Overnight in Brussels

With Rachel's bro, we did an overnight on the mainland so that Ryan could experience a more more "European" city.  A quick two-hour early-morning trip through The Chunnel was perfect to give us two whole days in BRUSSELS.  Forget the five hours involved with flying -- Eurostar is the best way to get to someplace new!

Brussels is small in comparison to London, Paris, or Amsterdam.  But it has fanciful buildings that (as Chris phrases it) look like Paris and Amsterdam had a baby -- haha!  In reality, Belgium actually is a mix of many cultures.  At a café getting coffee, our server was speaking English to us, talking to his staff in French, and answering questions on the phone in Dutch.  We tried our best to keep up!

Our apartment hotel was modern and in the perfect location -- right off the giant main square (La Grand Place).
The square is lined with ornate architecture and sky-scraping steeples, and it's extremely lively and gorgeously lit at night.

Down the street from our hotel were restaurants and cafés and, of course, a dozen places to get fantastic Belgian beer!  For dinner, we chowed on a bread, mustard, and meat feast at a Delirium pub :-)

We toured around a TON of places... hope you enjoy some of our snapshots!

funnin' around at the Atomium (from the World's Fair in 1958)...

marveling at the HUGE buildings around the city...

the Cinquantenaire (a triumphal arch commemorating 50 years of independence)

trying to get into the Army Museum -- absolutely GINORMOUS doors and a main entrance that makes you look like ant...

drinking Belgium beer and strolling through the Galeries Royales St. Hubert (a covered market)...



escaping the rain with a tour of St. Michael's cathedral...

wandering La Grand Place at night...

touring the lambic beer brewery, "Cantillon" (which still uses oooold-school brewing techniques)...

Seven Sisters

Rachel's brother, Ryan, hopped the pond back in late July.  His first stop was a Mumford and Sons festival down in Brighton (directly south of London).  After his festival, we met him down at the coast to visit Seven Sisters, a national park with enormous white chalk cliffs that rival (if not surpass!) the "white cliffs of Dover".  I love this panorama that Chris shot -- those itsy-bitsy dots next to the cliff are people!

If you want a little outdoor exploring in the UK, this is an easy place to visit.  With National Rail's GroupSave and an unlimited Brighton bus pass, the three of us did all our traveling to-and-from London Bridge Station and all along the coast for less than £30 (total!).  Not a bad deal to sit back, relax, and take in the sights of the countryside!

Although white chalky cliffs are all along England's southern and southeastern coast, the big beautiful ones are at Seven Sisters.  Since there's no town or port to protect, the Seven Sisters are allowed to slough off their outer layers and reveal new bright-white chalk.

Once off the #12 (or #13x) bus at the park's cute little visitor center, it's a 3 mile hike along country paths through peaceful fields and dales to the coastline.  Unfortunately, for us, it was an extremely hot day for the UK, but the views were worth it!

There are two viewing sites -- one overlooks the cliffs and the other is at the cliff base.  We first aimed for the overlook and then hiked down to the beach at the cliff base.

That should be "beach" because it was rocks rocks rocks!  Dozens of wide and extremely fast moving streams kept us from fording all the way to the base of the cliffs, but we did wade a bit in the nice cool water.  Chris and I figured that returning to go tubing should be on our list of UK-to-dos!

We wrapped up the day at the trail-head pub, the Golden Galleon  ;-)
Brits can do a mean savory pie, and fish n' chips is no joke!  The fish they give you is as big as your forearm!

Chevrons for Shawn & Nicki

Our very good friends, Shawn and Nicki, are having a baby boy this fall. It's their first, and our first as Uncle and Auntie! We cannot wait for this little bugger to be born! His due date is Chris' birthday, so we're crossing our fingers (or as they say in Swedish, "holding our thumbs") that he makes his appearance on time.  :-)

For one of Nicki's baby showers, we sent over the first of many gifts for this little guy. An heirloom afghan in red, white, and grey. I sized it so that Shawn and Nicki can use it in a car-seat or pram or just as an easy wrap... a really versatile size (about 25" by 30").

Chevrons are all the rage recently, or so my mama says. Hand-crafting for boys can be very VERY hard, but chevrons are a great solution. And the color choices for a child of Shawn and Nicki are easy picks! Go Pack!

For the design, I modified existing chevron patterns.  In particular, since I was using two strands, I shortened the stretches of stitches for the 'straight' sections. These are some chevron patterns that I like:  Drops' "ZigZag" or Attic24's "Ripple" or Caron's "Zig Zag".

I used two strands and crocheted with a giant-sized US-P hook. The yarn is Drops Lima (red: 3609 | white: 1101 | medium grey: 8465). Since it's a blend of wool and alpaca, it's bouncy soft but will last a lifetime or two or three!

Hampstead Heath

Whenever we get even a hint of a nice day, we go out exploring.  You can't wait for perfect blue skies around these parts!  On Saturday, though, we had absolutely beautiful blue skies and 18°C temps (~65°F) -- perfect exploring weather!

Sometimes we go into the city, and sometimes we wander out into the surrounding English countryside or small towns and villages.

This weekend, we went north to Hampstead Heath.  A quick jaunt on the Jubilee Line to catch the London Overground got us about four miles north of the city.  And all for just a quid fifty with no parking or traffic headaches!  Have we ever mentioned how much we LOVE mass-transit!

In the Hampstead Heath area, there's an enormous park with tall grasses and picnic-ready lawns, woods and running trails, ponds for swimming and swan-watching, and (of course) an estate house Kenwood -- to remind you that you are in the country of aristocracy...

There's also a great high elevation (a whoopin' 322 ft!) at Parliament Hill, so you get an excellent view of the London skyline.

These pictures below show some of the woods and the estate grounds around Kenwood Estate.  Though the 'big house' was under renovation, its tiny garden shop and restaurant, kitchen gardens, and ponds and bridges were magnificent on their own!

Blue Mondays (British Edition)

If you're a fan of 'House Hunters International', then you've all seen them and raised an eyebrow.
Yes, our washing machine is in the kitchen -- haha!  And if you're wondering about the size, we can shove in a load about half the size that a traditional American washer holds.

Sometimes these machines can also dry the clothes, but they're usually crap (or so we've been told).  So, we air-dry all our clothes.  We worried at first about how the heck we were gonna dry a thousand socks?  Thankfully, our bathroom is equipped with a handy-dandy radiator/towel-warmer.  We haven't yet graduated to the outdoor clothesline like we see around most places here.  But maybe in the summer months, we'll hang our towels to warm in the sun.

Air-drying is more energy-efficient -- about 4% of a household's energy goes toward clothes drying.  So, I guess we've lowered our energy bill by about that much every month, too!

And isn't our boy Jimmy a great little model?  Well... I guess he's not actually that little!  ;-)

Reading Writing & Arithmetic

This week, I took my UK literacy and numeracy exams.  ALL teachers have to take these two exams regardless of their teaching level or their subject area -- nursery teachers all the way up to Calculus III teachers!

I was actually REALLY worried about these exams.  But not in the usual compliment-fishing kind of way -- nope, I was worried about the format and, well, the Britishy-ness of them.

Panic coursed through me on the spelling section.  About 1800 words (at least!) are spelled differently in the UK.  Amanda Mazzaro -- thanks for this webpage about all the differences!
Now add in some of the usual English stumbling blocks like "occurrence" vs. "occurance" vs. "occurrance"...  and we wonder why kids and English-language-learners can't frakin' spell!?!?

And don't get me started on British grammar -- no Oxford comma (ever!) and no periods after Mr./Mrs./Ms. and a distinct lack of commas for clauses and a very liberal use of parentheses.
As a self-and-community-assessed grammar-queen, I found myself shouting obscenities during my practice exams (and whispering them during the actual exams...)

For the numeracy section, I thought I'd have no worries.  BUT, the format!  Nearly half the exam is orally-presented word problems -- and you only have 18 SECONDS to solve each one.  And the lady only reads the problem twice.  Although the content isn't hard (especially if you're practiced and in the teaching realm), the problems are meant to confuse you and no calculators are allowed.

For example:

Absolutely nothing hard about the problem, right?
Now try to scribble down all the details (this text isn't up on screen; it's just the nice British lady reading through the headphones) and don't mix up the UK's level names with the actual data... arrrgh!!


For you educators who feel taxed by the requirement to ensure test questions have no contextual bias, I really encourage you to try taking a couple exams from the UK (like, actually take them yourself!).  For the first time, I really felt the frustration of being distracted by irrelevant context rather than being able to focus on relevant content.

See if you'd be considered literate in the UK!  Here are links to practice the literacy exams and the numeracy exams :-)

Chubb Keys

At our lease-signing for our flat (both here and in Sweden), we were handed a set of keys, including that fancy key on the left. I squealed like a little girl when I first saw it -- to the complete confusion of the Swedes.  And, to be honest, even this time in the UK, I was just as excited.  I then had to explain that back in the U.S., this kind of key was only found in fairy tales or it opened scary doors.  We even called it a skeleton key.  Here, though, they call it a 'chubb' key (which, of course, made Chris and I giggle at such a silly name). Surprisingly, this type of old-school lock mechanism is hailed as largely unpickable -- apparently, even according to Sherlock Holmes! It seems so funny to us, though, to just stick your key in a see-to-the-other-side keyhole and turn...