On the subject of various anniversaries, I’ve noticed that September 8th will mark a year since Ori and I arrived in the UK. Hard to believe how quickly the last twelve months have passed, and how much we’ve seen and done in the previous year. Nevertheless, like the countdown at right, it’s a reminder that our time here is passing quickly, and that it won’t be long before we’re packing up and shipping 98% of our belongings home before embarking on the Camino de Santiago.

It’s funny to think about life after the UK. How improbable our present circumstances would have seemed two years ago! There’s no saying where we’ll be two years from now, though it will likely be somewhere in Canada. We can see ourselves returning to the UK someday, though, perhaps even to retire. There’s just something comforting and manageable about England; I never think about how big Canada really is just because it’s too big to contemplate!

Anyway, since I’m extolling the virtues of the UK, I might as well describe one of our recent trips, this one to Wales and Bristol. The Welsh portion was completed on bicycle, a distance of 75 or so miles over three days from Chepstow to Merthyr Tydfil. We had positive experiences taking our bikes on all sorts of trains, from local two-car, self-propelled beaters to the locomotive-hauled, 120mph sleek trains that serve London. We followed National Rail’s advice and booked bicycle reservations as often as possible, but every train we rode would have had room for at least four other bikes in addition to ours. The only snag was at Chepstow, our starting point, where we had to unload our bikes and carry them and our heavy baggage over the footbridge. I don’t know what happens if you’re in a wheelchair!

Wales is beautiful. We were told to expect “lots of fields full of sheep,” and it certainly delivered on that front. What we saw of Wales didn’t differ much from what we’ve seen of England, topographically, but the different accent and language (which appears on signs everywhere!) gave it all a foreign tinge.

Our first stop was Tintern Abbey, which was mostly of interest to Ori (though I like a good ruin, too). The abbey’s size and degree of preservation were both breathtaking, and while we didn’t stay as long as we would’ve liked, we still got a good feel for the place. My primary observation was that, if that’s how “warm” it is in August (i.e., really cold, damp, and miserable), it would seem quite foolish to build an (unheated) monastery there. Ori tells me it has something to do with living a life of austerity. Brrrr!

At Tintern, we also had our first encounter with a low-flying aircraft, an RAF Merlin helicopter that buzzed the abbey while we were inside. Later on, also in Wales, a Harrier jump jet flew over at a low, deafening 500mph while we were observing the goings-on at a lock along the Monmouthshire & Brecon Canal. Not to mention the Black Cats, the Red Arrows, and the countless hot air balloons later in the trip, too! It reminded me of a very neat article I’d read that pointed out that the UK is one of the few places in the world where one can regularly photograph aircraft with the ground, not sky, as the background. Check it out!

We camped in Wales, having borrowed a small tent from one of Ori’s kind friends at the Ashmolean. It was funny to set up our tiny little tent next to all the extravagant, multi-room tents and caravans that are so popular in the UK. To their credit, other campers we spoke to seemed impressed with our self-sufficiency (i.e., carrying everything with us on our bikes), and several said they wished they could do what we were doing. That was nice!

The weather mostly cooperated, and we made it all the way to Merthyr Tydfil (the name of which reminded me of Minas Tirith) with no bike breakdowns or any other problems. Sure, we had to walk up some of the hills/mountains, but all in all, I think we did pretty well!

We took the train to Bristol, where we stayed with the same good friends as last time. The entire trip was planned around the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, which, when I first heard about it many months ago, I never thought I’d actually be attending. But we made it work, and it didn’t disappoint! I saw a “Night Glow” (balloons lighting up their burners in time to music), a mass ascent, and lots of arena entertainment. Apparently, the Fiesta is one of the UK’s largest free-entry events, and I believe them – the grounds were enormous, as were the crowds. The weather cancelled a number of ascents and other parts, but we nevertheless “got our money’s worth,” as it were.

We also managed a trip to Bath (on our bikes), which is linked to Bristol via the rhyming Bristol and Bath Railway Path. Bath was a bit disappointing, and I was glad we didn’t have to pay to see the Abbey. The cycle path was wonderful, though – smoothly paved the entire way, restricted to pedestrians and cyclists only, and you only have to stop once or twice in the whole 13-mile length! Way to go, Bristol – you certainly deserve to be the UK’s first “Cycling City”!

Predictably, I’ll end this post by saying it was a good trip. It certainly was – we both needed the break from work, and Wales and Bristol provided the perfect distraction. I’d certainly revisit both places again!

As you will notice, I have added a little countdown widget to the blog, visible (and temporarily highlighted) at right. It’s now counting down to the big day, our wedding on Friday, August 19, 2011!

To mark our “negative first” anniversary, we’re going to have a low-key celebration in Oxford tonight, probably a reliable dinner at Pizza Express and then Toy Story 3 in 3D. We’ll manage something a bit more romantic and significant when we both have more time.

At the moment, however, we’re still readjusting to normal life after a wonderfully restful week in Wales and Bristol. I’ll blog about it in more detail when I finish editing the photos, but suffice it to say that we felt a million miles from our daily grind in Oxford. We also surprised ourselves with our ability to be simultaneously self-sufficient and mobile, averaging 25 miles per day in hilly and mountainous Welsh terrain on bikes fully loaded with provisions for eating and sleeping.

And the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, which we attended at the end of our holiday, didn’t disappoint, either!

A few weeks ago, Kyle and I returned from our second trip to Venice together, which took place over the Redentore festival weekend. It was so fantastic to be back in Venice, to see all of our friends and our favourite scenes.

After a 3am wake-up, a 2-hour bus ride to Gatwick Airport, the flight to Venice, and the trip on the Alilaguna to the city, the first thing we did when we arrived was have our favourite panini and spritzes on the Strada Nova at Bepi’s. It was as if we never left! The only thing that made our first few days uncomfortable was the intense heat, made worse by the humidity. We quickly learned that running all over the city in a rush to see everything we wanted to see was not the way to beat the heat, and we soon slowed down (and found great comfort in the air-conditioner installed in our apartment the second day).

Our vacations together usually don’t seem all that relaxing, because we are too keen to complete our long list of sights to see, but this holiday was different. Perhaps that was because we know Venice well, and have already seen most of the sights. But I think it was a good thing to learn how to slow down, and frankly, both the heat and the masses of tourists made it pretty impossible to actually go anywhere quickly. We returned to Oxford feeling refreshed, which isn’t always the case after one of our holidays!

That isn’t to say we didn’t see anything – we visited the Doge’s Palace (Kyle had been in 2007, this was the first time for me), and I was quite excited to see Tintoretto’s Paradiso (the largest oil painting in the world), and to walk over the Bridge of Sighs. Our ticket for the Doge’s Palace also gave us entry to the Museo Correr and the Archaeological Museum, which both had interesting art and artifacts from Venice’s history. We also visited the Ca’ d’Oro, a pallazo turned art gallery on the Grand Canal. It’s really great to go to art galleries now, since I know so much more about art after working at the Ashmolean. We saw even more lovely art in several churches that we visited while using up our Chorus Church passes from last summer. I was also pretty darn excited to see the entire body of Saint Lucy (an early 4th-century Christian martyr) in the church of Santa Lucia (kind of morbid I know, but then again, I am a medievalist, and I live for relics!).

But of course, the highlight of the trip was the Redentore festival. This festival is celebrated to mark the salvation of Venice by Christ (the Redeemer/il Redentore) from the plague in the 16th century. Kyle blogged about it last summer, so I need not explain it all in detail again, but the short version is that there is a huge fireworks show on the Saturday evening (which is attended by most Venetians and all tourists), and on Sunday, a large temporary bridge is built over the Giudecca Canal to the Redentore Church to allow people to make a pilgrimage honouring the salvation from the plague. Kyle and I agree that it is difficult to explain to people just how awesome the fireworks show was – you can’t realistically describe the feeling we got from being in a traditional Venetian boat rowing through the crowded St. Mark’s Basin, tying up beside locals feasting and drinking in their decorated party-boats, and then watching the sky light up with more fireworks at once than we have ever seen before. The pictures, although really cool, hardly do the scene justice – they miss out on the ear-deafening booms, the constant screams from the crowds, the swaying of the boats, and the smell of the ash falling from the sky. It was truly an experience that I will never forget.

I would like to end this post by thanking our friends in Venice that made the trip possible – Fabio, for inviting us and for rowing us through the canals at night, and Ben (a new friend) for sharing his apartment with us. It was a fantastic trip, and we are so happy we got to go again.

I’m trying my hand at search engine optimization for the new and improved ecoVeritas website (ecoVeritas being my employer here in Oxford). It’s a lot of work (writing custom <META> descriptions and all that), but I hope it pays off eventually with new clients finding our site through Google and other search engines.

Click on the logo to visit our new website:

This post, by the way, is part of our efforts to get more people to link to the site. Nobody knows for sure, but it’s generally accepted wisdom that your rank in Google’s results is at least partially determined by how many (good, established) websites link to you.

Have any comments on the new site? Send them to me or leave a comment on this post.

Oxford has been having some uncharacteristically nice weather recently, and it looks like it’s going to continue this week:


Which is great, because the Duinkers arrived this morning (right on time), and there are so many things to see and do outside in Oxford – punting, visiting colleges, picnics in the meadows, walking along the river, and just exploring the medieval downtown.

There haven’t been many updates to the Gallery recently, for which I’m sorry. I’m working on editing some recent photos, which I’ll upload soon.

Well, things aren’t going so well for England, so I went out and bought a Saint George’s flag yesterday. Maybe that will help things. At the same time, it’s a bit funny to listen to the English TV commentators spout their colonialist nonsense (“England has never lost to an African team”, etc. etc.) as they watch their beloved players flounder.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that, while Google has gotten in on the World Cup in a hundred different ways, there’s one very subtle thing that I didn’t notice until this morning. When you visit South Africa in Google Street View (including going inside the World Cup stadia), your little orange Street View man is blowing a red vuvuzela:



And on a totally unrelated note, does anybody else think the chocolate chip trees in Katy Perry’s new “California Gurls” music video look a bit like ferrofluid?



I’ve got my engineering degree to thank for that bit of insight.

Everybody (well, everybody in the world except maybe most North Americans) knows that the World Cup is now well underway, and it’s certainly inescapable here in England. It started with the “football” branding of just about everything, from beer bottlecaps to pizzas to Babybel cheeses, about a month or so ago. Then all the grocery stores began stocking “England” merchandise – flags for one’s car, bunting, light-up “head boppers,” and so on. And it took over TV advertising – if a company isn’t seen to support the World Cup, it seems they’re not worth buying from!

Then our neighbours went absolutely football-crazy and decorated their houses (and the entire street) with England flags and other England paraphernalia. (Why waste a big white expanse of van when it could be decorated with some red tape to make a nice flag of St George?) It’s way more fanaticism than we’ve ever seen before (even when I lived in the heart of the “Red Sox Nation“). Oh well, as with the recent UK election, I suppose I should be glad for the opportunity to share this cultural experience with the English.

And now with the World Cup itself underway, things have been staying interesting. We follow it at work during the day, and I’ve been watching some of the games in the evenings, too. North Korea gave Brazil a run for their money last night, and today Switzerland’s upset of Spain (one of the big favourites to win the whole thing) was the only thing we talked about all afternoon. I never thought I’d turn into a football fan, but look at me go!

England plays their second game on Friday night (versus Algeria), and we’ll all be watching closely! The first one was a bit on the boring side, but I had the good fortune of watching it (with Ori and Angela) at Sam‘s house, in the company of a dozen or more other passionate England fans. It certainly made the game more exciting than it would’ve been in front of the TV at home.

Fortunately, nobody there had a vuvuzela. (Click to listen.)

Ori has already told you about her recent visit from Kate and Dave, but I’d just like to add that my sister Angela is now in the U.K. for two and a half months, too! I met her at Heathrow last week, making the arrivals lounge literally two minutes before she came through the doors. Despite not having slept at all on the plane, she was sprightly and excited to be in England.

We had a very nice day in London, and I saw the flat she’ll be sharing with five other Berklee students – quite “middle class,” as I suppose they’d say in this country (it’s how the English say that something is nice). She has a cute little pub across the street, two Sainsburies and a Tesco within three minutes’ walk, and a big park nearby. Where she’s working is a little bit further off, but still walkable.

I’m very glad to have her in the same country as me for a while, and she’ll be visiting us in Oxford next weekend. We can’t wait to show her around (and to prove just how much better life is in a rural town, when compared to the big city!)

P.S. Anybody who’s been checking the photo gallery will have probably noticed that there haven’t been many updates there recently (even fewer than to this blog!). That’s because I’ve installed Gallery 3, and am preparing to completely switch over to this newer, faster, slicker system soon. Why not take a look at the new gallery and tell me what you think in the comments? Besides, there are some new photos in there (including Oxford college balls, May Morning, Ori’s birthday in London, and our cycle ride to Blenheim Palace).

P.P.S. Fabio should be in Oxford for about a week starting tomorrow, too! It will be great to see each other again.

I am surprised that it took this long (9 months) for homesickness to really sink in, but in the past few weeks, I have really been missing my family and Halifax. I suppose it was spurred on by our visit from Kate, Dave, and Silas several weeks ago. They stayed with us for about a week, and we had just the most wonderful time together! Being the first members of either of our families to visit Oxford, Kyle and I were very eager to show them everything that we know and love in our new city.

Of course, sight-seeing and travelling wasn’t as easy as it could have been, because we had 11-month-old Silas in tow, but I was suprised at how great the little guy was (we hardly heard him through the nights – well done Kate! – and Kyle and I learned how to entertain and distract him when he was being strapped into his stroller). We showed them all of the usual Oxford sights: the Ashmolean, some colleges, the old churches, and a few famous pubs (Dave was keen to visit any spot related to J.R.R. Tolkein and/or C. S. Lewis). We even tried punting!

Kate and Dave were great for wanting to walk everywhere, and we stopped at many playgrounds and played even if Silas was asleep (seriously, the playground at the top of South Park is the best thing ever). We took a day-trip into London and went to a service at St Paul’s and an organ recital at Westminster Abbey, visited the Tate Modern, and walked through Kensington Gardens, past Buckingham Palace, through Trafalgar Square, and past the Houses of Parliament. I was exhausted by the end of the week, but also completely refreshed!

When they left Oxford for Germany, I felt really down. It was weird to come into my room and not see it scattered with baby books, or to see our drying rack outside without Silas’ cute little clothes hanging on it. It was really special to have them here. Even though Silas has changed so much since I last saw him, I still feel the same bond with him that I felt when I held him during the first few days of his life. And Kate and Dave were just so great – it was wonderful for the four of us to have time to hang out, and talk about life and marriage and babies and everything. I think they are excellent role-models for Kyle and me!

Missing them led me to ponder how much I have been homesick for Halifax lately. The lovely (but rare) summer weather Oxford has been experiencing recently reminds me of lazy summer days in Halifax, with Saturday mornings spent strolling around the Farmers’ Market, barbeques with my dad on our deck, coffee/tea time at St Paul’s on the Grand Parade, the leafy campuses of Dalhousie University, and drives to the Valley or to Lunenburg. I want to be home!

In the meantime, I’m consoling myself with the fact that my parents and Nelle will be coming to visit in several weeks’ time, which I am absolutely thrilled about!

You can see photos of Kate and Dave’s visit here.

We’re back from our trip to Grenoble, which found Ori participating in a musical twinning exercise between it and Oxford. I went along as a roadie (porteur) and, as one of the orchestra members joked, Ori’s “agent,” and I had a great time and took lots of pictures (of course!).

To get there, we took the Eurostar through the Channel Tunnel, and switched to a TGV in Paris. The change of trains also required a change of stations, so we took the opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing in Paris, too. Last time, we ducked up to Montmartre, this time to Notre Dame; I joke that we’ll eventually see all of Paris this way.




Spring was definitely further along in France than in the UK – there were buds on the trees and flowers in bloom on April 1, while things are only getting to that stage in Oxford now. Though Alpine, Grenoble is actually further south than Venice (and it’s not that high, either). It’s situated between three mountain ranges – the Chartreuse, the Vercors, and the Belledonne – but the city itself is somehow completely flat. It would be a perfect place to own a bicycle, something the infrastructure reflected (there were lots of bicycle lanes and paths, as well as miniature bicycle-specific traffic lights at many of the intersections!).

We generally spent the days sightseeing and the evenings at rehearsals and concerts. Our kind hosts had an apartment perfectly located in the center of town, and from there we were able to see and do everything we wanted to accomplish. Our Grenoble highlights definitely were the Bulles, the preserved ancient, underground baptistery at the Musée de l’Ancien Évêché, and the stunning mountain scenery that was there no matter which direction you looked.







We also had a few opportunities to see the surrounding areas of Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, Villard-de-Lans, and Vizille. The first was home to the Grand Chartreuse monastery, with which Ori was familiar and had her heart set on seeing. The sign on the front door said “One doesn’t visit the monastery” (in French), so we contended ourselves with climbing the nearby hill to peek down into it. The second was a skiing resort town where one of the concerts was given, and I went for a small hike during the rehearsal to get some spectacular views of the valley between the mountains. And the third was a small town with an excellent museum (in a château) and some beautiful surrounding gardens.



It was all very nice, and it made for a pleasant respite from our respective jobs. The French food was delicious (I was particularly fond of the pains aux chocolats!), and it was nice to have nearly all of the planning done for us. Passing through Paris also reminded us of the last time we were there, bleary-eyed and each laden with four gigantic bags and two years’ worth of life necessities on our backs, and it put Ori’s slightly heavy/bulky French horn into perspective!



The trip by numbers:

• Maximum speed achieved on a train: 191 mph (307 km/h)
• Maximum altitude: 4,242 feet (1,293 m) en route to Saint Hugues
• Concerts given: 3

(I like this idea and I may try to keep track of other statistics on our other trips.)

Grenoble strikes me as a city that would be a very nice place to live. The only downside would be the overwhelming number of apartment buildings, all of them quite ugly and tall enough to reduce most streetscapes to narrow tunnels with only bits of Alp visible at the ends. Everything else was great: the aforementioned bicyclability, the endlessly fascinating mountains, the smooth and elegant trams, and what seemed like an abundance of cash to spend on making life better for its residents. For instance, there were pansies planted at the bus stops, which means that a city worker has to make the rounds every year or two to plant a new crop. A city trying to save money would certainly opt for something more perennial. And there are even the espaces chien, small fenced-off areas in many parts of the city that are for dogs only, complete with tree stumps and wooden posts for you know what.



And now, with international travel currently jammed throughout parts of Europe and the UK, I’m glad to be back in Oxford with nowhere in particular to go. We took a walk to the Headington Cemetery last evening, hoping for a spectacular ash-intensified sunset, but we were disappointed. Tomorrow, though, we will be going into London to celebrate Ori’s birthday (which is actually on April 18) with a show in the West End and some shopping! We’re excited to use our brand-new Oyster cards.

You can peruse our photos from Grenoble here. I haven’t gotten around to captioning them, but I will eventually.