The Netherlands

I have a blog post on my Europe 2012 blog about Leiden: http://sandraeurope2012.blogspot.nl/2012/06/leiden-in-netherlands.html

I'm speaking today and probably won't be in here, but wanted to let anyone who would like more photos know that most days deposits into photobucket are available to peruse (some are boring, some are inexplicable to anyone but me, but some are good) and they're linked on the schedule here:
http://sandraeurope2012.blogspot.nl/p/speaking.html

This photo is from a playground we went to yesterday with other home ed families. There was a system of wooden aqueducts in a sandbox with a water pump up top. There are lots of other photos here

Where I'm speaking

Today we went to a large playground, across the street from the school where the presentations will be tomorrow. We went to the school after classes were over to set up for Saturday.

That's what the biggest space looks like empty. At any given time, some of the adults and most of the children will be outside that window or in a playground down to the right.

I'm going to try to sleep extra long because my leg is hurting and I want to be alert and I'm falling asleep, even though it's not 10:00 pm yet. It's still bright outside, but I'm not so bright inside. :-)

Leiden, in the Netherlands

This is my third day in Leiden, in the Netherlands. I'm having so much fun I don't have time to make web posts, but if you want to look at the photos I've taken, the links are below. Some will make obvious sense and some won't, but they're for me. :-) If you enjoy some of them, you're welcome to it.

http://s26.photobucket.com/albums/c111/SandraDodd/Europe/Sandra2012/June27LeidenHouseboat/?start=all

Julie and Adam are staying in a houseboat, and the photos are the walk from Rippy's house there, and then down to the old part of Leiden and the market, and back to the house. The stairs are steep and spooky and exciting.

http://s26.photobucket.com/albums/c111/SandraDodd/Europe/Sandra2012/June28LeidenBoatTour/?start=all

We went on a canal tour, so some of the photos are of the bridges. There are lots of little drawbridges and others on the smaller canals that they had to lower the roof of the bridge to get under, and there's a video of that.

The windmill is a reconstruction of someone's dad's windmill.

There are bikes everywhere, and all permutations of extra-riders and cargo bikes.

I took photos from the only hill in Leiden. They built a hill for a fortress/tower, and there are arrow slits in the bottom part, and a walkway up top.

There's a light...

My favorite part of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the one verse of "There's a Light" where Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien, the composer) sings

The darkness must go down the river of nights dreaming
Flow morphia slow, let the sun and light come streaming
Into my life, into my life.

During that verse, there is a zoom to a close-up of him in a window in a tower. I can't find an image to include here, and I'm not home with my DVD and big TV to get an image. If you've seen it, you remember, though. And yesterday I was there.

In the foreground of the more distant shot is a fairy ring on the ground. The closeup is of some of the mushrooms. They weren't up all the way around, but very clearly in a few places, and the ring did show.

We've had smaller fairy rings in our front yard. They're natural, but it's easy to see how they gave way to superstitious tales and fears that something had happened overnight that could have been a threat to the security of people who had been sleeping.

I wish I had measured it. I think it was over six feet across though; maybe eight feet. Wikipedia talks about smaller ones and larger ones here, and with google image you can see lots of them. I was glad to be able to show it to Adam.

A note on the UK Rocky Horror fan site says, of the building's use as a set:

Actually it's now a prestige hotel, although at the time of filming The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Oakley Court was a dilapidated shell. The crew had to work around buckets catching the rainwater from the holes in the roof and tread carefully on the old rotting timbers. It is said that most of the cast caught very bad colds during filming. *

We were there for afternoon tea. Nice place!

There are framed posters and such from other movies filmed there, back in the day between it being a nice home and being a luxury hotel. Mostly monster movies.

wikipedia says...

English peas

My mom always called peas "English peas." That was to distinguish them from black-eyed peas, which were the default peas in Texas when she was growing up.

Yesterday at a big Tesco grocery store, I saw a full array of peas, in England, which confirms that they are English peas:

Also, frozen—which is what Julie bought.
A dollar is 64p, 65p thee days, so everything there seems to be less than a dollar except the one in the upper right.

Some other exotic groceries:

They have a Mexican food section now, but the tortillas are very thin and like "wraps," not like substantial bread. They're closer to egg roll wraps than northern New Mexico's hearty tortillas.

But one of the things on that shelf was a twice-removed abomination. They have jars of chopped green jalapeños and of red jalapeño. This is in a vague new place between wrong and odd.

Smells and a blasted tree

I've smelled lots of interesting smells lately, but there have been three reports, scattered, in a very short time.

Holly Dodd, on Twitter, June 22:

Wonder what smells like pancakes.

Bea Marshall, on Twitter, June 23:

The loos in Costa at the O2 arena smell like a brand new car with leather seats!

Me, in person, to Julie and Adam in the Ashford public parking structure:

That stairway smells like an old filling station bathroom on a highway in Texas.

Nice that the best smell of the three was a coffee-shop toilet.

This tree didn't have a scent, but it's really impressive. It's on the edge of the Lime Tree Park in Northolt, which is in Ealing, which is in the suburbs of London. I was there Thursday, June 21.

It's not on a path, nor in the main part of the park, but the mower-person had mowed up around it so pedestrians could get in there under it. The ground was muddy, so I walked carefully.

It seemed perfectly round, and was an oak tree. The trunk is huge.

Much of the trunk was dead. It had been struck by lightning long ago, and the center of the trunk had been burned out, but the tree had recovered and was still stable and beautiful.

Dinosaur, Castle and Airplane

From Legoland yesterday we could see Windsor Castle and 'the Windsor Eye' (a ferris wheel in the town of Windsor). Because we were in a place where towns and buildings were made in miniature, they just didn't seem so real. :-)

The first photo has a dinosaur, a castle and an airplane all in one photo. You can't get that every day.