-refundable train tickets as we can change the dates of our travel multiple times, and we might still get there before Christmas, but everything is still unpredictable.) I heard, however, that the Christmas market in Birmingham is said to be one of the best in the UK and is designed to be like the European ones, so we decided to check it out the first week of December. The first thing we noticed was Tim Hortons and the Second Cup, Canadian stores! As for the market, we hadn't realised it was the Frankfurt Christmas Market, so indeed, styled on the European Christmas markets. It was beautiful to look at, and we had some yummy wurst on buns with hot pickled onions and mustard, but my husband said it lacked the crafts that are normally at Christmas markets--and he has been to them on the continent before. There were a couple of craft-related stalls, one with healing crystals stuff and one with homemade soaps, as well as one with honey and honey products. Nothing more. So I know that I didn't have the most authentic experience, but we still enjoyed ourselves, and it was at least nice to get out and about. I should mention one of the highlights was this German guy who was singing live, various seasonal favourites in German, and English classics such as Dancing Queen and Country Road--you know, those great Christmas tunes...It was hilarious.
In addition, we checked out some other places in Birmingham. I read that the Birmingham Library was supposed to be some sort of an architectural wonder. So we decided to check it out, and we came across a small ferris wheel. Since I'm afraid of heights, and my husband wanted to go on it, I decided that a small one might be a good way to try it out. It's supposed to give you good views of the city, but as you can see, it wasn't that spectacular, and it was hard to get a decent photo of the library since the glass safety walls were in the way, and you're not allowed to stand up. Well, such is life. I made it out alive, and that's the key point here! I included a selfie in my photos just to prove I really went on it. We also went to the Birmingham Cathedral. We knew it wasn't a large place, but the stained glass windows, which are currently in need of cleaning and restoration, are said to be quite beautiful. They were indeed. Someone had the good sense to remove them from the church and hide them in a mine in Wales during WWII to protect them, and the cathedral did indeed get damaged in an air strike! After the church was rebuilt, the windows were able to be installed again.
National Museum of Computing
A few months ago when we went to Bletchley Park, the one thing we didn't have time to see was the National Museum of Computing, so we returned to the Park the day after our Birmingham trip. I'm not that into computing, mainly because I really struggled with it in university, but I like knowing what I can know about it. It has certainly revolutionised our lives in modern society, so it is still interesting for me to learn about the history of it. I have to say, we though it was a fairly sad-looking museum upon arrival. The layout doesn't seem to have an obvious order, and much of the space looks cluttered. It appears to be run by what appear to be retirees that worked in the field and/or that are all computer geeks. That's not necessarily a negative thing in terms of their knowledge, as we were given amazing tours of rooms and information from these folks, but you get a sense of the stereotype of the absent-minded computer geek from some of them--wearing disposable masks so much that they appeared dirty and one of which was wearing his upside-down with the nose wire on the chin, both with crazy hair. It is for us part of the charm of British eccentricity. In any case, I mentioned that we had good tours of some of the rooms, one of which was given by a white-haired lady who even does some of the maintenance on the old machine she presents about--a replica of the machine that Alan Turing designed that helped to crack the codes at greater speed during WWII. If it's less likely to see women in STEM areas these days, it seems like it would be even less likely to see one of this lady's generation, when it was more likely to see women aspire to domestic duties or clerical work--great if that's what you want but not if it's because society thinks that what you should do. What's interesting about the machine is that they still give it codes to crack from time to time to see what it can do, and it's still able to decipher some coded messages--according to the guide, to the chagrin of GCHQ, the branch of military intelligence in the UK that deals with cyber stuff. I'm guessing GCHQ must be trying to use undecipherable codes and are annoyed if they have to go back to the drawing board. I'm sure that takes a lot of work.
There was also a copy of one of the first computers, which is mainly a calculator the size of half a room. The guide for that room mentioned that the design of the computer was supposed to be destroyed, and no one was ever to know that the British had it, especially because it had figured out how to crack a code that the Soviet Union adopted from Germany when they took control of half the country. How useful that the Soviets didn't know this code-breaking machine existed and that the code they were using at the start of the Cold War had already been broken. But apparently in the 70s, because the US had been involved with some of these operations, they decided to declassify some of their WWII records, and the existence of the machine was now revealed. It turned out that the design of the computer was also not destroyed as ordered, and so a team was able to re-construct a replica of that original machines, in consultation with the original builder of the first one, who still happened to be alive at the time.
There were a lot of old computers as well, as the museum is said to have the largest collection of old computers that are still running. We saw a couple of Cray supercomputers as well. In addition, there were computers running on DOS and BASIC, and you could put commands into them and run a little program or play a game. They had disposable gloves and hand sanitizer at all these stations so you could safely touch everything. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, it can bring back a lot of memories. As much as I did terribly with computing science in school, I did successfully type in commands into our DOS computer and play games and do word processing, all without a mouse, as a kid. That's what you did then! It never ceases to amaze me how our phones are now more powerful and capable than these huge computers that needed their own room due to their size. It's a museum well worth seeing, but just be prepared for the sad appearance of the place. If you can get past that, there is a lot to play with and a lot to learn.
Around Town
As we go around the city, there are always things to see. On the Videos page, I have added a video of a parade that may have been related to Remembrance Day. The fanciest uniforms were those of the State Trumpeters. They look pretty impressive on horseback! I included another video of the Hare Krishnas playing music on a boat they seem to ride up and down the Thames for that purpose: playing music. There's also one of those metallic human statues--he is held up by hiding this brace in his sleeve, but he'd still be pretty lop-sided and uncomfortable. And there are some Christmas scenes from Camden Market and a Hanukkah addition at Vauxhall Bus Station.
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