Windsor Castle

This weekend we visited Windsor Castle.  Buckingham Palace is the Queen's London home.  She also resides in this castle, as well as others throughout Britain.  It claims to be the home of royalty for over 900 years.  For those of you not planning to own a castle some day, this might seem like a lot of pictures.  But for my little nephew Eric: maybe these pictures from a real life castle of a real queen will give you some ideas for your castle.  

 Approaching the castle from the city streets.

 Again, outside the outer castle walls from the city streets.

 Inside the outer wall of the castle; one of the many wings of the caste,

 The Keep of the castle, the innermost portion designed to be the safe place of retreat, if needed, during a battle.  It's surrounded by a moat that has now been turned into a beautiful garden.

 An inner courtyard, not accessible to visitors.

 These window-like structures are where the archers would shoot their arrows.  The wide inner-opening allowed them to shoot from various angles, while the narrow outer-opening protected them from enemy weapons.

 A better view of the moat-now-garden.  Looks like a wonderful place for a walk!  If only i were a royal...

 St. George's Chapel, the place of worship at Windsor.  We attended a service here.  The music was absolutely beautiful.  We really enjoyed it!

 Another view of the chapel.

We seem to have our best luck with pub food.  This pub, The Three Tuns, is the oldest building associated with Windsor still standing.  There are passageways (now closed) leading from this pub to the castle.  These passage ways were used by King George (I think?  I'm getting all these kings confused) to visit his mistresses. Not only was it a place of historical significance, the food was quite good - a traditional roast dinner with our first taste of Yorkshire pudding.

Oxford

Today we went to Oxford.  What a great place!  Oxford is composed of several different collages such as New College and Christ's Church College.  The colleges are where the students eat and sleep.  Each student has an assigned tutor, and this tutor is a fellow of their college.  Each college has it's own library and sports teams.  I believe the lectures are all held in common lecture halls, however, and there is a common testing center.  The earliest students began studying at Oxford as early as 1066 ad, or so, when the English students attending the French universities were forced back to England due to a conflict between the English and the French.  The buildings and architecture there are beautiful and the history of the place is quite inspiring.

Christ's Church College.  The dining hall here was the inspiration behind the Harry Potter dining hall in the movies.  It was closed when we got there so we didn't get to go inside, but the outside was beautiful enough!

Many of the colleges are built around these "quadrangles", or grassy inner courtyards.  The earliest students were aristocratic Normans and not much liked by the Saxon villagers.  Many students died at the hands of the villagers, so the setup of the colleges with the buildings surrounding this quadrangle was designed to protect the students.  I believe this is the quadrangle of New College.

 
Some scenes from Harry Potter were filmed in this college.  You may recognize the corridor above.

An Oxford Street.  Love the architecture!

This was my highlight of the trip.  The Eagle and Child was the pub where CS Lewis and his friends and colleagues (including J R R Tolkien) met on a weekly basis for over 20 years, discussing their literary works and ideas, and otherwise philosophizing together.  Oh, how I would have liked to be a fly on the wall!  We ate dinner here.  The food was pretty good and the atmosphere was fun, a good, old fashioned English Pub.

 Yesterday was our anniversary.  Two years!  I came home to these, so beautiful!

 DJ took me to dinner at this restaurant.  The food was delicious!  Seriously, amazing.  Supposedly traditional English food, but all our waiters had French accents, so we're a little suspicious.

And we finished our anniversary celebration with a walk through Hyde Park.  Aren't these flowers beautiful?!      What a perfect night :)

Today I am grateful for two things:
1. Hot Showers.  Our boiler has been out for the past couple days (on it's way out since we got here) and so   our showers have been a little chili (ice cold chili, to be exact).  The boiler fixer guy came yesterday and today I had my first hot shower in three days!!!  What a wonderful experience :)

2. House Cleaning Services.  Yes, that's right, this apartment comes with house cleaning services.  Once a week someone comes in and cleans our whole apartment, changes our sheet (I'm beside myself with joy) and our towels, takes out our garbage, and brings us more toilet paper.  Saturday mornings will feel so empty without our weekly chores!  I guess we'll have to spend more time sight seeing.  What a treat!

I'm almost done with my first week on the job and I think I'm going to really love this experience.  My colleagues have been very nice and welcoming.  My leader seems great so far, and the project I will be working on seems very interesting.  And did I mention that it's in London?  Yeah, it's going to be a fun 8 months.

While I have been at work DJ  has been exploring the city, finding reasonably inexpensive places for us to buy things here in the city.

30 pounds for all of this!  If you've lived in London, you understand why this is blog-worthy.  Now we can make chocolate chip cookies!  

With only one small wardrobe, we needed a little extra storage for our clothing.  DJ bought and assembled this nice little "wardrobe".  Now we can finally fully up-pack!

My gym arrived in the mail today!!!  Last week, DJ and I went exploring to see where the best gym would be to join.  We discovered a very disappointing fact - none of the gyms open here before 6:30!  We ordered this spin bike in the mail for less than the cost of 8 months gym membership.  My mr. handy man put it together for me.  Good thing we have a spacious bathroom - now it will be a bathroom/gym room.  For our prospective visitors - don't worry, I'll be done working out before you even get up. 

Monday night we went for a walk to a park near our house called Holland Park.  It was beautiful, more like a nature preserve than a park.  You really felt like you were out of the city and in the middle of nature (hence DJs wide smile :)  )

Home is where the heart roast is.  Apparently England is the home of roast and potatoes.  That's a custom we don't mind complying with. 

Sunday evening walk in Hyde Park.  So pretty.

This is the church building for the Hyde Park ward, our ward while we're here in London.  It's about a mile and a hald walk from our home.  This is also the visitor's center for the church in London.

We slowly getting settled into our house and it feels good to begin to get closer to normalcy.  We finally have more in our cupboards than crumpets and honey so we can start to cook at home now.  The grocery stores here are different - it took us a while to adjust.  The food is definitely more expensive, but they also have more specialty foods here that are harder to get, and even more expensive, in the states.  It's going to be fun to experiment and try different foods here.  

Today we went and explored the Tower of London.  The first portions of this castle were build in 1066, though it was expanded and added on by many monarchs through the years.  It was the primary royal residence until 1547 or so, and it is the home of many a prisoner and is famous for it's beheadings of traitors and enemies to the King (including his own wife, at times). 

Stephanie, I thought Eric might appreciate these pictures, as I know he plans to own a castle some day :-p

 Inside the outer wall of the castle

 The crown jewels are housed at London Tower, inside this building where the guard stands.  An interesting fact I did not know - all of the royal crowns and jewels were destroyed during the British civil war in 1649.  The monarchy regained control of Britain in 1660  Most of the oldest pieces in the collection date back to Charles II, who ordered the replacement and recreation of most of the pieces that were lost during the revolution.  The crowns in this collection are incredible - bedazzled and full of sparkle and very large precious stones and diamonds. One of the crowns was so heavy, the queen had it carried ahead of her because she couldn't bear the weight of it on her head!

 Traitor's gate - originally intended for the receipt of supplies into the fortress, it became known as traitor's gate because so many alleged traitors were brought in for their beheading through this gate.

 The castle gates, shown behind DJ, are original.  Can't you just picture Robin Hood escaping through the castle door, just in the nick of time, as the gate slams to the ground behind him?

A heavy castle door - I picture it being stormed by several strong men, using a huge post to ram and weaken the holding. 

Dinner afterward - good ol' American BBQ.  All this sight seeing makes us hungry!

 We explored Hyde Park yesterday.  The outer rim is about 4.5 miles around.  There are really beautiful flower gardens and all sorts of fields and paths.  We only live a block up from the park.  I have a feeling we will go here often, and I'm looking forward to it!  Our church building is just on the opposite side of the park from us - Sunday walks in the park on the way to church, what could be better?

 This is a private residence in the park - maybe a gardner? I'm pretty sure I lived in this house at one point in one of my childhood dreams.  What a perfect little English cottage!

King William the III?  I think?  Pretty sure I lived in this house, too, probably when I was reading a Jane Austin book and dreaming about marrying Mr Darcy ;)  Now I have Lord Shelton - even better!

Morning run in Hyde Park.

We took a double-decker bus last night to meet one of Michelle's MBA friends for dinner.  We went to Brick Lane, a street in east London full of Indian restaurants.  It was good Indian food, but the experience was definitely different.  Each restaurant will send a person out on the street to try to lure customers in.  All you have to do is look in their general direction and they will pounce.  We were promised free drinks and 20% off.  Next time I'm going to bargain for free Naan and 30% off - whoever can promise me that has my patronage!

We finally got into our apartment today!  Wahoo!!! What a relief to be out of hotels and to begin to unpack.  We started the day a little groggy.  Even though we went to bed at 9 pm local time, we were lucky to get up before 8:30 am.  We finally forced ourselves out of bed, went to the hotel gym, cleaned up and checked out.  After a stop at the bank to open an account we ventured to our new home.  The rest of the day was spent finding the essentials - grocery stores, etc.   The video above shows a quick tour of our new abode.  Small, but comfortable enough.  Just a few trips to the store for some additional storage and I think we'll be set!

  Today we had to set up our bank account.  It happened that the branch we went to was right next to London tower.  Today we just toured the outside, can't wait to go inside and hear the stories inside these walls.  Pretty cool!

 Tower Bridge.

 When is England, do as the English do - our first taste of crumpets.  Yummy :)

We found a street with a familiar name - Cooper Street!

It seems the first step out the door is always the hardest.  It is your last look at everything that you are leaving behind, everything that is familiar and comfortable, and everything that you will be missing over the coming months. Then you take your second step, and then your third, and slowly the path before you begins to unfold and you realize that the future is exciting and worth the sometimes painful beginnings.


We flew out to NY Sunday morning, April 23rd, to begin our 8  month journey abroad.  Michelle worked in the Three World Financial Center tower for two days while DJ finalized the last details to prepare for our trip (stuff like porting our Sprint numbers to Google Voice and all that smart tech-y stuff).  New York was freezing cold, but we did find some time to enjoy some yummy Mexican food and, of course, DJ's beloved Shake Shack.  Michelle had several successful networking sessions, including meetings with two separate senior vice presidents - definitely a trip well spent.

Here are some of DJ's adventures in NY while Michelle was hob nobbing with the VPs:

 New World Trade Center building - impressive progress since we were living there.

 September 11th memorial pools.  You can't tell from the pictures, but that water is falling 30' into the pool below.

 Tulips in NY?  Who knew!  Red is a nice complement to the concrete.

 The building where George Washington was inaugurated president.

Tuesday afternoon we left for the airport for an all-night flight to London.  Michelle caught a little sleep, but poor DJ didn't sleep a wink, taking full advantage of the free movies on the flight to pass the time.  We landed this morning, Wednesday, at 9 am London time, 2 am Salt Lake time.  We got to our hotel around 11 am, settled in for a few minutes, then ventured out to get to know our new home.  Here are some of our adventures on our first day.

Buckingham Palace - the Amex office is right down the street, so Michelle will practically be neighbors with the Queen.  She's just waiting for her first invitation to tea.  I'm sure it won't be long...

Statue in front of Buckingham Palace.  At first we thought it was cool, but then we realized there are statues all over London of people and things that have no significance to us as Americans - the one behind me included :)

 Whoever said London was just like NY was totally WRONG!  It's nothing like New York.  It's cleaner, the buildings are shorter and you can see more blue sky, and there are parks and flowers and green life all over the place!  It's wonderful.  You can't see it very well, but behind us is a beautiful garden of spring flowers - quite lovely!

 Big Ben.

 Big Ben - again.

Westminster Abby.  You have to pay 18 pounds to get in.  Wonder if it's free on Sundays?  We might give it a try.

Two happy Americans in a new city, ready for lots of adventures ahead!  Stay tuned to hear more!

Well, it's almost 7 pm London time, which means you Salt Lakers are just sitting down to lunch.  DJ is going on 30+ hours without sleep.  We're both fighting the urge to fall asleep.  One more hour and we can go to bed almost in line with normal hours and adjust to this new time zone.  Hope we make it - DJ keeps falling asleep mid-sentence!

We miss you all and hope you will keep in touch with us as we journey on this adventure across the world!! :)