We're Back

Preface:
This is a really long post about what Grace and I have been up to with my family. The first part is about London, the second about Paris and most of the last part is about trying to punt in Cambridge. In case you don't want to read it all, because it's long, there are pictures up at flickr. The relevant sets are "London with the Family" and "Paris with the Family."

Real Post:

After a frenetic eight days running around London, Paris and Cambridge with my family, Grace and I are settled back in at home. Grace is at work, and I've got under two weeks left in my vacation. I spent yesterday doing six loads of laundry and tackling the mountain of dishes.

Anyway, my family came over and we spent three days in London, three days in Paris, and one day in Cambridge, plus some days spent mostly traveling. First we went to London.

It was difficult for Grace and I to travel on Boxing Day (December 26th), since the trains were not running. Since my parents were arriving at 9 AM and we wanted to spend the 25th in Christmas, it was impossible for us to get to the airport for their arrival, as much as I love the idea of meeting at international arrivals gates. Anyway, we got a car to pick them up. It was the real deal, with a guy holding up a sign for Mr. Clancy and everything, which I think is great. Grace and I took a bus down to my parent's hotel. Because there was no traffic on Boxing Day we arrived early and were served tea in the lobby while we waited.

I was really stressed out during this time since there was no way for me to contact my parents and make sure things were going smoothly. Also, I had arranged both their hotel and the driver, so I was worried I might have screwed something up. But I didn't and they arrived and there were a lot of hugs. I hadn't seen them since September, and now that they're gone I won't be seeing them until August probably.

Our relatives in London had gone to the States for Christmas so Mike, Grace, Hannah and I were going to use their flat. We dropped the luggage off there while my parents took a nap and then went for a walk. Straight away, within an hour of my brother and sister's arrival we had the necessary pictures of them in red phone booths, next to stoic guards, and in front of Big Ben. There really wasn't much left to do after that, so we all went to some relatives house for an extended six hour tea/beer/dinner. It was a good chance for us to meet some relatives we hadn't before, and they told Grace and I to come and stay with them anytime we wanted to, which was really nice.

That took us into the night and all the weary travellers collapsed into bed.

The next day we got up relatively early and had some English Breakfast at a little cafe. We took the family on a walk to see Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, and Harrods. We spent the afternoon in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Imperial War Museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a room full of enormous plaster casts of things like Michelangelo's David, Trajan's Column, the doors of Cathedrals and so forth. I was loving it, but my dad was unimpressed with the casts because none of them were originals.

The Imperial War Museum looked really interesting, but unfortunately, Grace and I were already tired of museums by then and didn't really give it our full attention. Maybe some other time. We did like a small exhibit about a messenger pigeon on D-Day that delivered an important message and was awarded the Animals' V-C award before later being accidently killed when it's trainer stepped on it.

It was dark by then, it being winter, and so we all went home, passing the lit up Houses of Parliament on the way. That night I advocated ice skating at Somerset house and around 9 o'clock we headed out. We walked for a half hour only to find it was totally sold out, until January 6th or so. So Mike, Grace and I went to a pub.

The next day was another busy one. We spent the morning at the Tower of London, which was pretty grisly. Lots of talk of executions, torture, and so on. But we did see the crown jewels which were pretty big, as you can imagine. But we weren't allowed to take photos, so you'll just have to go to the monarchy's website. The place was really crowded, since it was a holiday.

After the Tower Mike went for a run while we all went to St. Paul's Cathedral. Grace and I balked at the £8 entry fee and went to the free Tate Modern art museum instead. My mom, dad and sister paid their dues and really liked the cathedral. They walked 500 steps to the top of the enormous dome (second only to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome) for a nice view. After that they went shopping on Oxford street which sounds like a bit of a mistake. The place was completely packed with people since the January sales were in full swing and everyone was still on holiday. It was pretty claustrophobic and when Grace and I got done with the museum and went to Oxford Street ourselves we quickly left.

That evening my mom and dad and sister had tickets to go see Les Miserables at the Queen's Theatre. Mike, Grace and I had some Thai food and then decided, on a whim, to see if rush tickets were available for the show. We ended up getting standing room only seats for only £10. We did have to stand though, and the musical was probably three hours.

There's pictures of the london segment of the trip here.

So, on to Paris. We packed up for the trip the next morning. My mom wanted to get to the train station really early, but Grace and I negotiated us down to leaving for the station 90 minutes before the train left. Once we had left and were taking our luggage down the two stops on the tube we realized that we had been reading the wrong time on the tickets. It turned out we had 25 minutes till the train left, not 90 minutes.

Well, some panicked a bit. The tickets weren't exactly cheap around New Year's Eve. In classic fashion we ran through the terminal with our luggage, trying to make the train. My mom used the wrong ticket trying to get out of the tube and the exit machine kept reading "error." When she realized this and got the right ticket out, it blew out of her hand and she had to chase it down the station floor.

It was like Home Alone or something. We had seven minutes to catch our train when we cleared security. We were in car 16, which was a long way down the platform. So we ran again, the only people on the platform, everyone else sitting calmly in their seats with their books. We had to take our coats off to get through security and I forgot that I had put all the gift money from my grandparents in one of my pockets. As we were running the money wafted out into the air and my sister yelled out "Leave it!"

Well, we didn't leave the money and we made the train.

So, we arrived in Paris. Mike, Grace and I were sharing a small, cheap room in the Garden Hotel, while my parents and sister were sleeping in the lap of luxury at a fancy hotel near the Arc de Triomph. Our room was just that - a room, entirely taken up by two beds. A third bed for Mike had to be wheeled out from under one of the other two. There was just enough floor space for the three beds to exist along with our luggage. But the bathroom was pretty nice, although we were warned there was no hot water between 8:30 in the morning and 10:30 at night, due to the hotel being totally packed (one morning Mike got up early to take a shower only to find this was a lie! Ha ha ha!).

So the first night in Paris we had this great plan to go to the Louvre, since it was open late on Fridays. Unfortunately, half of Paris had the same idea and when we saw the line stretched around the courtyard we switched plans. Instead we walked along the Seine until we found a restaurant, which Grace and I had actually eaten at last time we were in Paris. It wasn't a great place then, but it was alright and it catered to tourists with it's bi-lingual menu. The notable thing about the restaurant is that it had Cheeseburgers, and Mike ordered one, and (ha ha ha!) it was tiny, like a meatball for a hamburger patty. The small size of the burger was not reflected in it's price.

After this meal we went to the Eiffel tower. Grace and I have been there before and we sort of hated it. Not the tower so much as the endless lines and steep price to go to the top. This time we paid 3 Euro to walk up the stairs to the first floor. Then, we went home and watched French Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

The next morning we did go to the Louvre. It was raining, as it would continue to do all day. The line was much more manageable, probably since we got there early. It's a really big museum, the biggest in the world. We took Mike to see the major sights - Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, Large Format French Paintings - just to get them out of the way. The rest of the time at the museum I really enjoyed. The crowds stayed close to the just mentioned major sights so the place was quiet everywhere else. We took in some more French paintings and some old Mesopotamian artifacts that Mike had learned about in his Art History class.

Following the Louvre we went to the Ile St. Louis, an island in the Seine, for lunch and ice cream. This place did not have bi-lingual menus and my family struggled a little bit. Many of us ordered the wrong kind of ice cream. It was pretty much the nadir of the trip.

So, after lunch we went to see Notre Dame, the big, free, Cathedral. We did pay to see the treasury room, where they keep bones of saints and the carrying case for the (maybe) actual crown of thorns. We weren't sure where the crown was, since everything was in French.

After Notre Dame we parted ways. Grace and I knew a Cambridge student from Paris pretty well, and Mike, Grace and I spent the rest of the day with him. It was so refreshing to be in the city with someone who knew the language and the city. He took us to the Latin Quarter, to small French streets, to the Sorbonne, to the Parthenon, and to many other place we would not have found without him. He humored us by accompanying us to the Champs Elysees and helping us order some crepes.

For dinner we went to a traditional French restaurant. I shared a three cheese fondue with him while Grace and Mike gathered around a pot of boiling oil to cook pieces of steak on little skewers. We had some white wine, which Grace and I thought was just wonderful. Our French companion was not so impressed, but he admitted he was a bit spoiled on wine, since his family had opened a 20 and a 30 year old wine for Christmas. I thought the three cheese fondue (which you dip pieces of stale bread in using skewers) was really, really good. It would be a mess to clean up the pot afterwards though.

The next day was New Year's Eve. Mike, Grace, Dad and I met at the Catacombs early in the morning. The catacombs was the one thing I really wanted to check out in Paris. It's an extensive underground network. It was originally a quarry I think, but has been used for clandestine meetings by anyone operating under official radar. The French resistance used it, and recently the police uncovered a secret movie theater being run by an arts group. It's also famous because it holds millions of bones. There was a cemetary in Paris back in the 1800s that seemed to be causing lots of disease problems so they had all the bodies disinterred and moved into the catacombs. Now the bones are stacked in perfectly symmetrical patterns along long hallways. The place is a labryinth of caverns and tunnels far below Paris. It's illegal to enter it except on the tour part, which is what we did.

When we arrived, we saw a sign warning that children and people of a nervous disposition might be upset by the Catacombs. We payed our admission charge and walked some 100+ steps down a spiral stone staircase deeper than the metro and into the guts of Paris. The beginning part was all dank, short stone tunnels that were dimly lit. I had to stoop most of the way.

Eventually we came into a big room with a bunch of placards about the French Rebellion and the bodies down in the catacombs. There was an old warning over the doorway into the next section, called the Ossuary, which read, "Beware; you are entering the empire of the dead."

It was in here that the hallways were lined five or six feet deep, with endless bones. The bones were arranged like bricks, perfectly symmetrical with the skulls forming a long horizontal line a few feet off the ground. The first skull I saw gave me pause - I think that's probably the first time I've seen a real human bone, unpolished, unprotected. But the effect quickly wears off since you're literally surrounded by bones. Grace didn't wait around and quickly walked to the end of the tour. I waited for Dad to catch up, which took 15 minutes then went to find them. Because we delayed then seperated, both Dad and I were pretty much alone except briefly for the whole 15 minutes of quickly walking through endless halls of bone. There were a lot of placards with french poetry and apparently it's pretty grim stuff if you can read it. There were also small monuments among the bones, and sections were the bones were arranged in new patterns, like crosses.

Eventually I left the ossuary and caught up with Grace and Mike up 83 stairs and outside the Catacombs.

While we were at the Catacombs my mom and sister had gone up to Sacre Couer Basilica, which I think they probably enjoyed more than they would have the Catacombs.

After the Catacombs we took it easy at my parents swank hotel while Mike ran and then went out again in the late afternoon to get some Berthillion Ice Cream (best ice cream I've ever had) and do some shopping. My parents went to the Musee D'Orsay, which is full of impressionist paintings. Our shopping/ice cream expedition was hampered by lack of time, intermittent rain and the fact that it was late Sunday on New Year's Eve so most shops were closed. Still, Mike found a hat he liked at an open air booth and Grace and I got some ice cream. We were also part of a big crowd watching a street performer. He had pulled some people out of the audience and was directing them through a movie scene that involved someone with a gun, someone in love with someone else and a lot of French dialogue.

For dinner we had room service. This was because most restaurants were both booked and extremely expensive for New Year's Eve ($100 per person was the cheapest we could find). Now that I've been to Paris on New Year's Eve I think we would have been able to grab a cheap bite at a cafe (as opposed to a restaurant), but at the time we didn't know what else to do. Anyway, Grace and I bought some French wine, and we thought it was alright (we brought a champagne and two reds back to Cambridge and the first red was really good).

There had been a lot of debate about what to do for New Year's Eve night. We knew there would be tons of people on the Champs Elysees to watch the fireworks but we had also heard that, 1) they were a really rowdy group, 2) they were not actually Parisiens but just tourists, and 3) there actually weren't any fireworks at all. My parents were not interested in going out into the mess because of the potential for rowdiness. Grace was tired of crowds. I wasn't crazy about being with a bunch of tourists. My brother was worried about how we would get home, since we lived far away and he had to run the next day.

Anyway, we decided to go to a performance of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" and Mozart's "Requiem." It was in an enormous church/cathedral. I had never been to a classical music concert like this before. People were extremely respectful, holding their coughs and shifting until the breaks between movements. It was pretty long though, and my family got pretty tired of it, so we got out of there pretty quickly when it ended.

Outside we were greeted with pouring rain. That sort of clinched it and we went back to our hotel, since it was already 11. Personally I kind of like being part of a big crowd and would have liked to stay out, but I think I was the only one in the group of that mindset, so we had a pretty tame New Years. Ah well.

Pictures of the Paris leg of our trip are here.

The next day was devoted to travel to Cambridge. We arrived at the train station very early this time and had a pretty straightforward trip home. Grace and I were really excited to get to our home. At Cambridge the plan was to take it easy and recover from the sight seeing expeditions we had earlier embraced. We stuck with the plan, taking in a pint at "The Eagle," an old (1500s) pub where Watson and Crick announced they had discovered DNA. We had a long dinner at a local restaurant and Mike, Hannah, Grace and I stayed up watching YouTube junk at my place.

The next and final day my parents came over for breakfast and to see my place. We took them for a nice long walk into town. The sun was shining and the weather was really mild for January. We all got some hot chocolate and the plan was to take a relaxing punt down the river cam.

Good God, what a mistake. Where to start?

First off, in case you don't know, punting is where you take a long, flat, narrow boat down the barely moving river Cam. The boat is propelled by someone standing on the back of the boat and pushing off the ground of the river with a long pole, like the gondoliers in Venice. The plan was I was going to be the punter, pushing us off the river bed and Grace would be in the front with the emergency oar which is used when you're going to crash into things.

Now, this is a pretty sedate activity. It's hard to achieve anything approaching walking speed on these boats. But it's much harder than it looks to get the boat to go where you want. To go left, you either push off the left side of the boat (so the back goes right, due to Newton's third law, and the front goes left), or you try to use the pole as a rudder and drag it on the left side of the boat. It's really hard to just go straight. And you're standing on a flat boat all the while, trying not to fall into the water. But like I said, you're going really, really slow, so if you crash into things, you just sort of bump into it. And there's a bunch of bridges too.

So, I've done this before and I thought I had the hang of it. I wasn't a pro, but I could get the boat to go where I wanted with a little work and some zig zagging. Of course, my family had never experienced the usual, even worse, style of punting, and so all four were yelling advice immediately about where to put the pole, warning me that I was going to hit that wall, that I wasn't pointed in the right direction, that I was about to fall into the water, etc.

And then, right after the second bridge the pole got stuck in deep mud and I had to let go or fall off the boat. We kept up our momentum and drifted away from the pole. Grace paddled us back, but by then the family had lost all faith in my abilities to command the punt and the backseat driving ramped up to a fever pitch. And it started to rain. We had been out 10 minutes when my mom started asking if we should just go back (normally it takes a little over an hour to see the best of Cambridge from the river).

There was intermittent light rain and the relaxing punt on the river with hot cocoa became an ordeal to get through, not enjoy. The boat didn't seem nearly as easy to steer as it had a few months ago. We drove into walls, into branches and had to be paddled out of a lot of situations. It didn't help that I didn't really know anything about any of the colleges, including their names in most cases, so the informative aspect of learning about Cambridge was pretty much non-existent. We made it just as far as I felt we had to, to the Bridge of Sighs (which is famous for some reason, but I don't know why), and then tried to turn around.

Here we encountered a delightful new problem. There was a slight wind at our back while we were heading down the river. Now it was in my face, and it seemed that when it was forced through the opening between the surface of the water and the bottom of the bridge it followed principles of aerodynamics and sped way up. We could see the surface of the water change under the bridge and suddenly the wind howled past my ear. We literally could not make it through the bridge. Everytime I tried to push us through the wind forced the front of the boat to turn sharply left or right until we were sideways under the bridge. As I said, it's really hard to go straight on a punt - normally I have to zig-zag my way to a location. But with the wind, any turn was amplified and the boat turned 90 degrees, where no forward motion was possible. It also didn't help that I'm really tall and acted sort of like a sail.

We went at it three times, each time ending up sideways before making it under the bridge. Eventually we backed up, straightened out and, with a combination of paddling and grabbing the bottom of the bridge, we made it through. Of course, by then there was no confidence in my captaincy. I gladly handed over the duties of punting to Mike and was delighted to see him subjected to the torrent of suggestions, warnings and panicked cries. After he failed to make much more than 15 feet of progress in 10 minutes, he sat down and let Dad have a shot. Mom was certain Dad would fall into the water and could barely watch him as he stood on the back of the boat.

Dad did better, but it quickly became clear I really did know sort of what I was doing. So, in the interest of getting off the river, I took over the punt and we hurried back to the dock. The backseat driving finally stopped.

We made it back without any more major incidents, though I almost lost the pole in the deep mud again. As we piled out of the boat we saw some tourists heading out, with both passengers standing, one with the pole and the other with the emergency oar. I doubt they fared well.

We had the punt renter take a picture of all six of us, the only picture with everyone in it. Mike ruined the picture by blinking.

The remaining few hours of the day we had some lunch and split to go shopping. Shortly afterwards everyone left and I was sad.

Grace and I tried to see a movie, but everything in the theaters was terrible so we went home.