Landscapes at the RA

I noticed that there was an exhibition showing at the Royal Academy of Constable, Gainsborough and Turner, three massive names in English art, and some of my favourite landscape artists.  So I was always going to go along.  Though now having been, I wish I had read the Guardian's review of it before going.  There were a lot of engravings, and not many landscape paintings.  The engravings were of the 3 masters' paintings, I just kind of wished that they had the paintings instead.  It was cool to see engravings of places we have been here, like the peaks district and Wales.  It was just a bit disappointing that there weren't more of the 3 main guys.  I thought the Royal Academy would have had the sway to demand these paintings when they want to exhibit them, but perhaps they don't have the same power they used to.

It was interesting to visit the building though, as unknown to me there are about 6 royal academies in the same set of buildings, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and they all share the same courtyard.

New Years in Florence

Sunset over the Ponte Vecchio

We had a great few days in Florence in the New Year.  On our flight out we were thinking, great maybe we'll get a few days of sunshine now.  But to be fair on London, I don't think their weather is all that bad compared to other European cities.  I just think the British talk about it more, and perhaps other cities have a better PR machine.

David and David outside the Town Hall - with his clown gloves

The Duomo, Baptistry and Bell Tower - pre-tourist time

I was surprised with how full Florence was, I guess I was thinking, why would you visit Tuscany in winter, when it is all about sunflowers, and olive oil and sitting on hills drinking wine.  But apparently it isn't all cultural stereotypes.  Though since it was so busy, it did mean that everything was open, and we got to see a few things we hadn't seen the last times we'd visited.  We also ate a surprising amount of gelato given how cold it was.  I guess Italian gelato is an all-weather food.

We went for a few runs around the city, which I always enjoy in these old, compact towns, since you can see most of the sights in one run, and there aren't thousands of tourists milling about.  Though since it was still early January, there wasn't a lot of light around.

The interior of the Duomo

The Duomo in the twilight

We managed to get inside the Duomo, just before closing time, so we didn't have to pay for a ticket, but we got to see the dome, which I don't think I had seen before.  I wasn't expecting something so colourful, or the almost 3D effect achieved, as if the people were about to step out of the dome.  Quite impressive.  Though we didn't get too much time to enjoy it as the guards started to herd the tourists out.  Since it was about 5pm at this time, and the sun had long since set, it was time to admire the facade in the twilight instead.  That church really is quite pretty, in all lights.

This time round we also got to visit Santa Croce, which is the really sacred church in Florence, you would think it would be the Duomo, but all the big names are buried in Santa Croce.  It has these incredible chapels inside, where the walls and ceilings are all painted.  They were really pretty.

There are also three statues to Dante in and around the church, though he isn't buried here, and I'm still not sure just how much the Florentines like him.  Since they have given the statues rather funny nicknames, one of them they call Dante on the toilet and there's also one where he is scratching himself.  Not super respectful.

Dante scratching himself - outside Santa Croce

Inside this church there is also a leather workshop, which seems like an odd mix.  Apparently the Franciscan friars running the church wanted to give orphans something to do after the second world war.  Though after having smelt the leather preparation process, I'm not so sure if that was a really generous thing to have done.  But now you can watch the artisans make wallets and handbags, and spend far too much money on belts.

In the grounds there is quite a plain little chapel, designed by Bruneschelli, who is the guy who made the Duomo. What is slightly freaky about this church is that the night sky pictured in the dome is exactly the same as the night sky in another church in Florence.  These two churches were built at the same time, by completely independent families, and yet they managed to chose exactly the same date for their skies.  It is thought that this was the date that Rene of Anjou, the King of Naples and the father of Margaret of Anjou, visited Florence.  I really liked this little chapel, tucked in beside the much grander Santa Croce, it had great lines.

July 4th 1442 - the sky in the Pazzi Chapel

The Bruneschelli designed Pazzi Chapel

This visit was definitely a visit of the churches, since we also managed a trip into San Marco.  This is a church and convent together.  You can take a look into each of the cells, and they all had a painting on the wall, kind of like early versions of posters.  Though here there was only one band, Jesus.  This church is also famous because it was where Fra Angelico lived and there are a lot of paintings by him, in the cells and in the chapel there's a great altar-piece.

I really like Florence's embrace of technology in their museums here.  So this altar-piece had been scanned into a computer, so you could zoom in on the picture, and find out about every bit of the painting, which was pretty cool.

As well as this monk there was also Savonarola who was this fiery guy who got excommunicated by the pope and preached against corruption and despotic rule and managed to get the Medici kicked out of rule, which is impressive given their power.  Unfortunately you can't mess with the Medici and get away with it, so Savonarola was eventually tortured, burned and hanged and his ashes were scattered in the Arno.  There is a painting of this event in the church, as well as the horse hair shirt he used to wear and his self-flagellating whip.

Santa Croce in the dawn light.

View from a Tuscan village on the way to Greve

We also managed a few trips out of Florence, which was great, since the last times we have been to the city we haven't managed to see much of the rest of Tuscany.  So we made a day trip out to Greve, which is the centre of the Chianti region, though we didn't drink any Chianti, which perhaps we should have.  I'm actually keen to try this Brunello wine they make, it seems to be the Italian wine to drink, at least it is by far the most expensive one, whether that makes it the best is debatable.  I'll have to keep an eye out for it in our local wine shop and see how it compares to Rioja (my current favourite).

Tiny village in the Chianti region

Anyway Greve was a great little village, with this super cute town square, as well as shops selling just cheese and meat products, with added massive stuffed boar out the front.  That was a major hit.  We stopped off on the way up there, at this tiny little town, it was literally just a 300m round path, with all the houses coming off it, and a church at the edge.  It was classic Tuscan.  And the weather was great, which always helps.

The main square in Fiesole

The mist over Florence with the great day above it

We also went out for a walk in the hills surrounding Florence.  Apparently the Italians are even better than the British about the rights of way.  In that you are theoretically allowed to walk anywhere, fences should be no obstacle to walkers as they are allowed to go wherever they want.  We didn't quite manage to experience this though.

Just above Florence is Fiesole, so we headed off there, this village is 240 m above Florence, and you can see it from most places in Florence.  Especially the very characteristic tower with the square crenellations.  When we were in Florence it looked like a terrible day, very foggy, and almost raining.  But as we climbed up towards Fiesole it became clear that it was just Florence that was covered in cloud, and once you had climbed out of it, it was actually a really nice day.  I was almost thinking I should have worn sunscreen, until I remembered it was January, in Europe.

There were heaps of these shrines all through the country-side

From Fiesole we headed into a forest, and this is where the walk turned bad.  Mainly because of the book we were following.  Never use the Sunflower walking books. If the one we had is any measure of the average standard, then I wonder if any one in the whole place has ever actually been walking. I really thought at some points we were about to either be arrested or shot, just because we were so obviously in places we shouldn't have been.

We head into the forest from Fiesole and the book tells us to start counting wooden benches, bad sign that!  From then on we had no idea where we were meant to go, or which was the correct path.  Luckily we could see Florence at all points, so we were never worried about not making it home, I'm just glad we didn't try to do a harder walk, we would still be there now, lost somewhere in the Tuscan hills.  The first thing I did upon reaching civilisation was chuck the book in the bin, so nobody else would have the misfortune of using it.

Now the walk was actually pretty good, the first part of it anyway, with no thanks to the book.  We leave Fiesole, past Frank Lloyd Wright's house (he was an architect who lived in Fiesole in 1910) and into the forest where we climbed Monte Ceceri which is 414m high.  This area is famous because it's where Leonardo da Vinci attempted his first flight, there is even a plaque to this feat at the top of the mountain.

The Arno in the dawn mist

The frescoes inside the Santa Croce

From the top of the mountain it really started to get sketchy, we managed to cross a low fence and carry on.  But at some point we had to get back across this same fence.  Unfortunately it had at this point grown into this massive 3 metre high construction, with multiple strands of barbed wire on the top.  I managed to just squeeze through the gate, but Dave had no chance.  It was very obvious that we weren't where we were meant to be, and at this point we could hear a truck approaching.  I was sure it was going to be some farmer with a shotgun who would call the police on us or something, so I was getting a little desperate at this point.  It was just lucky that whoever had constructed this fence had been quite lazy, and only made a little span between two rivers.  It was possible to follow the fence down, through blackberry bushes, into the river and then back out the other side.  Which is what Dave had to do, all the time with the sound of this truck getting closer and closer and me getting more scared.

Once out, we walked about 10 metres down the road, only to discover the shotgun wielding farmer's truck was actually a garbage truck.  At this point we decided to give up on the absolutely hopeless book, so we end up basically following this garbage truck back down to Florence, luckily it turned off at some point, and we walked back through some fields.

More Duomo goodness

It was actually a pretty good walk for most of it, I would definitely do more walking in the hills, just using a different company's books, and perhaps with some topographical maps and a compass.

Our final excursion from Florence was to Lucca.  Which is this completely walled town about 30 minutes drive from Florence.  The walls were amazing, I'm going to assume these are similar to what Florence used to have, but they were incredibly wide, maybe 100 m wide at some parts, and really tall.  You would have had a hard job attacking the city with those defending against you.

Inside the city, because there was very limited space, everyone was living on top of themselves.  It had a feeling quite like Venice, since there weren't many cars allowed inside the walls.  Pedestrians ruled the streets, which I always like.

It must be one of the only Italian cities with a round square.  Instead of the usual square piazzas, this one used to be a Roman amphitheatre, and people had converted the outside bit into houses, leaving the oval bit in the middle as their piazza.  Hard to capture in a photo, but kind of cool.

Not all that it seems

Again there were a lot of churches, they really do love their church, the Italians.  There was one really cool one which had this incredible facade, but then, the facade was about three times as high as the building, so when you walked around the side, you could see that the frontage was just that, only frontage.

With the amount of old stuff we had seen, it really makes you wonder how they can afford to look after it all.  I mean this stuff must need constant conservation and restoration.  How do they make the decision as to which stuff to save and which stuff to just abandon to it's fate?

The round square in Lucca

Rowan Atkinson in something that wasn't Mr Bean

We saw Rowan Atkinson in a play the other week, we really only went to see the play because of him. It was called Quatermaine's Terms, and was written in the 1980's about a group of teachers at a foreign language school in the 1960's.  Basically it was about the loneliness of the British due to their inability to communicate anything like feelings or emotions to other people.  Rowan Atkinson played a character kind of similar to Mr Bean if you imagine Mr Bean being able to speak and having to hold down a job, with less of Mr Bean's exhuberance.  It was a pretty depressing play as this Rowan Atkinson character removed himself more and more from the surrounding teachers.

Rowan Atkinson was really good in it, his character was in nearly all of the scenes so he had to be pretty good, even though he was kind of peripheral to everything.  It's good to see him in something other than comedies, as he's pretty good.

Brussels

A war memorial - with surprisingly few wreaths for Armistice Day

A visit to Belgium was always going to contain a day in Brussels, that's pretty much a given.  I was hoping that after the lack of museums in Bruges that Brussels would more than make up for that, I mean it is the home of the European Union as well as the capital of the country.  Sadly I didn't plan for Armistice day, that day is huge in Belgium, well no, actually it's incredibly low-key, but everything is shut for it.  Not a single, solitary, scrap of a museum was open.

There did seem to be an awful lot of scouts around, all in shorts, even though it was freezing.  They seemed to be on some sort of treasure hunt, and were constantly forming circles and performing weird callisthenics in the middle of them.

The main square in Brussels, with some great, but closed, buildings

Another great building

I didn't realise this, but Belgium is a really young country, only forming in 1830.  Apparently when they formed they decided that they wanted a king, so they kind of just ended up asking some relative of Queen Victoria to be their monarch, which seems a strange way to chose a king.  They could have gone with straight democracy, but no, I guess they thought they couldn't be trusted with their own governance.  You do wonder if they made the right choice in starting this dynasty, since only their second king was responsible for the brutal repression of the Congolese.

I was hoping for massive wealth in the city, since it is home to one of seats of the European Parliament, Council of the EU, the European Commission and the European Council.  I'm not sure why there needs to be four different bodies, which superficially look like they would do the same thing.  The public servants who work for the EU also get paid really well, it's a bit of a bone of contention at the moment, what with the austerity going around, that the EU seems a bit immune from that.  Despite the public edifices, and the vast numbers of well paid EU public servants, Brussels still felt quite poor in parts.  Especially around the main train station, which is pretty much universally dodgy in cities, but it felt worse than most cities.  What is it about the main train station and dodgy people.  Sydney has it, Paris has it, Brussels, I could go on.  Though I don't think London has it.  I'm not sure which station I would classify as their main one, Kings Cross, Paddington, Euston?  None of those feel dodgy at all.

The most famous resident of Brussels

It seems in Brussels though that the EU public servants keep their money to themselves in the European Quarter, which we didn't really get into, only on the periphery, and it felt rich.  But on the other side of the road, it was a different story.  That's not to say it was all poor, there were some nice boulevards, and the roads were all pretty good.  In fact the zebra crossings were pretty impressive, being made from different coloured marble, rather than just lines painted.

It seems that the most famous resident of Brussels is a small, 60 cm statue of a boy peeing into a fountain.  He really is quite small, for something that causes such a fuss.  Apparently they dress him in costumes, and he has a wardrobe of 800 outfits.  Too bad when we visited his clothes were being dry cleaned.  I'm not even sure what the story behind the statue is, nobody seems to know.

Hampstead in Winter

The street up to the heath

We had a bit of snow in London this winter, it's hard to decide if there is more than last year, it seemed to melt faster than last year, but perhaps it was deeper.  It's always nice to have a snow weekend, it was just the perfect amount, not too much to cause complete shutdown in London, but enough that you could build snowmen and throw snowballs.

The day after it had snowed all night we headed up to the Heath.  I was excited because it meant we could try out our microspikes for the first time since I'd bought them at Christmas.  They are like mini-crampons that you put over your boots, very easy to get on and off, it's basically just a rubber band you stretch over the boots.

They were really good, I'm so glad I got them, we were walking all over the place, and it was as if there wasn't even any snow, like you were just walking on dry dirt.

A red-robin, posing for me

In fact they were so good that I had to take them off to check that the snow was in fact slippery, because it was impossible to tell with the spikes on.  They did get a bit clogged every now and again, which was a funny feeling as you were then walking on basically a big ice ball, so that reduced the stability, but a quick bang and you were right to go again.  I was impressed at the runners I saw out, since they didn't seem to be wearing any spikes, they were obviously a lot more sure footed then me.

Don't worry, this tree had already fallen over before the snow

A winter wonderland

One thing I really like about the British is that they are great hobbyists, and nobody looks twice at you for practising your hobby, so we were out with our spikes, other people were out skiing, some had their nordic walking poles out, and there was no agro to be seen.  Everyone was just enjoying the snow in their own way.

Even the ponds were frozen in the heath, and the birds were enjoying standing on the water.  I'm not sure how they manage it, as they would stand right on the edge with the water, and I really don't know how the ice was thick enough to support them.

I was hoping to see a few dogs swimming, but for once it was even too cold for them.

It was total chaos up on Parliament Hill, this is obviously the place to toboggan in London, it is a pretty perfect place for it.  So it seemed that the kids had come from far and wide to partake.

The snowy expanses of the heath

Living here I have wondered why it feels warmer when it snows, you would think it only snows when it's really cold.  But I have since learnt that warm air can hold more moisture than cold air, so when warm, moist air hits cold, dry air, the excess moisture has to be released, which it does through snowing.  So the snow doesn't cause the warm air, the warm air causes the snow.  I'm sure this is something school kids learn here in primary school, but growing up in the tropics, I never really needed to learn about what caused snow.

Pandemonium on Parliament Hill

In Bruges

The canals were so pretty

We took the Eurostar to Brussels one weekend, a bit different from the standard Parisian trip on the 'star, but no further time-wise.  I'd never been that excited to go to Belgium, in fact this was the first time I ever visited.  I'm not sure why, maybe it was the European parliament or the inability for the country to form government, it just never seemed that exciting.  And whilst the excitement levels were low on this trip, the beauty stakes were pretty high.  As were the friendli-ness stakes.  We spent a day in Bruges, I love how the Flemish (or Dutch or whatever it is) say Bruges, they call it Brug-GAH, with a really hard g, so different to the French pronunciation.  They are always going to have trouble forming stable government if they can't even decide on the proper pronunciation of their own cities.

Everywhere you looked you had to take another shot

There are going to be a lot of canal shots

But anyway, the only things you need to know about Bruges are the chocolate and the lace, both of which are sold in every second shop.  It must be some city-planning law, you cannot walk 50m without either a chocolate shop or a lace shop.  Sometimes even both.  Luckily the chocolate was delicious, if there's one thing I take with me from Belgium, it's the slightly sick feeling of too much sugar.  Within 10 minutes of getting of the train, we were already scoffing our first bag of handmade, Belgian chocolates, and we didn't let up much for the rest of the day.

I would put Bruges up there with Venice or Amsterdam, not as spectacular as Venice, but definitely as pretty as Amsterdam, and more compact too, with possibly fewer tourists.  And the people were so incredibly friendly, I couldn't get over that, they were like big friendly Vikings or something.  In that their exterior was a little bit intimidating, but then they opened their mouths.  Perhaps it's all the beer and chocolate that keeps everyone so happy.  Normally in such a tourist town you would expect almost universally surly service.  Everyone knows they don't rely on repeat customers, so why bother keeping anyone happy.  And yet not once did it feel like that, perhaps they were still screwing us over, but the important thing is that it didn't feel like they were.

The canals with the dozens of tour boats

The brick spire of the Church of Our Lady

There aren't a heap of museums or anything to see in the town, it is pretty, and almost around every corner is another photo opportunity.  But there isn't much in the way of historical or art museums.  Perhaps it's a factor of them always having been mainly a merchant city.  But so long as they keep serving their delicious moules-frites I don't care that they don't have any museums.  That's the other thing you've got to have if you go to Belgium, the fries, holy cow, I don't know what they do, but if there is a national dish (besides chocolate) it has to be the fry.  Unbelievable.  You would think there can't be that much difference in fries, but lets just say I don't think McDonald's is ever going to get a strong hold in Belgium.  There is a galaxy of difference between the standard Belgian fry and a Maccas one.  And the mussels, oh man, so juicy and tender, and I don't even normally like mussels, but after that weekend I am a total convert.

Canals from a boat

So really what the day was all about was walking around amazed at the beauty, stopping every now and again to eat some more or drink a beer (again awesome) whilst taking a few photos.  We did try for a few museums.  There was a chocolate one, which seems a bit of a given in Belgium.  That was slightly strange.  It went through the life-cycle of cocoa and had these weird paper-mache exhibits.  And then at the end they give you some chocolate.

The Madonna of Bruges

In one of the churches they have a statue by Michelangelo, the Madonna of Bruges, it is thought to be the only sculpture that left Italy during his lifetime.  Unfortunately ever since that crazy Hungarian-Australian geologist attacked the Pieta in St Peters all these Madonna sculptures are now behind bullet-proof glass and you have to stand 10 metres away.  Which is disappointing.  It is so obviously a class above all the other sculptures in Bruges, noticeably so. I guess you can't blame them for wanting to protect their star.

Other than the Michelangelo sculpture, there's not a lot else.  They have the second tallest brick tower in the world, at 122m it's a lot of brick.  They have the chocolate museum, a fries museum, a diamond museum, a lace museum, a museum on the history of artificial lighting and an archers museum.  But not a lot on the history of the town, or much in the way of art.  You kind of feel that the lighting museum is clutching at straws.

The main square

A boat cruise on the canals is quite good and about the only real tourist thing to do.  It would have been nice if the tour was a bit longer, and that you went a bit further afield, but you very much stay in the centre of the town, even though Bruges is actually on the coast, you wouldn't know it from the tour.

What can I say, go, but don't take too full a stomach with you, as you will be feasting all day.

New Forest

One of the many ponies - all fluffy in the cold weather

It wasn't just Stonehenge that we saw whilst we were visiting Salisbury.  We hired a car and drove through New Forest to the coast.  Salisbury is actually really close to the coast.  And this area is definitely worth a day in itself.  I didn't appreciate this before I visited but in the New Forest it seems all manner of normally domesticated animals roam free.  Mainly ponies, but there were also pigs, deer and donkeys as well.

This one really wanted food, all it got from me was a pat

And when I say mainly ponies there would be thousands of them.  Everywhere you go there are more ponies.  You aren't meant to feed them, but you can certainly tell that in the more popular spots in the forest they are used to serious amounts of human attention.  I wonder if they ever do some sort of pony round up, just to stop them completely decimating the vegetation, or invading the nearby villages and eating all the flowers.

A pony being shy

Even though it is called New Forest, it was created as a royal forest by William the Conqueror all the way back in 1079.  It was new at the time I suppose, because at that point the local peasants were allowed to hunt in it.  Once it became a royal forest, no more hunting allowed.  Like all national parks in England it has seen human intervention for hundreds of years, so isn't really as wild as you may imagine something with forest in it's title should be.  But I suppose for it's location, in that incredibly dense area of south-east England, it's doing pretty well.  It would be cool to head back here in summer sometime and try and head further into the forest, away from the roads, just to see how wild it really gets.  Apparently you are allowed to walk anywhere you want, sometimes there may be signs up asking you not to disturb rare birds, but that's about it.  It's also meant to be the largest area of unenclosed pasture in the country, but I'm not really sure what that means, since I definitely saw a number of fences on my day through there.

We even got a proper sunset for once

There is also a deer feeding area, that looked like the main tourist area, apparently the rangers feed the deer everyday there during summer.  Not so much in winter though, so there were very few deer to be seen.  I managed to get one blurry shot on massive telephoto zoom, but it wasn't up to this blog's standard so you don't get to see it :).  One other slightly morbid tourist site is that Alice Liddell, the Alice from Alice in Wonderland, is buried in the graveyard in Lyndhurst, the main gateway to the forest.  We didn't know this when we visited though, so were more taken by the tarot card reading going on in the carpark.

The sun setting over the sea - not something I see that often

Salisbury Cathedral - with added Magna Carta

Once we had our fill of big trees and ponies we left the forest for the sea.  We popped out near Lymington, which is actually incredibly close to the Isle of Wight.  I don't think I appreciated how close that island is to the mainland, but really it's just a good freeze away from still being connected.  So we got to sit there looking out over the Solent and for once the sun set over sea.  And since it was only about 4pm when it set, we could get back to Salisbury in plenty of time for our awesome meal of scallops and pork belly.

After our trip to the Stones the next day we had a little more time to check out the town before having to head back to London.  The most famous thing about Salisbury (apart from Stonehenge obviously) is the cathedral and the copy of the Magna Carta it contains.  This version is one of the four remaining ones written in 1215, and is the best preserved.  And it really is very well preserved, it looks like it was written yesterday, there's not even much of that tea staining effect you get in old documents.

I love me some cloisters

The cathedral is 750 years old and has the tallest spire in Britain, which is a little mind-blowing (the 750 years old thing).  On the tour to Stonehenge the guide gave us a bit of info when we drove back to town, pointing out Sting's house and where Madonna bought a house and then incited the wrath of the British rambler by trying to get a right-of-way moved.  Let's just say you don't want to take on the might of the British rambler, even if you are Madonna.

He also pointed out where the local "eccentric" lives.  She is a Dame or something and keeps camels.  In the nativity play one year, she decided she wanted to have her camel walk down the aisle as well, and since she is the local aristocracy she gets to do what she wants.  In the end the camel got to the font in the middle of the church and decided it was a bit thirsty.  It hasn't been invited back since.