Fool's Fair at Stirling Castle

This week was quite busy, with the kids back in school and David and I back at work. David's parents are visiting, and they spent some time this week wandering through the St. Andrews castle, the grocery store, the high street, and the various charity shops in town. David's dad spent some time on the golf course on an especially bright and sunny day, and on a less bright and sunny day they took the bus to the nearby town of Dunfermline. On Friday, David drove them to Anstruther for takeaway at the town's famous chippy, but I stayed home to get in some more work (this is a busy time of year for me, alas).

On Saturday, despite a forecast for heavy rain and thick cloud, we ventured to Stirling to visit Stirling Castle. There was a Fool's Fair planned for the afternoon for the Easter weekend, and though the castle is always a busy place, this made it even more highly trafficked. We waited in an impressive queue to get into the car park...so long in fact that about half-way up the hill David's parents gave up and just got out of the car. By the time we had located a loo and suited up in our rain gear, though, David had parked and was waiting for us at the entrance.

We started our tour in the interesting exhibitions in the castle vaults, which give an excellent overview of Scottish history and the part that Stirling Castle played in that history over the centuries, and also gave us a wee bit of shelter from the rain. Like most historic properties in Scotland, there were a number of exhibits geared towards kids, but at Stirling Castle they really go above and beyond in the family friendly category, and there's a whole section of the vault geared towards the 7 and under crowd. Emma and John usually enjoy these areas just as much as Leah does, and I think they sometimes use Leah as a "free pass" to gain access to the various games and hidey holes and dress up stations meant for little ones. In this vault, Emma and Leah were especially taken with a puzzle that matches various natural products that are used to create textile colors (lapis lazuli, cochineal beetles, etc). When the puzzle pieces that depict a certain natural element used to make color were matched to the right region on a world map, that color would light up. When all the puzzle pieces were matched correctly, a spring on the back of the map would release and all the pieces would shoot back into a receptacle at the map's base. Both girls were equally impressed, and played several rounds!

Once we made it through the vaults on textiles, musical instruments, carvings and court jesters, we continued up through the upper parts of the castle, towards the Great Hall, which was built by James IV, and the Chapel Royal. This chapel is where the infant Mary Queen of Scots was crowned in 1543, though probably not in the same building that stands there today. On this day, the chapel had been turned into a puppet theatre, and was stuffed full of damp toddlers in wellies cheering on a sock monk (yes, a puppet monk in full saffron robes) as he decided whether to give his pet bear a sweetie. I'm sure it wasn't what James IV had intended as he went about improving Stirling Castle to create a space fit for a European monarch, but the toddlers and parents inside looked happy enough to be the beneficiaries of his grand design.

After the puppet show, we went back out to the courtyard to partake of the court jesters and magicians doing various magic tricks and shaping balloons into swords. We watched for a bit, and procured two balloon swords for Leah, though John surrendered one of them just a few minutes later to a weepy little boy who was holding the limp remnants of a balloon sword in his hands, having popped his by poking his father repeatedly in the nose.

Next we entered the Royal Palace, and not only were were happy to have another place to dry out a bit, we were excited to see this part of the castle as it was being renovated when we were here in 2011. The palace is now completed, after having been restored to the way it would have looked in the 16th century. We visit a number of castles in Scotland but a good percentage are in ruins, so it's great to have the opportunity to see one with a roof and textiles and furnishings, even if much of it is recreated. Also, the Royal Palace was built by James V for his French wife Mary of Guise in about 1540, and because I find her story especially compelling I was looking forward to the opportunity to see the space as it might have looked during her lifetime. Mary of Guise was actually the second wife of James V (his first wife died soon after their marriage and relocation to Scotland), and she was also the mother of Mary Queen of Scots. James V died just a few days after his daughter Mary was born, so Mary of Guise (as dowager queen) lived in the palace with the infant queen for a number of years on their own. The Palace is a set of six rooms (royal apartments), three for the king and three for the queen. Each set starts with an outer hall, which was a fairly public room, followed by an inner hall where the king or queen would grant audiences, and then finally a bedchamber. Even these rooms were apparently fairly public, however, and so signage in the palace indicated that Mary of Guise actually slept in a very small closet off to the side of her bedchamber. The beds themselves were enrobed in layers of tapestries, but still they didn't look especially cozy so I could imagine that a small, hidden bedroom off to one side was pretty appealing.

These rooms are now full of tapestries, many of which depict unicorns, or St. Cecelia and St. Clare, all of whom are associated with Mary of Guise. There are also a number of replicas of Stirling heads, which are wooden carvings of historic figures that used to adorn the ceilings of the Palace. Originally, 37 heads adorned the ceiling, and 34 of them still exist. Some of them are on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, but others were on display in an exhibit above the Palace, and Emma and I enjoyed going through this section slowly, while David and John were off with Leah, in search of a replacement balloon sword after hers popped with a loud bang that ricocheted through the Outer Hall of the Palace as she was taking part in a Legos activity.

The ceiling of the Queen's Outer Hall.

Leah in the King's Outer Hall, which was playing host to a Lego activity.

Towards the late afternoon, the rain dried up and we took the kids on the outer walls of the castle, which afford a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside. Standing on top of the ramparts, you can really appreciate the oft-used maxim, "Hold Stirling Castle and you control Scotland."

Whirlwind Trip to London

We’re on the train back from London, after several wonderfully busy and exhausting days. We arrived by coach on Tuesday night and settled into a busy youth hostel in the middle of Holland Park on the west side of the city. The hostel was in one wing of the Holland House, which was built in 1605 as Cope Castle for a courtier of King James I. In the late 1700s it was acquired by the family of the Baron Holland, renamed Holland House, and became the social centre of the Whig party in nineteenth century London. The main part of the castle was destroyed by bombing in World War II, and what is left is now a lovely orangery, a café, and the hostel. It’s off to one side of lovely Holland Park, and though it’s a bit inconvenient to walk down a lengthy path through the park to get home at night, having a park at your doorstep is well worth it. On the first evening we were there, David took the students to a pub and then off to a poetry reading at a nearby theatre that is run by the wife of a Colgate alum, so I took the kids through Holland Park for a tour of the daffodils, a walk in the Kyoto Garden, and a bit of time on the adventure playground. There are a number of peacocks wandering through the park, and we were all pretty shocked when we came upon one. Emma said, “Look Leah! A peacock!” Leah stopped dead in her tracks and stared at the peacock slowly walking her way, then shrieked, “That’s a mean guy, and he’s coming to eat me!” We assured her that the peacock meant her no harm, and after a moment he flew away, up into a tree. I had no idea that peacocks could fly, and Leah found this very reassuring since the path to the playground was now clear. This playground ended up being the highlight of the trip for Leah and John, and for the remainder of our visit, they both asked at the end of every museum visit or group meal, “Can we just go back to the playground now?”

Our itinerary for the group trip to London was quite full, and we tried to rearrange our schedule to keep us out of the Underground during rush hour, since it can be difficult to move a large group through the Tube on overcrowded trains. On our first day, we had a guided tour of the Tate Modern and a visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral, with a break in the middle for a group lunch. On the second day, we had a tour of the Tower of London, a quick break for everyone to grab some lunch at the Borough Market, and an afternoon visit to the British Museum. I skipped this one because I didn’t want Leah to be a distraction for the group, and instead I took her to a nearby playground called Coram’s Fields. I asked John to come with me to help me find my way and to help keep an eye on Leah. I did feel a little guilty at taking him away from such a wonderful museum, but I assumed he would prefer the playground to the presentation that the tour guide was giving the students. When we first arrived, John took Leah over to a tall climbing structure, and she scrambled right up. John and I stayed on the ground, watching as Leah quickly met a friend who was a bit younger and smaller than she. At one point, the little girl tried to lower herself to a platform below without using the ladder, and she hung for a moment by her fingers. John turned to me and asked if he should go up to help, and I said no…that she would be ok. Just as I said that, she lost her grip and fell down the platform and the one below as well, landing on her head in a heap with a loud scream. The mum scrambled up and rescued the girl, and after about 15 seconds of wailing she recovered and wandered off to play with something else. She was fine, but John was totally traumatized. “I just feel so bad for that little girl,” he kept saying. To make matters worse, Leah later slid into a little boy who was sitting at the bottom of the slide, and the little boy scolded Leah for not waiting until the slide was clear. This bothered John as well for some reason, and for the rest of the playground visit he wanted to talk about whether he should have intervened in either case. When it was time for us to leave and go back to the British Museum to meet the students, John insisted on pushing Leah’s stroller, and taught her that if some little kid on a playground messed with her again, she should say, “Don’t say that to me! I have a big brother and he will fix you if you do!”

That evening, we took the students on a “flight” on the London Eye at sunset, and then to a dim sum restaurant for a group meal. Some of the students were flying out the next day for a week in Paris, and it was wonderful fun to talk with them about their plans. London is a great city, and I love visiting the gardens and navigating the Tube. I find almost everyone who lives in London to be wonderfully friendly and accommodating, and I think it’s a very easy city to visit with kids, though like most other big cities, it’s probably best for those who are rich or young. Since we are neither, we are a bit limited in how much we can do and see, but for the most part we really enjoy London. However, there is simply no city like Paris!

 In the last two days, when most of our students had left, we went with those remaining to the Museum of London and walked through and past some of London’s most notable landmarks: Westminster Abbey, St. James Park, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square. When we had some free time, we made it to the Marylebone area of London, which I have never seen. John was duly impressed with the line of chauffeured Rolls Royces waiting outside some of the townhouses, and spent most of our walk snapping pictures of the various Bentleys and Jaguars we saw along the way. I intended to take the kids to Regents Park, but it wasn’t terribly warm outside at this point so we spent a few hours in the Marylebone Daunt Bookstore instead. This is a great bookstore, with soaring wooden shelves and stained glass windows. They specialize in travel books, and they organize all of their books by country, so interspersed between the guide books to Italy one can find a number of novels set there. It’s a great concept, and David and I took turns in the kids’ section reading books to Leah to give each other a chance to explore. We hadn’t planned any more group meals since some of the students weren’t there, and instead our family ended up finding dinner in a tiny little café run by an Egyptian family across from the Kensington Gardens that was full of photos and memorabilia about Princess Diana. John didn’t know who she was, and it was interesting to tell him her story while in London, surrounded by these images of her throughout her life.

On our last full day in London, we were fully museumed out. Instead, we did what all London families do on a Saturday and headed to a playground. I had intended to take the kids to the Diana Memorial Playground, but after John’s experience at Coram’s Fields, he was a bit reluctant to try out an unfamiliar playground so we stuck with the known at Holland Park. After a few hours, we followed the crowds to Portobello Market, which is a street market full of antiques, food, vintage clothes and jewelry, and a random collection of all kinds of other stuff. We almost bought a small phrenology bust for David, but we weren’t sure we would be able to get it home without breaking it. Instead, we just bought food: falafel, fruit, and some delicious beans and rice from a guy from Ghana. The market was so crowded that it was a bit of a trick to get Leah’s stroller through the streets, and the crowds and excitement kept her from falling asleep so she started to get a bit squirrely. Emma and I did a bit of shopping while David and John tried to keep Leah buckled in, and once she got too frustrated, we let her out and took her to a nearby toy store. The toy store, like all British toy stores, had a substantial line of stuffed Peppa Pig characters. We told Leah she could choose two of the smallest size, and after a bit of deliberation, she decided she wanted Peppa and Peppa’s brother George. However, the store seemed to have only the larger size of George in stock. We dug through the pile for a bit looking for a smaller one, but couldn’t find it. David said he would find the shopkeeper and ask, and John turned to me and said, “You know what’s great about this? Dad is going to have to say to this guy: (in a British accent) Pardon me, sir, do you have a small George?”

The market took quite a bit out of Leah and the boys, so we swung by the hostel to let them have a nap. Emma and I weren’t interested in wasting a minute of our time remaining in London, so we walked to the Kensington High Street to do some shopping. My criteria: if I had seen a photo of Kate Middleton shopping there, I was going to pop in. So, we stopped at Top Shop, Zara, and Uniqlo. We didn’t find anything, but it was possibly because I had only one eye on the clothing, while the other was busy scanning the crowds for royalty and other famous faces. When the boys called to say that Leah was awake, we returned to the hostel to meet them. We also saw one of the remaining students, and asked him to come with us for dinner. We walked to a pub in Earl’s Court to meet David’s parents, who were in London and had just come back from a day trip to Hampton Court Palace.  The pub was brimming with people and it was quite a squeeze to get our whole party of eight through the crowd of rugby fans there to watch Six Nations and into a table at the dining area in the back of the pub. But we made it and had a lovely pub meal…a great way to celebrate a last night in England.

This morning we had quite the journey to get from our hostel, through the Underground and to the train station with a fair bit of luggage and Leah’s stroller. Some of the Underground lines were suspended for repair, so we had to take an unusual journey to King’s Cross. In addition, we were traveling with David’s parents, who were going to come back to Scotland with us for a few weeks. In all, we made quite the spectacle moving through King’s Cross station with all our luggage! Fortunately, we gave ourselves plenty of time to get there, and made our train, with time to spare, for the five hour trip from London to Leuchars. There will be a fair bit of laundry to do when we return, and the kids will have some catching up to do for school in the next few days, but overall our week-long journey was time (and lots of money!) well spent!

48 Hours in Oxford

After a looooong bus ride from York, we arrived at our youth hostel in Oxford at 6pm on Sunday night. The hostel was hosting a number of other groups, and we were clearly the oldest group there….most of the other guests seemed to be about 13 or 14. I was surprised to see kids that age in a college town, but we kept seeing big packs of them everywhere we went in town over the next two days, so it must have been some kind of half-term in some neighboring country.

David knows Oxford pretty well after having spent a year there as an undergraduate, so I was happy to step back from tour guide for a bit and let him lead. After we all settled in, he led us into the town center to find some dinner. As a college town, Oxford is packed with restaurants and bars, and even though it was a Sunday night and Oxford is between terms, they were all quite busy. David gave us a quick sense of what was where, then we all split up to get our own meals. Our family ended up with takeaway from a food truck, and for about £11 we ended up with falafel, pizza and lamb kebab, and way more food than a family twice our size could reasonably eat.

The next morning, David took the students to meet with a colleague, so the kids and I headed to Christ Church Meadow, in search of some ducks and daffodils. We stopped at a Marks & Spencer on the way for juice and snacks, and that kept the kids sustained enough to last a number of hours in the park. Emma and John taught Leah how to play “Pooh Sticks” under one of the bridges, and we had a look at the Oxford Botanical Garden as well. Not much was in bloom other than spring bulbs, and though it was quite sunny it was still a bit cold. We stopped into a takeaway baguette place for sandwiches and fruit, and though it was a super tiny little place, the owner showed us to a back corner where there were some ottomans and a coffee table. We sat there and warmed up a bit, and then David texted me that the lecture was done. We met him at Blackwell’s bookshop, and he and John read Leah a collection of Peppa Pig books while Emma and I browsed. After a bit, we walked back to Christ Church to meet the students for a tour of the town and campus. I had hired a tour guide from the local visitor’s office, and the woman was wonderful. She took us all through Christ Church, and was good enough to walk through the history of the town and the college, and throw in a few bits about Alice in Wonderland and the filming of Harry Potter. We saw the staircase where Harry first meets Professor McGonnagle and Draco Malfoy, and the dining hall that was sort of the model for the great hall in the film. (The actual filming took place in a studio, where the filmmakers could recreate the Christ Church hall but add a fourth table for the four houses of Hogwarts). I could tell that Emma was very impressed with the school as we walked along, and she started to talk with the tour guide between stops about her interest in studying history. Towards the end of the tour, she whispered to me that she wouldn’t mind going to Oxford. I’m not sure what I think of that, though it may not matter in the end since Oxford has an acceptance rate of about 8% for American students.

We gave the students some free time after the tour, and our family headed to an Indian restaurant was had visited in 2011 that we remember was fabulous. It was closed when we arrived, so we walked to a nearby plaza instead and found a coffee shop that was still open. We got some coffee and hot chocolate and sat in a corner table for a bit of a rest. Leah was playing doll family with the collection of water and juice bottles we had amassed during the day, and David took advantage of the rare WiFi connection in the café to catch up on correspondence with tomorrow’s speaker. That left the three of us to plan our day tomorrow, and more importantly to consider what we were going to order at the restaurant.

Dinner was again fabulous…possibly even better than we remember. Leah was exhausted, but held her own at dinner for the most part. A group of our students were at a neighboring table (after we raved about the place to everyone, they all took our suggestion and ate there at some point over the visit), so Leah started to try to sneak up on them and take them by surprise. Since it was a bit early for most people for dinner the restaurant was still relatively quiet and so the staff was tolerant of her sneaking around among the tables a bit.

The next morning, David headed off with the students again for another lecture, so the kids and I went to the Natural History museum. It was full of primary students on tour groups, so we hit the highlights for Leah (dodo bird, butterflies, the black bear and the dinosaur and whale bones) then went to the Pitt River museum nearby This museum is a crazy collection of cabinetted curiousities, and would really take days to explore correctly. The folks who run the museum have created fabulous trails for the under-five set that involve clues to tiny wooden mice hidden in various display cabinets. Emma and John loved it so much on our last visit that we bought some of the wooden mice as souvenirs, and they still cherish them. So, this time with Leah they served as her tourguides and helped her find the hiding mice. She’s still a bit young to stay interested in such an activity for too long, and since the rooms are so full of tall cabinets packed closely together, it was pretty easy to lose track of her. So, once she got a little wild, we headed for the exit, stopping in the gift shop on the way out for three more wooden mice.

We spent our last hour walking through town, taking pictures and picking up more takeaway food. We walked back to the hostel to eat and have some tea, and to wait for the students to arrive. At 2, the students came back with David, and our coach bus arrived as well to take us to London.

24 Hours in York

Our train trip to York was relaxing, and I was pleased that there were a number of hen parties on the train with us (middle-age ladies festooned in tiaras and sashes that marked some rite of passage or occasion like “Bride to Be” or “30^th birthday” or “Yummy Mummy on Parade”). They were making so much noise that our fellow passengers didn’t notice our group, despite the students’ tendencies to be quite unaware of how loud they are and Leah’s lack of concern overall about both the volume of her voice and of the Peppa Pig show she was streaming on my tablet. Leah actually loved everything about the three hour ride…the sheep out the window, the enormous bag of baps and crisps and grapes that we brought along, and especially the toilet, which was a cavernous round cubicle that opened and closed with a flashy push-button. This she requested to visit about four times, though by the time we traveled down the aisle and through the adjoining car, then push-buttoned the door open, then closed, then open again, then closed again, then finally locked, she no longer had to go.

She had been a real trooper all morning, despite the last-minute flurry of activity in our house as we packed and loaded our car, checked and double checked train tickets and email confirmations, and counted students and tracked text messages about who was on which taxi to where. Once we had everything sorted and were driving out of our car park behind the students’ taxis, Leah looked out the window and said, “Wooo! Buh-bye Scot-end!” We all laughed, though none of us broke it to her that we were still coming back!

Leah charms one of our students at the hotel.

We arrived at the lovely York train station (no sarcasm intended…it actually is lovely!) at 1:00 pm and dragged our luggage to the hotel nearby. It was the same place to which we took our students in 2011, though it was now owned by a new firm, and the robin’s egg blue walls I admired the last time were now done in hot pink. But the location was still great, and the price was still right for a large group. The top floor room that we got was the same one in which we stayed in 2011, though it now only had three beds in it instead of four. Leah was going to sleep on an airbed anyway, but that did mean that we had to put Emma down in the women’s dorm. She didn’t mind, because she is getting along very well with the students since she’s actually only five years younger than they are, and as we walk through the towns she spends more time with the other students than she does with me.

David and the students (and Emma) went off after checkin for a 3pm tour of York Minster. I didn’t go because I assumed that neither Leah nor John would love a 90 minute tour of a Gothic cathedral. Instead I took them to the York Castle Museum, which is housed in a former debtors prison and tells the story of the city through various time periods. There’s a recreation of a Victorian street, complete with shops, schools, churches and homes that the kids can tour, and another recreation of World War 1 trenches on the other side of the museum. The trenches included some narrow-hidey holes that were just Leah’s size, and we spent a good bit of time trying to fish her out of those. Eventually, the sound of machine gun fire that the museum was piping in was enough to draw her out, and we were able to move on. There were other exhibits about the prisons themselves, and in each cell there was a projected image of a prisoner, telling his or her story about why he or she was there and what the prison conditions were like. It was very well done, but Leah found it a bit ominous so she wanted to hurry through the cells. John on the other hand was quite taken at the personal stories and the manners in which they were to be executed and was more interested in lingering. I managed to delay Leah in a colorful exhibit about the 1960’s and Beatlemania long enough for John to catch back up with us.

Leah in front of York Minster

The three of us left the museum when it closed and walked to the York Minster for evensong. We arrived in time to wave to the group at the very top of the Minster tower. When they came down and rejoined us, we all filtered into the choir, where evensong was going to take place. A merciful usher seated our family right next to an exit. Leah made it almost all the way through the hour-long service by playing alternately with her shoes, her fingers, and the Book of Common Prayer. Eventually, even she had had enough of the chorus, and announced in a very loud whisper that she had a dirty nappy. Incidentally, if you ever happen to be in York Minster with a toddler, make note that the changing rooms on the left-hand side of the main altar are very well equipped!

After evensong, we had a group dinner with the students at an Italian chain that was in a converted church. This is a pretty common site in York, though some of them have been turned into shops or even nightclubs rather than restaurants. It is a telling symbol of the changing importance of religious practice (and food!) in British culture. The chain had left a good number of the architectural features intact, though they had replaced the pulpit and the pews with sleek white tables and stainless steel bars along the ends of the room. Though it was a chain, most of the waiters were Italian and the food was surprisingly good. Almost everyone ended up with some kind of pizza, though a few students chose risotto instead. For a crowd of college kids on the first night of spring break, they were all a bit subdued, though it was possibly because David had assigned a rather large paper and a number of them had been working on it late into the night the night before. At eight, I left with most of them to go on a “ghost tour” of York, while David stayed back with the kids, and the student that looked most exhausted, to finish the pudding that had come with the kids’ meals and to pay the bill.

The “ghost tour” is a popular pastime in almost all large British cities…even St. Andrews has an outfit that offers them. I usually shy away from this kind of thing, since I’m not too into murder or mayhem. However, this one seemed to get some excellent reviews online, and was apparently run by a pair who are relatively serious at historic research…or as serious as a pair running a ghost tour outfit can be, I guess. Our tour guide was fantastic, well informed, funny and appropriated dramatic but never hokey. He took us to some fairly interesting spots and shared as much history of the city as he did stories of executions and haunted pubs. In fact, the only thing actually scary about the tour were the roving bands of bachelorettes and wannabe bachelorettes out on parade in stiletto heels, feather boas, rhinestone tiaras  that kept passing our group and cackling in a ghosty-falsetto voice. It made me supremely pleased that the whole hen-party tradition seems not to have made it across the Atlantic yet…except perhaps at Halloween.

Clifford's Tower in York

In the morning, we had yet another tour, but this one was of the center city of York and didn’t involve any ghosts or stilettos. Our tour guide was a former librarian who brought along a collection of very old texts, maps, historic photos and coins to illustrate the history of the town as we walked. He took us along the very high stone city walls (which was interesting to navigate with a stroller!) and through many of the streets, and told the group about the Roman and Viking influences on the city. He also talked a bit about the history of the city since it had discovered tourism, and how some of the poorer areas had been gentrified. That was clear as we walked, and passed even more historic churches that had been converted into High Street British chains like Joules and Jack Wills and Boots. Since it was a Sunday, the cobblestoned streets (or newly re-cobblestoned, as our guide pointed out) were full of families, tourists, and street performers. One of our students ended up as the assistant in a knife demonstration at one point, but it happened at the same time that Emma wanted to duck into the Cath Kidston, and so fortunately I missed it and only had to fret about it while watching the replay on the students’ phones.

After our tour and a bit of free time to wander the streets and the market, we met at a pub (again, haunted) for a Sunday roast. All the students had either the traditional beef roast, complete with Yorkshire puddings, mashed potatoes AND roasted potatoes (!), cabbage, peas, cauliflower and carrots, though a few requested the vegetarian nut-loaf version instead. It was a lot of food for the middle of the day, and so after we ate and returned to the hotel to retrieve our luggage and board the bus I noticed that almost all of them fell asleep almost immediately!

On the Road (and Rail) to England

And we're off! We have a four hour train ride this morning through southern Scotland, and will arrive at the northern English city of York in the afternoon.We have a tour of Westminster Abbey planned and we'll get a chance to walk along the city walls.

After an overnight and a tour of the city itself (and probably a late night ghost tour too!) we'll take a bus to Oxford. David has a number of lectures set up here for the students, and that means that the kids and I get some time to wander around the city, visiting the fabulous free Natural History and Pitt River museum and walking along the bank of the river which will undoubtedly be full of daffodils and crocus at this point in the season. We'll take an afternoon tour of the university with the students at some point, and will see Christ Church, the Bodleian Library and Radcliffe Camera, pictured below.

After two nights in Oxford, we'll take another bus to London. We'll be here for the remainder of the week, staying in a cool hostel in Holland Park.

Our time in London should be pretty busy, and we have a packed itinerary. I'm a little worried about navigating the Underground for the students while dealing with a toddler and a stroller, but it's also always one of my favorite parts of traveling to a big city. Since I grew up in the midwest where we don't have a lot of public transportation, I love the novelty of it...and the challenge! However, I think a few times we'll use the bus system as well, because the kids are going to love riding on the top floor of one of those double-decker Routemasters!

Care of children in the UK

Every morning when I drop Leah off at nursery, I see the day's food delivery in crates and boxes by the back door to the kitchen. The daily food delivery to a nursery school in the U.S. (if nursery schools served meals) would probably be Sysco boxes full of frozen french toast sticks and preformed chicken patties. Not here. Yesterday morning's delivery was mushrooms, potatoes and leeks, along with pears and bananas.

The teachers told me at pickup time that lunch had been stovies with sausage, and poached pears for pudding. Lucky kids!

It's interesting to see how parenting is a bit different in a different culture, and taking Leah to nursery has given me a chance to see that. Parents are much more relaxed here about a number of things. The playgrounds are full of some pretty seriously fast and high slides and swinging contraptions that, when fully loaded with a kid's body weight, could easily take out a small toddler passing by. Parents are always either on a bench nearby as their child plays, or down in the sand or mud playing alongside the child, but never hovering over in an attempt to keep the kid from plunging off the side. I have also noticed that a good number of toddlers here ride in car seats that are installed in the front seat of the car. That would never, never fly in the United States. I'm not actually sure why that happens here, because the cars seem to be equipped with the same airbags as they are at home. I have never seen a rear facing infant seat in the front seat here, so it seems to be a practice reserved only for toddlers. Leah still hasn't noticed all of her little friends getting out of the front seat of their parents' cars in front of the nursery, probably because she is still too impressed with the sheep and the cows that are peering over the front gate at her as we walk past their stalls. I hope she doesn't, because we are certainly not going to put her car seat in the front seat, no matter how many other families are doing it!

There's an interesting discussion taking place in Scotland right now about a proposed "Named Person" scheme. It's a new policy by the Scottish government set to go in effect at the end of the summer, though it does have opponents who are trying to get it thrown out before then. Basically, it will give each child a "named person," appointed to monitor his or her welfare as he or she grows up. The named person, who will usually be a midwife, health visitor or head teacher, will be a point of contact for the child for information or advice. It's meant to ensure that cases of child abuse or neglect are uncovered, but opponents argue that this will undermine parents and violate a family's right to privacy. It has prompted an interesting discussion about parenting in general in Scotland, and since I get a good bit of time in the car each morning to listed to BBC Scotland after dropping off the kids, I have learned quite a bit about the debate. Overall it sounds like a good idea, though I do see the validity of the opposition arguments. However, I'm struck at how difficult a program like this would be to institute in the United States, if only because we are such a large country. This seems to be just one aspect of life in Scotland that couldn't possibly be replicated in the U.S. because of the difference in the size of our population.

I think about this a lot when I am driving. Scotland is visually so calm...no billboards on the side of the road, for example, and no screaming advertisements on shops or pubs. This must be because of tradition, in part, but also because it's just not worth the expense of putting up a huge advertisement on the side of the road when not many people will see it. The other day, Emma told me a statistic that I found shocking: the population of the United Kingdom is a bit over 5 million people, and only 8.3 percent of those people live in Scotland. 8.3%! That's crazy! Scotland covers nearly a third of the entire land mass of the UK, but holds only 8.3% of the population. What's more, about 70% of those people live in the band of land between and around Edinburgh and Glasgow (the dark blue dots on the map below...along with Aberdeen which is on the northeastern coast) 

There are various and complicated reasons for this of course, mostly historic (see clearances, highland for much, much more on this issue, or ask the person of Scottish descent nearest to you right now...) but some economic and cultural. In a way, it's what makes so many parts of Scotland so special. While this low population rate creates some serious challenges (no wonder their roads are so narrow! Who would pay to widen them?), it does create a number of opportunities and advantages...and the named person scheme is just one of many.