Please excuse our bliss

We haven't blogged about our travels for quite some time, and aren't likely to again until the new year because frankly we are too enraptured with the stone cottage we're staying in at Beynac-et-Cazenac (in southern France) and its environs.  We actually don't feel like doing mundane things like... oh... taking time to describe the places we've visited and the things we've done here.  Words fail us.  It is a magical place. 

The Dordogne Valley, with the Chateau de Beynac on the right.  They're our next-door neighbors.

 The Chateau.  If you've seen the movie "Ever After" with Drew Barrymore and Dougray Scott (not very good, but tame enough), then here is where they filmed the scene where Prince Henry "rescues" Danielle from the evil Baron.

View down the Dordogne River from the Chateau.  That's the parish church in the foreground, the bells of which wake us up every morning at precisely 7am because we live about 30 feet away from them.

Q and I stroll down the cobblestone pathway to La Maisonnette (i.e., our cottage).  It's the sunlit little cottage on the right.  That's the Chateau wall on the left.

 The facade of La Maisonnette.  Gorgeous.

One especially misty morning, I woke up and saw this view out the TV room window.  Too wonderful to let pass.

 Ground floor at La Maisonnette.

 This is the view from the bathtub.  Not the bathroom, mind you.  The bath TUB.  How could one not love this place?

Celebrity Stalkers

So, in case you're interested in knowing if we've run into any celebrities, here's my tally so far:

** Prince Philip, as he got out of a helicopter in Kensington Gardens and walked into the Palace.

** Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, being driven by her chauffeur out of Kensington Palace.

** Jude Law, in the staircase of Liberty of London, and also in the 4th floor Christmas Shoppe at Liberty. He said "Excuse me" as he squeezed by.

** Sean Bean, eating noodles at Wagamama. He was at the table right next to us. (We were eating the delectable raisukaree, my favorite.)

** Jonny Lee Miller, who passed us on the sidewalk just a few minutes after we left Wagamama. He was wearing extremely awesome glasses.

** Jamie Dornan, on the Tube. I still have no idea who he is, but the students I was with flipped out and got their photo with him.

Some of our students ran into Chris Hemsworth in the local gelato joint. They got their photo with him, natch. They also went to the Les Miserables premier and spoke with and had their photo taken with Hugh Jackman and Helena Bonham-Carter, as well as seeing Prince William. Ditto for The Hobbit premier and Richard Armitage.

I would never, under any circumstances, approach a famous person for conversation, autographs or photos. (No judgment on those who would.) But every time I've seen a celebrity, everyone around them is either staring at them or pretending not to stare at them, and all I can feel in such a situation is abject pity at how deeply horrible it must be to go through life like a well-dressed animal in a zoo.

Still. Jonny Lee Miller's glasses truly were incredibly awesome. Good call, Jonny.

St. Paul's was designed by Christopher Wren

CQH has known this fact for several years now, thanks to Miroslav Sasek.  But there's nothing like actually being in St. Paul's and immersing one's self in Wren's abundance of magnificence.  Unfortunately there is no photography allowed inside St. Paul's, so I was limited to outside pics.

 EBH and I walked to the very top, past the Whispering Gallery and past the external Stone Gallery at the base of the dome. This is now on top of the dome, looking down.  Through that (hopefully very thick and secure) piece of plexiglass you can see the sunburst mosaic on the cathedral floor, 225 feet below.  I'm actually between the inner dome and the outer dome here, and it was a little freakish to think that when you're down on the floor looking up into the dome, there could well be someone up there looking right back at you.

This is the highest the public can go at St. Paul's.  E was delighted.  It's called the Golden Gallery, and it's a very narrow external walkway at the top of the dome, with only those railings to prevent someone sliding down the outside of the dome and plunging to their certain death 280 feet below.

See?

But the views!  Ah, the views.  Here is the rather uninspiring "Shard"--that glass pyramid skyscraper in the background--but I can forgive even its monstrosity when it's subsumed into a view like this.

 Just around the corner, looking west down the Thames toward the London Eye and Westminster.  It had been a glorious, sunny winter day, and we got to the top right before sunset.  Couldn't have been more picturesque.

 And on our way home, a stop by the front steps, made famous by the old lady in Mary Poppins: "Feed the birds, tuppence a bag."

Yuck, yuck, yuck.

Last week, CQH had surgery on her ears. She had her ears pierced while we were in Australia in August, and impressed us with her totally unfailing responsibility in keeping her ears cleaned and cared for. She did everything right: cleaning her ears twice daily with the healing spray from the spa where she had her ears pierced, turning them regularly, leaving them alone, etc. There wasn't even a hint of a problem. She was allowed to change her earrings at Halloween, two months after they'd been pierced. Well, Halloween came and we took her earrings out, but her ears were so oozy and unhealed that we decided they needed more time, and we put the original earrings back in for a couple more weeks. At Thanksgiving, we changed out the original earrings for some cute "decorative" earrings. This is where the trouble started.

CQH said it hurt when we changed the earrings and kind of flipped out about it, so I told her that as long as she kept spraying the new earrings and twisting them, it should be fine, and that she could now wear these cute sterling silver earrings of bunny silhouettes all the time -- you know, simply switching out the original earrings for the cute ones, but keeping the same regimen. Oh, dear.

I guess maybe there's something about the earrings they do the piercing with that is more helpful for healing(??). We couldn't get the earrings out of her ears. The wound had oozed so much and crusted on there (is this the grossest blog post you've ever read, or what?) and we figured that the earrings were just sort of glued on there. LBH tried to clean them for her several times over several days, but each time she was flipping out and we just thought she was from outer space or something. After several cleaning sessions over several days, we could finally see that she'd lost the backs of both earrings and the crusty glue was so strong that we still couldn't get the earrings out of her ears, despite them having no backs. We just couldn't figure it out; it was so bizarre. A couple days later the mystery was solved -- quick as a wink, her earlobes had closed over the back clasps of both her earrings, eaten them up like a venus flytrap or something. We couldn't get the earrings out of her ears because the earrings were still clasped... only the clasps were now inside her earlobes where they couldn't be seen. It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen or heard of.

Four very tiresome trips to the hospital later, Catherine had surgery* -- complete with general anesthesia -- to remove the earrings. She now has stitches on her earlobes that, ironically, look like earrings if you don't look too carefully. She can get her ears pierced again when her ears are fully healed. Think she'll want to? Maybe... but I'd guess not for many, many years to come.

Poor traumatized kid!

*Socialized medicine isn't efficient, but it was completely free! And the surgeon said he's done thousands of this identical surgery and hates pierced ears for just this reason. In fact, the girl in the bed next to CQH, who had surgery right before her, had the exact same surgery. Who knew?

I don't think that's... (ahem!)... "history." (PG-13)

 We promised the girls at the start of this trip we would stop and ride any carousel we come across.  We'd seen this one on our first visit to the Natural History Museum in London back in October, but didn't have time to stop right then.  And then on the next visit it was a Sunday after church.  And then the next visit it wasn't open.  So this time we made a special excursion back, mainly just to ride the carousel.  What we didn't know was that it was a FAST carousel that spun so quickly we were almost thrown off, adding greatly the excitement (and making it difficult to get a photo where we aren't a crazy blur).  H sat this one out, and manned the camera.

All the public museums in London have free admission, which we think is astonishingly wonderful.  There are many things about Big Government we don't care for, but free admission to museums and galleries isn't one of them!  This is the entrance atrium, and the museum itself spreads out in all directions from here.  "Dippy" the brontosaurus skeleton is a local celebrity.

The other end of the atrium, with a lovely reproduction "Bridge of Sighs" spanning the entrance.

This is what I'm talking about re: the title of this post.  In the "Human Biology" section we stumbled upon this rather realistic life-size cutaway diorama (it's not an illustration, it actually is in 3-D).  Now Catherine has had "the talk" and wasn't all that surprised.  Totally embarrassed?  Absolutely.  But not surprised.  Elinor, on the other hand....  Well, we just turned her around and said, "Oh look over here, Elinor!  More dinosaurs!"  I guess it's "history" in the sense of it being the way we all got here (except IVF babies), but totally NOT what we were expecting at the museum.    

 The life-size blue whale model is rather impressive.  And rather large.

The girls want to try ice-skating while we're here, and there are any number of temporary rinks set up in lovely, historic locales (including the Natural History Museum, Hampton Court, Somerset House, Hyde Park, etc.)  Their enthusiasm was only slightly dampened by seeing people fall on the ice.  Last time I skated, about twenty years ago, I could stay up just fine, but I don't like skating.  It's a futile exercise that, at best, makes you cold and sore.

 On the Tube back to the flat, I was lucky to snap this pic.  It kind of sums up C's and E's relationship.  They're holding hands, but one of them is attacking the other at the same time.

Two things

We went to the Portobello Road Market one Saturday and fell in love with this old painting in one of the antique dealer stores.  So we bought it as our one Christmas gift to each other.  It's called "In the Shade" by the English artist Sidney Pike, and is from 1873.  He's not a really well-known artist, but he exhibited with the Royal Academy from 1880-1901 so he's not a complete amateur either.  He did this painting when he was in his late 20s, before he became not-quite-famous.  But the bottom line is that we're not really art collectors in any serious kind of way, so we don't really care who did it.  We just love it for what it is, and will hang it in our home when we get back.

Totally unrelated photo.  E and a student ham it up in our flat.

Jane Austen takes a (trip to) Bath

 CQH had appointments at the hospital, so she and I stayed behind in London while EBH and HDH went with the group to Chawton (i.e., Jane Austen's house) and Bath.  (C and I visited the Courtauld Gallery in London instead, which was delightful.)  But as you can tell, it was a cold morning, with hard frosts all across the south of England.

 Jane Austen's writing desk.

 The Jane Austen House.  H later reported that it really was a bit of a disappointment.  Almost none of the furniture in the house was Austen's.  In fact, almost nothing in the house now ever belonged to Jane Austen.  It was more of a "this is the kind of vase a contemporary of Jane Austen's may have put flowers in" kind of place.

 Then on to Bath.  I don't know what this is called (a "sedan chair," perhaps?) but I want one, along with the servants to carry me around in it.  Or more importantly, the wealth and leisure time to be so lazy.  Hmmmmm.

Bath has a fashion museum.  Here's one little girl totally in her element.

 And again.

 And again.

 Grocery stores don't look like this in the US.  Not even in Vegas.

 The bath at Bath.

It was a really cold day.