Dr. Watson Working After Hours

If you want to know how the Watsons spend their dark winter evenings in England, take a look at this video.  It has everything—foreign film (my accent that is), drama and comedy (mostly drama by Alex), inconsistent parenting (again presented by me), and a visual “how to” (by Robert).  Well, see for yourself.

 

Alex and his tooth

Lyana.

Snottingham!

No, that's not misspelled.  Nottingham the city used to be known as Snottingham, but apparently the new kids on the block back several hundred years ago (the Vikings or some other group with a speech impediment) couldn't pronounce the 'S', and eventually it became just Nottingham.

And that is where we went on Saturday.  Lyana was in travel agent mode and found a few interesting places to visit, just an hour and half north.  When the weather gets warmer we plan to return for the Robin Hood festival in Sherwood Forest, but this time we had to settle on driving past at 60mph while announcing to the kids, "Hey kids! Look, we're passing Sherwood Forest!  Look, now, hurry up you're going to . . . Oh, never mind, you missed it."

Humans have inhabited Nottingham ever since the ice age, and the archeologists know this because they have found evidence dating back that far in the vast array of man-made caves beneath the city.  Yes, that's right.  There are over 520 caves under the city, and more are being found every year. We went on a guided tour of the caves.  Here's how we got there.  We parked in the parking garage, went into the mall, took the escalator up a floor, walked down the hall and went into the store, which was actually the entrance to the caves that are beneath the enormous shopping mall. 

So there we were, underground inside this network of sandstone caves.  These caves have been used for centuries, even as late as the 1940s.  Basements of homes, pub storage, tanneries, bomb shelters, secret society club meetings (like my fan club which still meets every Tuesday evening at half past 8). 

Here's that tannery I mentioned.  Not interesting enough for you, eh?  Well, get this.  This is the only known cave tannery  in the entire country (of the UK).  AND imagine you were the poor guy working it.  You know what they soaked the animal skins in?  Well, I can't tell ya, cuz this is a kid-friendly blog, but you can bet your Scottish kilt it wasn't flower petals.

You see there the holes dug into the cave floor. 

Here's a glimpse of possibly a bedroom, or a living room, or a kitchen, or who knows what.  It could have been used for so many different things over the last few thousand years.  Chilling just to imagine the loads of people who crossed these paths.  Often they were were the destitute, poor or infirm would live, including those with leprosy or the plague.

During the tour, we actually stepped outside of the caves and walked around the sides of them, but it was still enclosed within the confines of the foundations of the shopping mall.  There was a bomb shelter there (recreated mind you) and we were humbled to think about why they were needed in the first place and what it might have felt to have to use one.

And what cave exploration wouldn't be complete without a "Pretend to be an archeologist" section.  Here you go kids, don't mind mum and dad, get yourself a shovel and dig in this moist earth.

Look mum, I haven't the slightest idea what this is I'm holding, but I found it in the dirt.

So, from underground we emerged, reentered the modernity of the 1960s shopping mall, jumped back in the van (remembered to pay the parking ticket this time before trying to leave the garage), then headed out to Bruce Wayne's house.  Yup, that's right.  If you've been keeping up with Lyana's facebook (and let's face it, who isnt' these days) you'd know this already.  Unlike the stories you've all heard, Bruce Wayne does not actually live in Gotham.  He lives in Snottingham.  Really, this is the house he lives in in the Dark Knight movie.

There was even a cardboard cutout of Batman to prove it. 

There were also a couple of elephant tusks, but they don't really prove anything.  However, this picture illustrates the amazing fact that these tusks (which are acutally modified) are extremely long - incisors.

So I digress.  Back to the old house used for Batman.  Inside, very cool.  Best part -- it's free (though 2 pounds for parking).

 

This working organ they say was once played by George Handel himself (yes the guy who wrote Handel's Messiah, not to be confused with his cousin, also named George, who owns a taco stand in Wichita).

Here's pinterest for you -- how to display thirty-one hunting musket rifles.

Taxidermy to the max.  Cool, really cool actually (once you got over the creepy factor).

Yeah, still a little creepy.

The finale of our daytrip -- sledging down the hill in front of Batman's house (I can't help saying that).  Next time it snows, I think I'll take a trip up to Nottingham just for the sledging.

It was a long and bumpy ride, not to mention weaving around all the other sledgers.

Mark is the most photogenic person I know.

Next to me of course.

I lied earlier.  Sledging was not really the finale of the day.  In fact, unbeknownst to us, there was still plenty more in store for us.  As everyone know, any good road trip ends with eating out.  We settled on Indian cuisine and found a nice place in Stilton -- excellent Tripadvisor reviews so we knew were in for a treat.  Took a while to figure out what we wanted, and in the end the owner told us he would make us something special.  Little did we know that "Immigration Sting" was on the menu.  A few minutes after ordering, six or seven people in full black gear and bullet proof vests came running (well, more like speed-walking) into the restaurant, some stood guard at the exits and the others went around gathering the work staff into one of the booths.  It was the Border Patrol and (one of them told me) they had a tipoff about this place.  They said it might be a couple hours but we could wait if we wanted.  We didn't.  But I'm hankering to go back -- if it's still open. 

So we went home and got food from Pisces Chinese Take-Away.  And that was the real finale: Orange Chicken on rice.  Mmmmm.

rob

“As I Was Going To St Ives…”

We had BIG plans for Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend since Robert gets three days off in a row without being charged leave. We planned a BIG road trip to Bath/Cotswolds/Stonehenge and the surrounding area. The trouble is—England got snow! Therefore, the base sort of shut down early on Friday, Wales was completely covered in snow, roads were closed, trains were delayed—it would be a big mess if we were going to travel. Until very late at night we were debating whether or not we should go and just stay at the “cabin” by Bath and see if we could brave the cold and explore that area. Anyway, in the morning, we looked at the roads and decided against it, mainly because Bath is near Wales, which was the area hit worse than us AND because we, of course, don’t have snow tires any more here—our van is mostly good for FL, apparently.

Instead, we decided to go to the movies for kids (they have special Saturday showings at 10 am for only $1.60 each), and then to St. Ives, a town just about twenty minutes drive from us.

A few interesting things about St. Ives.

1. The riddle “As I Was Going to St. Ives” does belong to this particular town of St Ives. It was known as far back as the 18th century-and different versions of it, not mentioning St. Ives but using the same idea of multiplying things by seven, go back to the Middle Ages.

2. In 1086 St. Ives, then still called Slepe, was valued at just 16 British pounds ($23). That was in William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, which also recorded the population at just 52 men—nobody bothered to count the women and children.

3. Oliver Cromwell lived in St. Ives as a young man before he became famous. Apparently, he was born in Huntingdon (a town nearby) but St Ives got the statue because when the idea of commemorating him was raised in 1899, his 300th birthday, Huntingdon was still such a Royalist town that they didn’t want the statue and it came to St. Ives instead. He name wasn’t really Oliver Cromwell anyway. His real name was Oliver Williams.

4. St. Ives Monday Market was started in AD 1200 when King John granted a charter for the market to be held in the streets of town.

5. The world’s first pocked calculator, the Sinclair Executive, was made in St. Ives in 1972 by Sir Clive Sinclair in his factory in the Old Mill.

6. The crest of St. Ives is four bulls’ heads, a reminder of the big cattle markets held in the town in the 18th and 19th centuries.

So amazing to live next to this much history!

On the way to St. Ives I read in a guide book about Norris Museum, so we thought maybe we’ll stop by there if we find it. It just so happened that the museum was a few steps from where we parked. And it was free.

Katya and Mark thought, “Why not?”. It’s small (you can see it behind them) it shouldn’t take too long to walk through it.

Robert and Alex were not sure if they were allowed to go in. But they did anyway.

And the first thing that greeted us at the door was this ancient creature.

The museum had a whole bunch of fossils found in the area of Huntingdon/Peterborough.

And I had never seen mammoth hair before.

Considering the fact we just watched “Ice Age-4” that morning, this museum stop was very appropriate.

Apparently, ice skating was a cool thing to do in the 19th century around here.

And we jumped way back to history to Katherine of Aragon’s lace.

As you can read on the description, Queen Katherine is buried right here, twenty minutes from us, in Peterborough. Katya asked me to take these pictures so she could show them to her school teacher because they are right now learning about the Tudors.

This creation was so exquisite! It was made out of bones, and if I remember it right, by prisoners who were in jail up in Peterborough. Not sure where they got the bones to build them.  The museum had a few examples of this kind.

Our visit was maybe thirty minutes long, but we enjoyed it very much. They had some hands on activities for kids and questions/trail to follow as you walk through the rooms (two rooms?).

This is the in courtyard of the museum. I bet it will be beautiful here in the warmer months.

As we walked out of the museum to find a place to eat lunch, we thought about how happy we were that we did not go to Bath. We would have been just frozen and miserable walking around in this moist cold weather. Although it was hovering around zero Celsius, it felt quite a bit colder. Robert felt the coldest.

After a stop at a candy shop, just to get warmed up and because it was on the way AND because we wanted to ask where we can find good food, we got lunch at the local pizza place. It was pretty good, except I thought it had too much cheese! Kids liked it.

On the way back to our car, we took a detour a bit to the Old Bridge, a famous place in St Ives.  The Bridge was built in the 1420s, it has a chapel in the middle. There are only three other bridge chapels in the whole country. And one of our friends told us yesterday, we can check out keys to the chapel from the Norris Museum and go look inside. So we’ll definitely have to come back.

 Swans everywhere.

Run, Mark, run!

The view from the bridge—a very wintery gray day, as you can tell. On the right, you can find a wonderful Tea Room with traditional décor and wonderful sandwiches.

So come visit us! We’ll take you to St. Ives, hopefully when it is warmer.

And in case you forgot the riddle:

As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives, 

Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats, 

Each cat had seven kits: kits, cats, sacks and wives, 

How many were going to St. Ives?

Lyana.

To Illustrate Our Life

I got a very nice camera for Christmas. I am intimidated by it, although Michelle (my sister-in-law and the one who knows about cameras) showed me the basics, I still have a lot to learn about how to take quality pictures. I admit it’s fun to just take pictures with it because it is so fast-haha. Well, these pictures were not taken by me, but they are just fun excerpts from the last two days.

Robert went outside before kids came out, so he could take some pictures of the snow. He got a couple of good shots of the kids through the windows. Katya is in the conservatory playing Legos.

This is what you can find Alex doing half of them time he has free time. He is finishing his third Percy Jackson book now.

Mark is ready for departure to go play in the snow. “I’ll be back soon!”.

Our Japanese fish remind us of our Japanese days.

And this is miracle in itself—Katya decided to do her laundry with out anyone asking her. It’s quite exciting trying to fit as many clothes as you can into that small washer.

And here is Robert’s attempt to capture how cool our stairs are.

Not really. They are just stairs with one crooked bar.

Okay, that’s all for today. Hopefully, I’ll be getting better at pictures sometimes in the near future.

Lyana.