Transport Museum (Day 2) and 221b Baker Street

Today I actually set an alarm, which for me is unusual since I don't have classes on Fridays. This was because had a specified time for a tour at the Transport Museum's Acton Depot. After a quick history of public transportation in London and a safety talk (it is a working restoration center & depot) we departed in small groups to tour the depot. My group first headed toward the buses. But before we got there, we passed an old iron gate which was once in a private access tunnel to Westminster station for MPs. The first picture is of a horse bus. Ladies would only sit on the bottom level, but I'll let you guess why in the comments. The second picture is a Routemaster, RM1, the very first Routmaster to operate. These buses served London for over 40 years.
After that we went onto the area with the underground trains, but didn't get to see a lot of it. The picture is from the side of a car from the Metropolitan Railway, the company that built the first underground line and survived much of the early consolidation.
After that we moved on to the area containing station booths and other larger station items. The first is an old store that was in the stations and would sell tobacco and sweets. The second is a gate from the High Street Kensington stop.


After that we progressed to the area with all the signs and a model of an underground station, Notting Hill Gate.

After leaving the depot, I headed over to Baker Street to meet some friends to go see the Sherlock Holmes Museum.After the museum, we walked over to Regent's Park to see it and the waterfowl there were, simply put, amusing. Just look at the pictures, and yes, the second one is trying to eat the wrought iron fence. I also took the picture at the beginning of the post at Regent's Park.

Transport Museum & Covent Garden

Today was the first half of my visit to London's Transport Museum. Today I trekked to their Covent Garden Location and tomorrow I will be going to their Acton Depot, where they have more and larger items on display. I will also be going to the Sherlock Holmes museum tomorrow with some friends.

The Transport Museum is housed right on Covent Garden and uses an old flower market building to house their exhibits. Going in, you pass a wall that has parts of different subway and bus maps from around the world. I was able to identify Paris, New York and London.

The above picture is of a steam engine that pulled some of the first underground trains between Paddington Station and Farringdon. The steam trains used a condenser to eliminate the steam, but could do nothing about the smoke. This, and most of the early underground lines were built using the cut-and-cover method, as can be seen in the model below:
Imagine doing that to London's streets today! Most new routes are built much deeper and a few stations are so deep, they only use elevators to carry passengers to the surface, the stop for the museum is like this. They also use some really long escalators. In fact, when escalators were first introduced, a man with a wooden leg was hired to demonstrate that they were safe. The following picture is of a later tube train, this time from 1938:The museum also had many examples of the buses that have been used in London. The next two photos are of two examples of double decker buses, but it is the first one may look familiar to you. It is a Routemaster, which served London from 1959 until 2005. They are still in use on two "Heritage" routes in central London. Most buses are now a modern version of the double decker (the second picture)or new single-level "bendy-buses."


So after leaving the museum, and telling myself I could not buy everything in the gift shop, I went to Covent Garden, which had once been an important fruit & vegetable market, but is now a semi-enclosed market for all sorts of things.

While I was there, a string quartet was performing in the building, which was very nice. I think when it gets warmer, I might come here some days and do some homework, although I imagine it will get more crowded when the weather gets warmer. There were also several street performers, including this guy who dragged me into the performance to help him get on his unicycle so he could juggle a machete, a club, and an apple. He also ate the apple while juggling all these items.

So tomorrow is the Acton Depot and Sherlock Holmes Museum, so look for another post tomorrow evening.

Second Trip Booked & Some Loose Ends

I realized it has been a while since I made a post, so I thought I would let everyone know what I've been up to.

The major thing that has occurred in the last week is I have booked my tickets for my second trip, which will be to Scotland. The first trip is a program-run bus trip to Bath, which I am pretty much just using for the free bus to Bath so I can visit friends, although they are giving us tickets to the Roman Baths.

Well, back to the Scotland trip. I m going in late February when we have "Reading Week", and therefore no classes, so I can take more time for a trip. I will be going to Glasgow and Edinburgh to see some historic sights and to go to the Glasgow Film Fest for a day.

I thought I would also use this post to tie up a few loose ends and answer some questions people have raised. For those of you outside of F&M, the "Dip" in the blog's title is a reference to F&M's mascot, the Diplomat.

It also seems that many other people who are studying abroad are doing blogs, so I thought I would post a link to them here (If I missed any, let me know):

Danielle (Avignon, France): http://fummerfrance.blogspot.com/
Celine (Rome, Italy): http://travelingchao.blogspot.com/
Jordan (Florence, Italy): http://florentinefrolics.wordpress.com/
Tim, Katie, Deanna (Lancaster, PA): http://fandmblog.blogspot.com/

A note on the last one. Tim decided to do this because he felt left out with all of us going abroad.

That's all for now. Look next week for the first in a series of posts comparing England and America. I'll keep track, and we'll see who wins.

The picture below is of a train passing my building. During peak times, this will happen about once every minute:

Thames River Cruise & Classes

So I've been done classes since 4 pm yesterday, so it's time for another blog post. That's right, I only have classes on Mondays and Tuesdays. Be jealous.

Monday night the university took all of the international students on a 3 hour river cruise on the Thames. I don't have any pictures from it because I forgot to take the memory card out of my computer and put it in the camera. But nevertheless, it was a great experience. Definitely had one of the highlights of my time over here: going under the Tower Bridge at night with it all lit up.

Monday was also the start of classes for me. My first class was also my first drama class, Places of Performance, which looks primarily at the relationship between the performance and the space in which it is performed. It looks like we'll be focusing a lot on found spaces and other spaces that are not traditionally intended for theatrical performance.

Immediately after that I headed off to my next class, which was my first history class. Believe it or not I have traveled all the way to England to take a U.S. history class. It is called "Building the American Nation: 1763-1917." Monday's lecture was on the political crisis of the 1850's, and the lecturer was great. Later that afternoon, I had my seminar for the same class, and I have the seminar run by the same professor who does the lecture. I am also the only American in my seminar group of 10 students.

Tuesday brought an early start (by college student standards-9 am) with my second history lecture. This one was entitled "The American Century: since 1900." Probably the same number of students as my other history class, although the seminar I had later in the afternoon was a bit larger. I already have a presentation on Joeseph McCarthy to do for next week and a debate on Eisenhower to prepare for the following week. I also had my other drama class on Tuesday, Performance and History, in which we look at the context in which the plays were performed and not necessarily the plays themselves.

Now I have a lot of free time, but it's going to quickly get filled with all the reading I need to do.

Museums & Bus Tour!

Last post before classes start. I'll cover the museums I've been to since arriving and the bus tour that I had this morning.

For those of you who tried to guess which museums I had been to, if you had guessed the British Museum (the Rosetta Stone pic) and the Imperial War Museum (bi-plane picture), you were correct. I also went to the British Library, but they do not allow photos, so I have none to post from there.

There is just one word to describe the British Museum: massive. As the Rick Steves guide to London puts it: "Simply put, this is the greatest chronicle of civilization...anywhere." This is so true. From the Rosetta Stone to the Elgin Marbles, the halls of the British Museum held a lot of items. I was impressed by the scale of all of it, but felt it was somewhat anti-climatic. Later that night I got into a discussion with another student (who is an archaeology major) about whether or not the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece. By later that night I mean over a drink at a bar a bunch of us went to.

The British Library didn't have much. The Magna Carta had its own room, but most of the space was dedicated to displaying the highlights of their collection. Not much interpretation tying everything together. A few highlights were a Gutenberg Bible and an original draft copy of Handel's Messiah.

The Imperial War Museum covers just the twentieth century wars that Britain has been involved in. While a lot of war museums tend to glorify war, this one does not. In fact, the area separating the halls covering the two World Wars is entitled "The Cost of War." You go through this before entering either hall. An interesting fact that I took away is that since 1945, there has only been a single year where no British soldier has died somewhere in the world. A highlight of the World War I exhibit was a recreated trench with realistic lighting and sound (no mud though) to give you a feel of what it was like in the trenches.

This morning I went on a bus tour of Central London, and by that I mean most of the city. I won't name every sight we went by because you name the historic or tourist sight, we probably passed by it. The only one we did not see was Buckingham Palace because the road leading up to it is closed on Sundays. We did make two stops for photos. One was to get pictures of Tower Bridge and the HMS Belfast and the other was to get pictures of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. For those of you who do not know, Big Ben is not the clock tower, it is the bell housed inside the clock tower. The tower is simply just the "Clock Tower."

Classes begin tomorrow and river boat cruise tomorrow night.

Orientation and Cold Snap!

Okay, so the last few days have been pretty busy so I won't be able to cover everything in this post. Expect more posts over the next couple of days.

Most of the time since my last post has been filled with orientation activities. I have actually gone through two different orientations since arriving. The first was with the program and the second was at the university. Pretty much everything we were told at the first was repeated at the second (such as how to stay safe). One interesting event during the first orientation was they brought in an MP (Member of Parliament) to speak to us about current political and social issues in Britain. He explained how their system works and such. They actually will be having an election while I am here!

The highlight of orientation was the trip to see my first (of what will probably be many) West End show! We saw Avenue Q, which I had already seen in the states. I have to say I liked to US version better because the actor who played Princeton/Rod kept switching between an American and British accent while the rest of the cast did a good job of keeping to an American accent.

Spending so much time inside has been a good thing because England is experiencing its worst cold snap in 30 years. A few days ago parts of the country got almost a foot of snow, which is practically unheard of over here. It is so bad that some areas are running out of grit for the roads. Some places have resorted to spreading sand on the roads to help vehicles get traction. Two salt mines are working 24hrs, but are having trouble keeping up with demand. Airports have either shut down or delayed many flights and rail service has been restricted in some areas. Relief is in sight though as it is supposed to get up to 6 degrees Celsius (43 Fahrenheit) by mid-week. Hopefully the winds will also die down.

When I had free time during orientation I went to a few museums. I'll post a couple of photos now, but talk more about them in another post. Try to guess which museums I've been to with the two photos in this post.

Arrived!

First things first: I have arrived safely in London.

Take off was delayed slightly and a little shaky due to the wind at the airport, but the flight was pleasant. The food excellent and it was a good thing that they only had one episode of Bones on the in-flight entertainment system otherwise I wouldhave watched that my whole way over. Looks like I had a better time getting out of Newark than the poor travelers in Terminal C who had to re-enter security after someone walked through the exit to get past security. It happened right as I was arriving at the airport.

Checked into the orientation hotel and the schedule looks like it will be busy, but we do go to see a West End Show tomorrow night (Avenue Q), if only they had picked a show I hadn't seen before. I'm at the hotel until Thursday when I move to the university.