Exams, visits, and a bellyful of arms and legs

Hello from England in late summer, where it is pissing down raining with a princely top of 21 degrees. Fortunately, Mum got a week of really lovely summer weather before we returned to the whinge-worthy stuff going on outside the window now.

Mum arrived the day after exam No.1 and had a bit of a nightmare flight, but recovered pretty well. She only had a few days where she couldn't remember what she'd done. We warmed up with some trips around the lovely surrounds - Kensington Palace Gardens, etc - before graduating to a hike into the city through every beautiful park you could think of, and so on. Actually she must have walked a million miles while here; the problem with our flat is that it is in LONG walking distance of everything you can think of, and it seems a pity not to walk given that it is scenic and extremely flat, so then every adventure has 2 hours of walking added. Oh well.

Mum had been given a list of five hundred places to see by friends and acquaintances, and in fact she did rather well at ticking them off, covering all major galleries and museums in metro London. We also fitted in field trips to Hampton Court, Bath (via Avebury stones - because what better to do with a 6,000 year old stone circle than graze sheep upon same?) and she also went on a solo adventure south to Sissinghurst Castle Garden, former home of Vita Sackville-West. Her pictures looked amazing so I will have to try and get there before we leave. Anyway, she was a very considerate houseguest and made sure to leave me time to study every day, as well as do an exam, which is a pity because I really like excuses not to study! In fact, I was getting much more study done while she was here than I have since because, as is probably obvious to anyone who knows me, I am inherently lazy and need someone standing over me with a big stick to get anything done.

On the subject of exams, exam No. 2 was waaaaaaaaaaay better than No. 1. I didn't spend the next two days freaking out about what I'd failed to put in my answers or anything. If anything, the problem with that one was I was spoiled for choice on question topics, having prepared far too many. Good questions though. You know you are a freak when you are feeling stimulated and challenged and entertained IN AN EXAM. Plan B's increasing bulk meant I had to have a toilet break halfway through, but otherwise a very good exam. Now I just have to get through copyright on Tuesday next week and I am DONE DONE DONE. Slight problem: Notting Hill Carnival with several million attendees expected is happening one block from our house, all long weekend. Conditions for study may not be entirely ideal.

Plan B also had an exam this week; the 21 week anatomical ultrasound. And despite the fact that I was freaked out for roughly two months beforehand (despite having absolutely no reason to be so - I am a walking, talking waste of a low-risk, easy pregnancy) it couldn't have gone better,
really. All baby's bits are exactly where they are supposed to be and doing what they are supposed to do, and we even found out the sex, although people have to beg me if they want me to tell them. The ultrasound tech was much better after the first part, where I was alone waiting with the ultrasound goo stuff all over my belly for Mum and Grant to come in and the tech happily started taking skull measurements from the top (ie no other baby bit visible) until I said..."um, is it alive?" when she promptly started doing a lot more "oo, everything is perfect" stuff. Grant wins awards for his uncanny ability to determine what bit is what (including, according to him, determining sex before it was announced) based on an ultrasound screen, whereas I am forever asking "what's that bit?"

Baby was punching and kicking up a storm which was cool to see, and apparently one of the reasons why I can't feel it is a helpfully anterior placenta, ie baby is punching and kicking the crap out of a nice big cushion on the front side of the uterus, not me directly. Good to know so as not to freak out quite so much as previously. Apparently Plan B will outgrow this soon enough, but I predict that by that point I will go from feeling nothing to being beaten up, if the size of its Donnelly calves were anything to go by.

In conclusion: Plan B is not just a giant bump requiring a total change of wardrobe, it is a baby. I will not however take the step of proving this with the ultrasound pictures because they are somewhat scary looking and might put you off your tucker. And to think that Plan B was so photogenic at 12 weeks!

Grant finishes work today, so I have washed my last business shirt. RAWK! Then we are both unemployed albeit not homeless YET. Post-Tuesday exam we are off to Paris for our anniversary (pregnant and in Paris for our first anniversary is quite a cliche, hey? Unless of course the eleven years beforehand are taken into account), then to Geneva to visit friends, then home for the arrival of Grant's parents. Still busy busy busy!

Update

Roman amphitheatre, St Albans (aka Verulamium)

The public (well OK Robert) demands an update and we shall provide.

First I must note that we are actually having a decent thunderstorm here. Just like home!

Last weekend we spent Saturday (a) at Bayswater dim sum (per usual ritual) and then (b) at Hyde Park at the start of the Tour de France.

It was pretty cool in the sense of being sweltering hot. I managed to see the top of some helmets as they whizzed past and quite a lot of police escorts and assorted support vehicles. The organisers had chosen to couple a particularly disorganised cabling arrangement with this attractive liability-limiting sign:

Which was itself a trip hazard as people were staring at it in puzzlement while staggering over the cables.

On Sunday we decided to get our moderately lazy tourist asses into gear and went to St Albans. In its current incarnation, it's a moderately pretty satellite/commuter town for London. Two thousand years ago, it had a rather grander life as Verulamium, the third largest city in Roman Britain and the one place in the UK you can still see a ruined Roman amphitheatre (above, in all its glory). There are also some ruins of the original city walls, which were built after Boudicca smashed and burned the joint (and Londinium) in the first century AD or thereabouts. After the Romans pulled out, the locals deconstructed the joint for use in their own buildings, hence the fact that most of the older St Albans places are made of flint. It's quite a look actually.


It's polite to refer to this as recycling rather than sacking, and it's nice to know that our ancestors were as environmentally conscious and/or lazy at getting their own damned building materials as this outfit.

The Roman overlords of the town in its heyday clearly had a bit of cash to spend. See rather spiffy mosaic with underfloor heating:


St Albans also has a very classy street market and a belfry constructed around the fifteenth century. Clearly people were both shorter and skinnier then; the stairway up is so narrow that even I had to twist to pass and Grant was basically going up backwards. Possibly a preview of what Plan B is going to be experiencing come January.

St Albans' belfry; observe (a) short doorway and (b) yokel buck-tooth grin and (c) t-shirt, which has now completely given up all hope of covering bump.

Anyway, the belfry managed to combine my fear of heights with my mild claustrophobia very satisfactorily indeed. Good view from the top, too. It used to be a part of a sort of proto-telegraph with signals transferred from the roof to other towers miles away.

St Albans' other jewel is the cathedral, largely made of flint as you might expect. I don't think I've ever seen a bigger church.

The inside was clearly decorated over several different historical periods with a whole lot of available cash and was just beautiful. Very worth a look, especially given that it's a mere hour by train from our flat. Once again, the esteemed guide 25 Best Day Trips from London proves itself to be made of solid gold!

Last week was the usual work/pretend to study deal. Grant made a couple of really nice dinners on the nights I was working, with organic chicken and sustainable organic cod no less.

This weekend we have been hanging around at home mostly. On Friday, Grant's old mountain biking buddy Tyler was in town, and we went out for dinner and to the pub - Prince of Wales, aka Prince of Pubs, natch. This was wonderful actually, as we hadn't been to either the Mexican restaurant or the PoW since the smoking ban came in. The Mexican now not only provides tasty food but also 99% less worries that every breath one takes is damaging one's on-board embryo, and somewhat ironically the beer garden of the PoW has become a smoke-ridden crowded hellhole while the formerly smoky indoors is now a mostly-empty smoke free paradise.

Saturday being yesterday we went into town for TROLLEY DIM SUM!!! (a concept poorly understood in this country but obviously the standard means of offering yum cha in Oz) in Chinatown. It was OK, and nice to see the trolleys like home, but nowhere near as good as Marigold or the other Sydney joints and nowhere near as good as the ordered dim sum at Bayswater, so I guess we should stick with what we know. Then we went a hunting digital TV tuner cards in Tottenham Court Road, then shopping in Oxford Street, unfortunately in the middle of Summer sales. WHOOPS. Grant picked up some jogging shorts (he has started walking/jogging the days he doesn't ride to work) and I gave into necessity and dropped 47 quid on lycra everything. I'm now much more comfortable and have two whole pairs of pants I can wear, and possibly as many as four shirts that don't show overhanging gut! The humorous thing is that when I wear "normal" clothes it isn't obvious that I'm pregnant (just look chunky); when I wear skin tight maternity lycra people offer me fruit juice instead of alcohol and ask solicitous questions about my health. Answer: fine, can I have a beer?

While I am on the subject, boo to Mothercare for selling me jeans previously that appear to lack a basic appreciation for the shape of a pregnant body, specifically it being wider in the middle than at the top and bottom, and of gravity, specifically that clothing will aim for the smallest point and stick there. ONE CANNOT DESIGN JEANS THAT GO AROUND THE BIGGEST POINT OF THE BELLY AND EXPECT A SKINNY ELASTIC TO HOLD THEM UP, MOTHERCARE! Result: elastic cutting person in half through uterus AND pants falling down; quite a double act for a company that specialises in maternity wear. Advice to purveyors of clothing for bumps: one must either go under or over the bump if all one is relying on is a piece of hat elastic. Advice to everyone else: H&M sells decent cheapass lycra for your bump, provided you don't mind a little exploitation of Eastern European/South-East Asian labour.

Last night Bin and Claire were in our neck of the woods visiting a friend, so we all met up in the evening and headed to the Moroccan restaurant in Goldborne Rd, highly recommended as always and damn cheap really. You can stuff yourself with two courses of really decent food for 10 quid; not always true of the W11 postcode.

Aunt Franny is visiting next week, and then Mum is coming in early August. After that we have Grant's parents in early Sept for almost a whole month. Busy. Times. Ahead. It will be so great to see everyone, and show them around our temporary home, though.

Island/Iceland

Hallgrimska, Reykjavik, 12:30am

Over the weekend we had a lovely trip to Iceland. A proper trip, even, namely on of the three or four in my entire life for which I've had to pay for accomodation (what the hell are family and friends for anyway?).

We landed just before midnight on Friday at Keflavik, and from there it was a 40 minute bus ride to Reykjavik ("smoky bay"). As a result, we got to see the sun set. After midnight. And it didn't go all the way down; it just sort of sulked over the horizon. This photo of the main cathedral, Hallgrimska, was taken just as we were walking to our guesthouse, pushing 1am. FREAKY. The sun came back up again a little after 3am which wouldn't have been a problem, except that we had no blinds in our room. Funny how quickly you get used to it though.

I must say I did a kickass job of picking the guesthouse. It was opposite a strip joint and two pubs, two blocks back from the harbour and one from the main shopping strip, and our apartment had a jacuzzi, dishwasher, and washing and drying machines, making the place as a whole roughly 98% more attractive, convenient and awesome than the pixieflat. I miss you guesthouse apartment! Oh, but since Reykjavik's water is geothermally heated, things got a little sulfurous when showering/washing up/having any contact whatsoever with hot water. This I do not miss.

On Saturday we had a wander around Reykjavik, which at 300,000 barely counts as a city by back-home standards. It is really quite pretty; all the old houses are made out of corrugated iron, but with elaborate wooden trims. Note to self: bring true gospel of tarting up tin shacks home. The main shopping strip is nice but quite tourist-directed (albeit blessedly without any of the major European/American chains) and really pushing Icelandic lopi jumpers. These are a little too simple for me to spend 80 euro on, given I could make one with my eyes closed for about a quarter of that, but they were interesting to eyeball anyway. I did actually pick up two balls of thin icelandic wool for about 1/5 of what I've seen anything sold in UK, land of "we pretend we don't have sheep so as to force up the prices." Icelandic wool is tough as an old boot, and I imagine would outwear merino by several hundred years. Might be a little rough on the hands, but we'll see!

During our wander, Grant made a new friend at the sculpture garden near Hallgrimska. Then we headed up the tower of the church itself, which is one of the high points of the city. It was great except that (a) I'm terrified of heights and (b) we went up there just before 3pm without realising what happens in a bell tower on the hour. BELL MAKE BIG NOISE.

Later, we went out on a boat for a whale/puffin-watching adventure, which did indeed include sightings of puffins on Puffin Island (shooting fish in a barrel, as that's where the puffins live at this time of year) but only dolphins, no whales around. Unfortunately dolphins appeared to satisfy there "get a cetacean sighting or get another trip free," or so I gathered from the tour guide's repeated discussion of the dolphins several hours after we had last seen them. The dolphins were, in fact, pretty cool - not like bottlenoses at all.

Later, in commemoration of the puffin sighting, my companions ate a puffin. I demurred.

On Sunday we rented a car to better experience the joys of Iceland. It came with a CD to replace those pesky human tour guides. Once we worked out the suggested route out of town it was quite good. The route was the golden circle, which covers Geysir (the Big One after which all geysers are named), Gulfoss (honking waterfall) and a park called Thingvellir (actually it isn't "Th" it's an icelandic character, the same as for the start of Thor's name, but let's not overtax blogger) where the Icelanders formed the first European parliament.

First stop was a nice lava field:

The dirt is quite black; the green stuff is really thing moss, not grass. Quite an alien landscape. At the instructions of our tour guide CD, we then visited this volcanic crater:

Oo er. We of course had to walk down into it; Grant and Rohan then raced each other back up, because they are both youngest children. And people make fun of my only child status. AT LEAST I WASN'T SCARRED FOR LIFE, people.

OK, next stop. Does my public want geysers? I am going to assume the answer is yes.

This isn't Geysir, which is unpredictable and in fact stopped erupting for a few decades before the 2000 earthquake jogged it back into life. It didn't go up while we were there. This is Geysir's little brother, which kindly shows off every 5 minutes or so. And is pretty blinkiy impressive. Of course, this entire area was rank with sulfur. Probably one of the few places on earth one can fart with impunity.

And this beauty is Gulfoss, a really, really big waterfall.

The first drop is about 11m and the second around 20-30 I think. Water flow is 100 cubic metres per second, so of course they wanted to dam it in the early 1900s. Fortunately, reason prevailed. This things puts out an amazing amount of water vapour. Grant and Rohan then spent some time standing on the edge, etc (Iceland has the same hatred of public safety as the UK, and even better, it's got a lot more dangerous things to refuse to protect people from) - see above re: youngest children.

And on to Thingvellir.

Thingvellir is at the rift between the American and Eurasian continental plates, which are moving apart at a rate of 2cm per year and being nicely infilled with LIQUID HOT MAGMA, which we are sort of standing on in this shot. Behind us is one of the continental walls; I think the edge of the American plate. We are also near the supposed site of the Law Rock, where in the early days of the Icelandic parliament, which was pre-script (backward Vikings), the Law Speaker would recite all the laws then in force. Sounds like a fun job, doesn't it?

On Monday we actually got proper sunshine, but were so wiped out from the adventures of the day before that we mostly mosied about the apartment. We went up in the Perlan for another 360 degree of Reykjavik and a visit to a most peculiar saga museum of Icelandic history (sort of history museum crossed with Madame Tussaud's) and had a wander about the harbour, but that was about it.

Tuesday was our last day, and was spent at Iceland's premier tourist trap, the Blue Lagoon hot bathing springs:

I'm cheating - this is outside the Blue Lagoon, but it's also the only part that is blue so we'll go with it. The hot springs are 37-39 degrees, like a toasty warm bath, and very salty, therefore conducive to a nice float. They also have a nice fake waterfall that will hammer your back and shoulders into submission for you, but which is not, I should add, of quite the same magnitude as Gulfoss. It was tremendously relaxing and exactly the best way to end a lovely holiday. PITY WE THEN HAD TO CATCH A PLANE.

And then we came home sweet home.

In short, visit Iceland!

Oh yeah, and it's not-winter again

It's summer, kids. The veg, they do not lie. The street market is full of these goodies.

Eggplant/aubergine consumed single-handedly over the last fortnight: 4. YUMMMMMMMMM. 2 pretties still in the fridge.

Way of cooking eggplant without half a litre of oil:

Chop up 2 eggplant and boil until almost tender. Dump in baking dish. Mix 400gm tin tomatoes, herbs of choice, and a little salt and sugar; pour over eggplant. Bake 30 mins or so at Gas Mark 5 (what has this country done to me?), I guess about 180 C. Then cover with grated cheddar and a bit of parmesan and bake until melted. YUM.