These are just a few of the lot of pictures I took last weekend in London. Every time I go there, it seems I bring the sun with me since the skies are always fulgently blue. Nevertheless, like a spell cast by an envious old witch, just after I left the Isles, this monumental eruption in Iceland, recently renamed as Dustland, appeared and all flights from UK were cancelled. I was lucky, again: last time I travelled to London, the mother of all snow storms stroke the northen part of Catalonia, bringing it back to the stone ages; no electricity for a week.
Portobello Rd. in Notting Hill, with lots of antiques shops and street markets. Lovely and charming, as they like to say in London. Somewhere down this street, I ate some Jolof food, from Gambia. I cried, so hot it was! First time I eat some African food from beneath the Sahara.
I know it is a very silly picture, just like these Japanese tourists routinely take in front of the signs and the billboards showing the name of the places they are visiting. What can I do? Too long living in Japan!
Oxford! Finally, I could see with my own eyes what it was all about. I shared for 6 months the room at work while I was in Sweden with two former Oxford students, a mathematician Irish girl and an electrical engineer, just like Rowan Atkinson. Most of the English I know I got it from them. Today, however, I was just a mere tourist taking pictures in an extraordiary stage and marveling at these phenomenal buildings, the wrapping of Oxford.
I found signs like this in the frontispiece of a number of doors around the central yard of this Oxfordian College utterly intriguing. "Beware, you will learn about Natural Philosophy on the other side!", like a warning before a tunnel advertising you of what you are going to find on the other end side of the hole. "Don't blame us if you learnt anything. We warned you!"
This magnificient ceiling is just in front of the Christ Church College's dinning hall, the one that appears in Harry Potter's movies, though the real one is not as big, but more grounded on the reality and far less sillily magical. What is magical to me is this achitecture. They could manage to build an almost flat ceiling with very few archs using tangencial circles instead. Notice there is no diagonal arch sustaining the squared parts of the roof flanked by groups of four columns. Magic!
This old chap in a bonnet hat was one of the friendly guardians of Christ Church College in Oxford. People were so excited about being in this cloister, also appearing in Harry Potter's first two movies, that he had to tell them repeatedly not to go onto the lawn. I could enter by paying just half of the ticket fare after convincing the funny head of guardians at the entrance I was a student.
This ceiling is just glorious! It spans like a fan from a virtual column which literally hangs on the sky. Amazing!
The symmetry is so perfect here, excluding the clouds, that it seems there is only one side facing a mirror. Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, used to teach logic around here and, as I read, used to look through the glasses of the windows in the library building that stands behind where I took the picture, maybe looking for a smiling pussy cat from Cheshire.
Trafalgar Sq. from the National Gallery's staircase. First on the foreground, Lord Nelson's commemorative column. On the far background, Big Ben and the Parliament. I tried to emulate Turner's stormy skies I had just observed in the museum.
The National Gallery from outside, since I could not take any interesting picture inside. I was warned twice by a Japanese-looking guardian, so I desisted. Later I could see how an Italian girl with a better technique was taking a smuggled picture of Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the museum. These cunning Italian girls!
Lord Nelson, the admiral who defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar. He lost one eye and one hand, as it is very amusingly pictured in Blackadder when saying something like "
this is the worst idea since Lord Nelson bet his hand on the virtue of Lady Hamilton", who is well-known to have been his famous mistress, or showing him awaking from drunkenness and desperately shouting "I'm blind, I'm blind!", not noticing his eye patch was covering the wrong eye.
London Eye from St. Jame's Park at dusk. The sun was bathing the buildings of the Ministries, but the ducks on the lake were just unaware of it.
And Big Ben, again and again, from near the War Rooms, where Churchill directed the WWII.
Portobello Rd. in Notting Hill, with lots of antiques shops and street markets. Lovely and charming, as they like to say in London. Somewhere down this street, I ate some Jolof food, from Gambia. I cried, so hot it was! First time I eat some African food from beneath the Sahara.
I know it is a very silly picture, just like these Japanese tourists routinely take in front of the signs and the billboards showing the name of the places they are visiting. What can I do? Too long living in Japan!
Oxford! Finally, I could see with my own eyes what it was all about. I shared for 6 months the room at work while I was in Sweden with two former Oxford students, a mathematician Irish girl and an electrical engineer, just like Rowan Atkinson. Most of the English I know I got it from them. Today, however, I was just a mere tourist taking pictures in an extraordiary stage and marveling at these phenomenal buildings, the wrapping of Oxford.
I found signs like this in the frontispiece of a number of doors around the central yard of this Oxfordian College utterly intriguing. "Beware, you will learn about Natural Philosophy on the other side!", like a warning before a tunnel advertising you of what you are going to find on the other end side of the hole. "Don't blame us if you learnt anything. We warned you!"
This magnificient ceiling is just in front of the Christ Church College's dinning hall, the one that appears in Harry Potter's movies, though the real one is not as big, but more grounded on the reality and far less sillily magical. What is magical to me is this achitecture. They could manage to build an almost flat ceiling with very few archs using tangencial circles instead. Notice there is no diagonal arch sustaining the squared parts of the roof flanked by groups of four columns. Magic!
This old chap in a bonnet hat was one of the friendly guardians of Christ Church College in Oxford. People were so excited about being in this cloister, also appearing in Harry Potter's first two movies, that he had to tell them repeatedly not to go onto the lawn. I could enter by paying just half of the ticket fare after convincing the funny head of guardians at the entrance I was a student.
This ceiling is just glorious! It spans like a fan from a virtual column which literally hangs on the sky. Amazing!
The symmetry is so perfect here, excluding the clouds, that it seems there is only one side facing a mirror. Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, used to teach logic around here and, as I read, used to look through the glasses of the windows in the library building that stands behind where I took the picture, maybe looking for a smiling pussy cat from Cheshire.
Trafalgar Sq. from the National Gallery's staircase. First on the foreground, Lord Nelson's commemorative column. On the far background, Big Ben and the Parliament. I tried to emulate Turner's stormy skies I had just observed in the museum.
The National Gallery from outside, since I could not take any interesting picture inside. I was warned twice by a Japanese-looking guardian, so I desisted. Later I could see how an Italian girl with a better technique was taking a smuggled picture of Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the museum. These cunning Italian girls!
Lord Nelson, the admiral who defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar. He lost one eye and one hand, as it is very amusingly pictured in Blackadder when saying something like "this is the worst idea since Lord Nelson bet his hand on the virtue of Lady Hamilton", who is well-known to have been his famous mistress, or showing him awaking from drunkenness and desperately shouting "I'm blind, I'm blind!", not noticing his eye patch was covering the wrong eye.
London Eye from St. Jame's Park at dusk. The sun was bathing the buildings of the Ministries, but the ducks on the lake were just unaware of it.
And Big Ben, again and again, from near the War Rooms, where Churchill directed the WWII.
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