Good English Living

Also, in case you've been wondering what the new place looks like:

Awwww, our cute little British flat. (I've definitely had the thought, while sitting at the dining room table eating breakfast and watching the neighbors stroll by, if I went back a few years and told my nineteen-year-old self that in just a short time I'd be living in England in a cozy, I mean cosy, brick Victorian house like this one, I might not have believed it. I mean, my Anglophile self would have been thrilled to hear it at that time, but...)

Off to Wales tomorrow, so I'm hoping for some nice weather and good hikes along the coast!

Writing, and the Meaning of Home

Errands, shopping, unpacking, getting settled: bit by bit the new place begins to feel more like home. I've spent the last few days in settling-in mode, enjoying being with friends in a new house while also reflecting on "home" and what it means to me. This is a conversation I've had with several friends since moving overseas, living in and visiting more places and forming a diverse set of relationships, and coming to terms with a more complex, sometimes inarticulable definition of home, if any singular definition of it exists. Maybe because of this, but maybe also because I just saw my family -- and also, I am sure, because I have never been away from New Mexico for this long before, now going on eight months -- I find myself filled with surprising feelings of longing for bits and pieces of the desert Southwest. Here, in Oxford, late August already feels like late September, the cool days starting to sink in and the hours of daylight changing bewilderingly fast. The rains are returning, though the weather is still on the whole good, and I am struck again by the dampness of these British Isles. In this new place, I think back to crisp and blazingly clear blue August skies, the smells of green chile roasting and afternoon monsoons soaking the land with rain and hay bales sitting in the valley fields, the early-morning sights of hot-air balloons rising into the air and preparing for the marquee events of fall: the State Fair in September, the balloon fiesta in October. August has always been a time of transition for me, a time of back-to-school and riding and horse shows and enjoying the landscape as the scorching temperatures of summer ease into the glorious crisp warmth of fall. That desert palette, those desert views, still remain with me, and I'm thinking of them a lot lately from far away.

I didn't expect missing New Mexico to hit me so suddenly at the end of this summer, but it has. What I wouldn't give sometimes to bask in the open skies and breathtaking colors and geology of the American West -- but here I am, admittedly enjoying these slower days of reading and writing and calling a new and very different place "home" (if only for a short while). Certainly it does feel like another kind of home, more and more now than last year, and in its own small ways. I'm sure more of those feelings of home will come in approaching weeks -- as well as more interesting conversations on what home means to begin with.

Aside from that, a lot of friends have been hard at work on their dissertations lately, which has given me time to pursue my own "work" for the remainder of the summer, which means writing. I'm looking forward to being more productive in the last weeks of summer, but was glad at the end of last week when a short piece I wrote appeared in the weekly blog of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank in DC. Check it out:

http://weeklywonk.newamerica.net/articles/lips-eyes/

I'm turning to a few other projects at the moment, including some collaborations and some short and long pieces alike, and we'll see what happens in these weeks before academic work and the Oxford term consume my daily schedule once again. I'll have a few updates in there, including a trip to visit a friend in Wales this upcoming weekend, so stay tuned!

Family Summer Travels Part IV: Back to London

After the recent series of posts chronicling my family's travels on the continent, we've somehow found ourselves jumping back down the rabbit-hole into the UK once again. Well, let's get to it. We left Brussels early on Sunday morning last week and reached London via the EuroStar train by 10am. Then, after a bit of traipsing about playing tourist and trying to get a photo at the Harry Potter trolley at King's Cross Station (which I'd somehow not seen yet), we arrived at the apartment we would be renting for the week, near Victoria Station, by noon. Staying in apartments rather than hotels is my preferred way to travel, and I gladly tossed my bag down on the bed before we headed out, first to walk through London and then meet my sister Leigh's friend Susan for afternoon tea.

So, from Victoria past Buckingham Palace to St. James's Park: classic London. We ran across an unexpected event on the way, a Prudential bike ride through London to benefit various charities. Watching the bikers make the final turn near Whitehall and cycle for the finish line at Buckingham Palace was thrilling, especially with so many spectators cheering, although it did mean we had to find a way to cross the streets since they were all cordoned off for the ride. That obstacle surpassed, we walked past Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden, where we shopped around, Leigh got some macarons from her most-beloved Ladurée, and we all got some Ben's cookies (yum; a true London and Oxford tradition) before catching a bus to the east end to meet Leigh's friend. The place we'd been planning on going for tea, Lady Dinah's Cat Emporium, is a new cafe near the trendy Brick Lane area that serves tea with, you guessed it, cats for company. We'd been wanting to go the entire trip, but alas, cats are wildly popular and the place was booked full when we got there. (Entrepreneurial note to self: open a business in the future that somehow combines tea, baked goods, and cats.) We still did some shopping at the Brick Lane Sunday markets and ate some delicious Indian food to top off our evening.

It's always fun to play tourist in London, and Monday was Tower of London day. We got up early again to make it to the Tower by the time it opened, only to find we'd arrived early. All the better, and we were among the first people in and went straight to see the Crown Jewels before the queue got too long. (By the afternoon the line was far out the door and they were announcing a 30-minute wait just to get in to see the main displays.) And: wow. Are they the real thing? Hard to believe, but yes, and they are dazzling. Crowns and scepters and coronation regalia and all types of ceremonial finery: go see them sometime for yourself. After the Crown Jewels, since the place was beginning to fill up, we took a tour with one of the Beefeaters and then spent the rest of the day exploring the tower and its sprawling, fascinating, dark history.

I was absorbed, as I always am (and was also happy to make progress in my understanding of the 1000-year history of the British monarchy), but by 3:30pm Leigh and my mom were tired and we left the Tower to walk over to St. Paul's Cathedral. One last Tower observation; we had to take notice (and photos) of the exhibit of over 888,000 red ceramic poppies the Tower of London has installed in its moat for the centennial of the First World War. These poppies stream over the walls of the Tower like (quite honestly) a vast pool of blood, one for each British or Commonwealth serviceman killed in WWI. It's quite a moving sight, and joins the many other references or memorials to the Great War that we saw along the way during our travels. Hard to believe that such bloodshed broke out a hundred years ago, in August 1914.

Anyway, to St. Paul's. Visiting hours at the cathedral were over by the time we got there from the Tower, which turned out to be just as well; we stayed for Evensong instead. For those who haven't experienced it, Evensong is a traditional evening choral service that takes place in many Anglican churches. In St. Paul's, it was just lovely and a welcome time of reflection and respite after a busy day contemplating bloody executions from hundreds of years ago. Afterwards, we met up with Leigh's friend Susan again, took a few minutes to enjoy the view from the Millennium Bridge, and headed to a cozy old pub for dinner (and a return to British cider).

We had deemed Tuesday our bus tour day, and early that morning we all got on a tour bus from Victoria to head out to Leeds Castle and the city of Canterbury, in the southeast England county of Kent, for the day. None of us typically like the rushed, touristy, mass-group-travel nature of bus tours, but we had a special reason for wanting to go out to Leeds Castle: when Leigh was in ninth grade she built a to-scale model of this castle with my dad for a class project, and had wanted to see it ever since. It was lovely in person, especially on a clear but blustery day (I'd been before, my last time abroad, in chilly and cloudy November, and this rendition was much better). The castle has a history of being built and used by English kings, including Henry VIII, before it was sold and restored in the early twentieth century to a wealthy American heiress for use as a private residence. What a place to have as your home, especially when entertaining 1920s and 1930s movie stars to boot.

Oh, and Leeds has rare black swans (brought over from Australia for an exotic bird aviary), which were cool:

After Leeds, the bus took a quick stop by Dover (to see the white cliffs). Yes, I privately thought of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"...

The bus rolled on, and we had a few hours in Canterbury, making our own small pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. This used to be one of the premier religious spots in the world, and people would travel from all over to visit it and pray at the shrine to the English Saint Thomas Becket (who was murdered in the cathedral during a rift with the king, then later canonized) at least once in their lifetimes. The cathedral, perhaps more so than many other cathedrals, brings to life a very different era, especially with the way it towers above Canterbury as though realizing its own importance.

We might have stayed longer and taken more photos, but we were all hungry and grabbed some lunch and had time to walk around the city and its riverside canals. Again, much nicer weather than when I last visited in November a few years ago!

Later that night: back to London, and then up the following morning for our last full day of vacation together. After much debate, we'd opted to make it out to Kew Gardens, in west London. Leigh met a friend in central London for breakfast and the rest of us did some shopping, and then we grabbed some picnic trappings and walked down to the river to get on the Underground and make the trip out to Kew.

I'd heard about the sprawling gardens, which are home to more species and varieties of plants than any other place in the world, from several friends and had been wanting to visit for a while, but nothing prepared me for the wonder I felt throughout the afternoon. Plants from all across the globe greeted us (including some I'd long taken for granted but had never actually seen: coffee, ebony, mahogany, banana, pepper), and I felt like I maybe ought to have been a botanist. In a future life, maybe. After a long few weeks of traveling, wandering the gardens and enjoying nature (though not quiet; Heathrow is right next door, and planes were jetting overhead every 30 seconds) was a great way to end the trip, even though we didn't manage to make it to the main botanical conservatory by the end of the day and see the carnivorous plants there. Rats! The evening's last pleasure: returning to central London and having another meal of fish and chips together before the fam jetted out in the morning.

But wait -- one last thing, from my end! My parents and Leigh left early in the morning on Thursday, and I cleaned and packed up the apartment on my own, then met a friend for a nice lunch. I'd opted not to head straight back to Oxford after that, though, since I'd gotten wind that the Longines Global Champions Tour would be in London starting that day. This is the premier summer series for world-class show jumping horses and riders, including many Olympians and many horse-rider pairs that will be heading to the World Equestrian Games at the end of this month, and I was thrilled to get to watch it in person. For those who are in the horse world: riders like McLain Ward, Ludger Beerbaum, Eric Lamaze, Ben Maher, Beezie Madden, Reed Kessler, and so forth were riding in a just-erected arena at the Horse Guards at Whitehall, right by St. James's Park, which had been taken over by horses for the weekend. I'd never gotten to see this caliber of riders in person before, and I do not exaggerate when I say I was starstruck. Even though the weather was awful, cold and rainy, I got a warm glow from sitting huddled in the stands and watching that day's Grand Prix. Some of those riders turn jumping a horse into a work of art. Another bonus: Antares F, McLain Ward's gorgeous Olympic horse from 2012 (who is now with a different rider from Switzerland) won the Grand Prix, slicing off the turns in the jump-off and snapping up those knees. I got back on the bus to Oxford missing riding, for sure, but the high of getting to watch the GCT stayed with me for days after.

And that's it! I've been back in Oxford for a week now, and in that time I've run errands and taken care of miscellaneous tasks I'd been putting off for weeks, written and read a bit, and packed up my entire room and moved into the new house I'll be sharing with friends this year. Agh, I don't know how I've accumulated so much stuff in the short year I've been here, but my share of the move is finally over, though I've been gradually unpacking and running yet more errands for bedroom and kitchen necessities. Oxford is quiet and sleepy after the whirlwind of travels, and a few of my friends are around, but I'm looking forward to the coming weeks when more people start to trickle back in. But not to get ahead of myself -- it's been a great summer, and this recent stint of family travels was a massive highlight. Until Christmas, then, la familia Kolb!

Family Summer Travels Part III: Amsterdam and Belgium

So, our traipse through Germany (just about) over, we drove out from Bacharach and to Cologne, where we had to take some time to figure out exactly where to drop off the car and get train tickets to Amsterdam. That done, we had a short time to visit Cologne Cathedral and play tourist with a few photos before continuing on our way. The cathedral is immense and imposing, and strikes the eye immediately as one walks out of the train station. The entire city was bombed during the war, except the cathedral was left standing. The black residue on the stones likely isn't all from bombing and ash, but my fantasies led me to think that it was.

With two steeples, it cuts quite the immense silhouette from afar, as we found when driving into Cologne and when taking pictures at a short distance.

Farewell, Germany! On to the Netherlands. Our train was delayed en route, and when we arrived in Amsterdam it was cool and raining, rather like the UK weather I've gotten to know. We trekked through the Red Light District to our hotel (and smelled the smell of Amsterdam "green" for the first time there, if you get my drift) and settled in, then grabbed dinner. Afterwards we were all tired, so we turned in and got up early the next morning to head to the Anne Frank House, which we'd all been wanting to see. It opened at 9am, and we got there a few minutes early since we'd heard about crowds, and holy cats at that point the line wrapped around the block. We waited for right around two hours -- I kid you not -- before we managed to get inside! So our first morning in Amsterdam was spent standing and trying not to breathe too deeply as a city maintenance crew pumped fresh sewage out of a septic tank close by. Welcome to the Netherlands. The silver lining in all this is that I'd managed to get in touch with a deaf friend of mine, Kate, who lives near Amsterdam, and she came out to hang out with us for the day. Two hours standing in line gave us a great opportunity to chat and catch up!

Once we did make it into the Anne Frank House, however, we found it had been worth the wait. I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank when I was younger (though I can't recall when exactly, and would like to go back and reread it now), and seeing the place where her family hid from the Nazis was an unreal and deeply sobering experience. The house has been turned into a museum, and many excellent informative videos greeted us as we walked inside, first through the warehouse part that was a public front for the place where the Franks hid, upstairs in the secret annex. We gradually made our way up to the secret annex, through a bookcase that hid the entrance in the wall (still there and still original), then had the chance to peruse the very small and very closed-in rooms where the Franks and one other family spent two years in hiding. Words fail me here. I cannot imagine spending so long, with five other people, in such a small place, sitting in tense silence the entire day as we struggled not to make noise, not even to go to the bathroom during working hours when people might hear us downstairs. It brought the reality of the Holocaust home in a very painful way. And the fact that the Franks, and the people who helped them, courageously hid for that long, and then were captured and sent to concentration camps anyway, is too awful for words. I left feeling horrified by the reality of those dark days, but at the same time oddly cheered by the fortitude of the human spirit, as we can see in Anne's diary. It was a strange mixed feeling that I have a difficult time describing, but I'm very happy we made the visit while we were in Amsterdam.

Next up: we had traditional Dutch pancakes for lunch (which were delicious), then walked the streets and canals of Amsterdam throughout the afternoon. The clouds and gloom had lifted by that point, and we had a truly beautiful afternoon to explore this unique city.

Kate explained interesting things about the Netherlands to me, from Dutch architecture (and why the buildings on the canals were built the way they were) to Dutch bicycles -- there were so many! Amsterdam is a tricky place to be a tourist, I tell you, because every time you step out into the street you need to look for bikes zipping by. The city is a biking mecca; there are hardly any cars compared to other places.

We made it out to the "I Amsterdam" sign, by one of the main art museums, the Rijksmuseum, and then proceeded to the Van Gogh Museum, which we'd been considering visiting that afternoon. But a huge line in front of that museum as well made my family decide to return with advance tickets the following day (which was thoroughly worth it), and we backtracked through the city to explore more of its streets and shops.

And wrapped up the day with a beer, of course. I so enjoyed catching up with Kate in Amsterdam, and must make it back out to the Netherlands during my time overseas.

We parted ways after the evening happy hour had passed, and my family wandered the canals a bit more (always so enchanting, these waterways) before grabbing a delicious Dutch dinner. Then we wandered the canals for a while longer in the gathering twilight.

Again, I could have used another day or two in Amsterdam, but isn't that true for just about every place I've visited? The next morning we were off to Brussels. We got to visit the Van Gogh museum in the morning, and then grabbed lunch at the train station, and made it to Brussels by early evening. After dropping our things off at the hotel, we set out to explore a bit of the city before dinner. We saw the Grand Plaza, supposed to be one of the most beautiful squares in Europe:

And most importantly, we started our journeys through Belgian food with some waffles! This was every bit as delicious as it looks, I assure you.

The chocolate (and chocolate displays) were pretty amazing, too.

We went to a fun Belgian restaurant (with some French influence and French dishes) for dinner, and were all very excited to try the local beer. I've mentioned that I'm not usually a huge fan of beer, since I prefer wine and other drinks, but this beer was absolutely excellent.

Take me back!! Anyhow, the next day we got up and got on a train to go up to Bruges for the day, since we'd heard wonderful things about it, especially in comparison to Brussels. (Overall, I thought Brussels was all right, a pretty standard European city, not all that many remarkable things about it compared to other cities.) Bruges, on the other hand, was beautiful and quaint and a perfect place for our last day out on the European continent.

We walked around the main city squares, took in the unique Belgian architecture, and of course visited a few beer and chocolate shops along the way. (So many varieties of Belgian beer, it's astonishing.)

Then we passed out of the heart of the city (and more charming architecture abounded), and then took a boat tour on the canals. This was an admittedly touristy thing to do, but a friend of mine had advised that we just do it, and I was glad to see Bruges from this angle.

There were so many charming architectural details to marvel at and take photos of, and after getting the overall lay of the land (or water) through our boat tour, we walked out to the other end of the city to see some windmills.

We returned into the middle of the city for a late lunch (with more beer, of course), then walked along the water and took photos of some of the beautiful towers and buildings rising over the canals. It was a lovely day, even if a bit blustery and cold and fall-like.

Another highlight of Bruges: all the horse-drawn carriages that clip-clop through the city. Hearing the sound of hoofbeats and horseshoes so often is something I miss. I kept turning to watch as the horses trotted by.

For our last activity of the day, we toured a local brewery that has made beer in Bruges for several generations, complete with another glass of beer for each of us afterwards. The view from the top of the brewery was beautiful:

Also beautiful: more waffles. Again delicious. I think Belgian delicacies need to make it into my daily diet (though it's probably best for me that they don't).

We then walked back to the train station, amidst swans milling in the water (and chasing each other hilariously out of the way when people tossed bread down to them), then caught our train back to Brussels. The next morning, early, we were off again, on the Eurostar back to London. Our time in Belgium was short, but I loved it there -- even if returning to the UK felt like coming home, a bit, as it has come to feel over the last few months. The Kolb family adventures did get a few more days in London and thereabouts, and that'll be the subject of my next post. Until we meet again, European continent!