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Churchill’s Palace of Wonders

Blenheim Palace grandly emerges from a cluster of verdant trees. Its amber walls appear to glisten in the English sunlight. Helen has recommended that we enter the back gate of the palace for just this view. It is stunning. To the right of the palace is a great stone bridge crossing a serene lake with ducks and swans lazily paddling past. We make our way across lush, yet closely cropped grass to the main entrance just beyond rows of tour buses which mar the reverie that one could be approaching the palace on important business. It’s still pretty grand though.

 

Blenheim Palace is the home of the current Duke of Marlborough, the 11th of a long line dukes carrying the same title, and was most notably the birthplace of Winston Churchill. In 1705, the first Duke of Marlborough, Sir John Churchill, a distant cousin of Winston, was given the property and funds to build a palace by Queen Anne after winning a crucial battle at Blenheim. A copy of the note that he wrote to the queen announcing his victory is on display in one of the many ornate state rooms. It was written on the back of a pub bill. The tapestries in that same state room tell the story of the victorious battle. A 110-pound silver centerpiece in the Salon shows the duke riding on his horse on the way to share his news with the queen. An American, and a Vanderbilt to boot, was a Duchess of Marborough in the 1940s. Her portrait appears throughout the house and in one of the state rooms is a carved golden bassinet, a replica of one that her mother saw in an Italian museum and insisted that her grandson sleep in something similar. Just down the hallway is the room where Churchill was born and exhibit featuring his letters, writings, family portraits and his water paintings. Did you know that his art has been featured on Hallmark Cards? Me, neither. I love learning random facts like that, which made this an enjoyable tour. The tour guide looked like he could have been one of the previous dukes, old and stately. One of the most impressive rooms inside the home was the library, said to be the second longest library in a private home in the UK. Not a bad statistic when you can also boast that you have the largest organ in a private home in that same library. It’s a large grey pipe organ sitting at the opposite end of the library from a marble statue of Queen Anne. Also, in the room are photos of past presidents and dignitaries who have visited Blenheim like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, along with clear signs that a duke lives there such as an invitation to the wedding of Charles and Diana.

And, as impressive as the inside of the palace is, the outside is even more so with gorgeous grounds and gardens. Helen and I decide to take a walk, a common British past-time, and plenty of others have the same idea. Apparently, locals like to spend their weekends at the palace, packing a picnic or just strolling its paths. We start at the Water Terraces at the back of the palace where little cherubs balance on the edge of still pools lined with precisely cut bushes. It’s the perfect day for a walk and we need to walk off the bacon sandwiches and cream tea that we had for lunch earlier. It is cool with a slight breeze and moments of brilliant sunshine. We walk along the lake and spot an interesting tree with a sturdy low hanging branch and wonder how it grew without snapping. We stop to take photos of dainty waterlilies a few steps away, then walk on to pass a water cascade and into a beautiful rose garden with at least 10 varieties of roses ranging in color from coral to red and yellow to white.

 

 

elen and I could have spent even more time exploring the grounds, but we had to make our way back to Oxford to meet one of Helen’s friends for dinner. On the 25-minute bus ride from Woodstock back to Oxford we sat in the front row at the top of the double-decker bus for a fun view of a poppy field and a plane flying into the Oxford airport. Our first stop in Oxford was the Turf Tavern, apparently the place to stop for a beer in Oxford. We enter through a narrow cobblestone alley way and find ourselves in a crowed courtyard of rosy-faced students, older academics and familes with kids. We can’t find a seat outside, so we duck inside the stone-walled pub with low ceilings and mismatched wood furniture and banquettes. We finally find a spot to sit and save a spot for Helen’s friend Duncan, a writer for Newsweek, covering China. Helen sends me off to get some beers and while at the bar, I remember that she said that I had to have a Pimms, so I order one and get a cider for Helen. The Pimms is my new favorite drink. I failed to take a picture of one because I liked it so much. Basically, it is gin-based liquor, reddish in color, mixed with ginger ale and garnished with fruits and some vegetables. Mine had oranges, apples and cucumbers. It was so refreshing and delicious.

Duncan arrived with a ginger beer and snacked on potato chips, or crisps as they are called here, a common thing to do while having a beer in a pub. We started talking immediately about the journalism news of the week–the shutdown of the News of the World, Britain’s largest tabloid paper owned by Rupert Murdoch. NoW, as it is called, was at the center of a wiretapping scandal, alledgely tapping phones of celebrities, soldiers and missing children, in order to get private details and the first scoop on big stories. The scandal even touched the prime minister’s spokesperson, a former editor. Duncan and other British journalists suspect that Murdoch shotdown the paper to take any heat off his son in top management at the paper. We went on to talk about Weiner-gate and other topics surrounding the sad state of journalism before we all made our way to a quaint Bengali restaurant. We dined on mildly spiced chicken and lamb dishes as the conversation turned to China’s desperate desire to become more modern at the expense of its amazing ancient cultural architecture with skyscrapers and malls replacing gardens and old homes.We also laugh at ridiculously translated signs that we encountered while visiting China. Duncan recalls a sign on a drink vending machine recently, which was loosely translated into English: Don’t share cans unless you are lovers. Before we know it, it is almost midnight and we part ways on a clear, cool and pleasant evening. Honeysuckle blooms perfume our slow stroll home.

 

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Soaking in Bath and Finding Jane Austen

I think I was a Roman noble woman in a past life. I am certain that I frequented the Roman baths at Bath, known as Aquae Sulis, in that former life. It would explain why I like spas so much. I would have started in the hot spring waters, about 114 F, of the Great Bath, relaxing in one of its alcoves after my swim and maybe purchasing the latest Egyptian fragrance from one of the roaming vendors. I’d probably move to one of the steam rooms in the West Bath and take a cooling dip in the natural spring waters of the frigidarium, a wonderful cleansing treatment for my pores. It’s hard not to get immersed in the rich history presented at the Roman ruins of Bath, the original health spa. It clearly deserves its status as a World Hertitage Site from UNESCO. The two-hour long audio tour is an expert bit of storytelling, laying out the historical, cultural, archeological and architectural significance of the place in a very accessible way. It is truly stunning to see how well preserved the ruins are from the baths to a temple worshipping the wise goddess Sulis-Minerva. I loved learning about how the Romans of Aquae Sulis turned to Sulis-Minerva to dole out punishment to people who had wronged them, hiring professional curse-writers to put their offenses to paper or pewter and tossing them into her sacred springs for her consideration. A perfectly-preserved bronze head from a statue of the goddess at the temple is the crowned jewel of the entire site. While wandering through the relatively manageable crowds, I was was struck by a small group of students who looked to be no more than 6, cradling audio phones almost half the size of their bodies to their ears and scribbling notes on the ruins on clipboards. At the end of the tour, you are invited to sample the spring’s restorative waters, which I do. If you like your water warm with the taste of a copper penny, you’ll enjoy it. The water was definitely minerally and you can imagine the infirmed “taking the water” like taking Phillips Milk of Magnesia. Not tasty, but something you have to do in the hopes of feeling better.

 The water tasting takes place in the “Pump Room,” a dining space built on top of the temple ruins that harkens back to the 18th century history of Bath. A piano player plays a delightful tune and I decide to have lunch and imagine couples waltzing beneath a golden chandelier. I am starved after the two-hour tour and order a roast beef sandwich with tomato soup and fries along with a ginger beer. I relish the fact that I’ve missed another one of Brittain’s unexpected cloud bursts as I lunch. I don’t have much time to linger because I want to visit the Jane Austen Center about a 10-minute walk away. A top-hatted, white-haired gentleman greets me as I enter the center to explore more about another one of my favorite authors. Jane Austen lived in Bath in a house similar the one that the center is housed in a few doors down. The city is featured prominently in her first and last novels “Northhanger Abbey” and “Persuasion.” If you are a fan of Austen, you’ll appreciate this thoughtful, but small exhibit placing her life and work in context in Bath. I studied a copy of a portait of Jane as drawn by her sister and a letter written in her own hand. The Regency Tea Room sits on the top floor of the Jane Austen Center and this would be a perfect place for afternoon tea. I order the Jane Austen Blend of loose teas and the Bath bun, a sweet yeasty bun dotted with raisins. Once again, I marvel at my luck dodging a particularly fierce rain storm with lighting shooting from blackened clouds. I am cozy in a room full of portraits of Austen and Mr. Darcy; harpsicord music plays in the background. I’ve gone from feeling Roman to positively British.

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Smarty Pants on Parade

There are lots of smart people hanging around Oxford, in case you didn’t know. The place is lousy with them–the confidently smart, the unassumingly smart, the old and smart, the young and smart. My friend Helen is one of these smart people. She has just written a book, “Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China,” on the role of women and home economics in forming modern-day China. She’s a tenured Chinese history professor at Virginia Tech University and she’s a research associate for one of the leading academics on Chinese history. This is how I come to attend a lecture on western journalists covering China. It interests me too, given my journalism background. The panel is made up of two journalists and two academics who discuss the challenges of covering China accurately and trying to avoid spreading stereotypes about the nation and its people. Covering any topic honestly and accurately is the goal of any journalist, but covering a place as complex and with a history as vast as China’s appears to be particulary difficult, and few do it well, according to this panel. We are in a room full of equally smart undergraduate and graduate students from China who ask all the questions we want to ask and crowd the panelists as if they are rock stars once the lecture is over.

After the lecture, Helen and I join her equally accomplished friends and colleagues for Sichuan Chinese food in an building that looks like a lecture hall called The Old School. Her friends Amy, Jen, and Lily share her interest in China and they order from the menu in fluent Chinese. It is impressive and an impressive array of food arrives at our table. It is all spicy and delicious and we cool our mouths with Tsingtao beers.

It’s the end of a day full of marveling at the history smart people at Oxford. Earlier, I went to the Ashmolean, the oldest public museum in the UK, chock full of artifacts from early European, Asian and Middle Eastern cultures. I was stopped by Powhatan’s Mantle. Powhatan was the chief of the Powhatans when John Smith arrived at Jamestown. There is debate as to whether or not Powhatan’s mantle was a cloak or a wall hanging, but it reminded me of Aboriginal art, circles of beads surrounded beaded images of two animals, maybe deer, on either side of a man. The museum did a great job of linking the intersection of cultures, art and religion through trade and wars that brought these diverse peoples in contact. It’s why Spanish tiles look like Morrocan tiles, which also look like Turkish tiles. I couldn’t make it though the entire four floors of the collection. I found myself practically running though the exhibit rooms before I had to meet Helen for lunch in the museum’s cafe.

The smarty pants tour continued through a few more of Oxford’s colleges and sites. We wove our way through trongs of tourists and prospective Oxford students along the way, making our way to the courtyard of the Bodleian Library, one of the world’s oldest public libraries. At New College, we marvelled at its beautiful gardens. Due to a shout out from my former colleague Beth, we stopped at St. Edmund’s Hall, the last of the medieval halls, which actually looked quite modern and quaint at the same time. It reminded us most of our alma mater, Swarthmore, somehow. I think Magdalen College was one of my favorites of the bunch, its chapel boasted a replica of DaVinci’s Last Supper. The cloisters were bursting with white hydrangeas against a vibrantly green lawn. One of England’s famed red phone booths was a pleasant surprise along with a deer park, where the deer put on a little show for us. Legend has it that the deer here inspired C.S. Lewis to include the fawn character in his Narnia chronicles. We stopped for scones and a pot of tea at the country’s oldest coffeehouse, maybe the world’s first, Queen’s Lane, where apparently Tolkien, Lewis and other liked to have literary chats. And, we ended our tour at Queen’s College, site of the lecture, which had a very Baroque feel. It’s chapel featured a guilded eagle, chandeliers and a ceiling painting ala the Sistine Chapel. Having seen smartness through the ages and walked along the path of past smarties, I am now feeling rather smart myself.

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Narrow Boating and Walking in the Cotswolds

Mark and Helen are Great Britain’s answer to RVers. They sold their home to follow their dream of navigating England’s 2,000 miles of canals and inland waterways on their 6.9 foot wide narrowboat called the Morialta II. Helen and I met Mark and Helen as we walked along the Oxford Canal on our way to the train station. They were drifting along as we walked and struck up a conversation. They’d been traveling since May and guessed they would reach their goal by October, but they were taking their time. They’d just come from the Henley Royal Regatta festivities. Mark and Helen looked like they didn’t have a care in the world. Helen wore a pink tube top, while Mark sported a blue and white stripped polo shirt, fitting for the captain of his very own narrowboat. Mark and Helen are also quite trusting. They invited us onto their boat for a tour and a quick ride down the canal towards the train station. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I grabbed Mark’s arm and jumped on the rear where he had been steering. Helen took us the length of the boat about 60-feet of compact living space including an expandable bed, full bath with small tub and shower, kitchen with washing machine and living room with working fireplace. After our quick tour, Mark asked us if we wanted to steer. Helen declined, but there was no way I was going to pass up the chance. He turned over the tiller without a second thought and just at a point where there were other narrowboats to the left and the canal’s edge to the right. I found myself drifting toward the boats, narrowly missing another narrowboat. I over-corrected and navigated the boat into the canal wall at which point Mark thought better of his decision to let me navigate, cooly taking the tiller back from me. It was awesome! We only had a few more minutes before we had to catch our train to the Cotswolds, so we said our good-byes hoping Mark and Helen would stay in touch.

We made our train just in time, which was ridiculously hot and stuffy, but had cart service. I found that interesting on a commuter train. We were on our way to Moreton-in-Marsh, a town in The Cotswolds, which is basically the British countryside known for its quaint villages and old manor houses. There is a popular open market in Moreton-in-Marsh on Tuesdays, so we thought it would be a good day to visit. Sadly, it started to rain as we arrived and the market was fairly small, selling a hodgepodge of items, from shoes to fresh fruit and vegetables. We bought a pound of cherries to take home and then wandered around town stopping at the church. Helen pointed out the fact that all the buildings in the Cotswolds are distinguished by their yellow brick. We also stopped by a little art gallery where I bought two items representative of my journey, a pair of painted wire robins. The proprietor of the gallery suggested that we walk to the town arboretum, but first we decided to have lunch at one of the many tea shops in Moreton-in-Marsh. We chose The Marshmallow on the main street with its proper country decor of white table and chairs, pale blue table dressings and an outdoor conservatory, what we Americans would call an enclosed porch. I dined on a sausage sandwich and Helen had a bacon and mushroom sandwich. We shared a pot of tea and a slice of tasty carrot and ginger sponge cake.

 We were thankful that the rain had stopped as we started the 20-minute walk to the arboretum, unfortunately about 10 minutes into our walk it started to rain again. It was enough time to get a few pretty pictures of rolling hills dotted with grazing sheep before we decided to head back to the train.On our walk back to Helen’s we stopped at one of her favorite pubs in Oxford, The Anchor, for a beer and light fare. I ordered the IPA and we decided to share the woodpigeon with a butternut squash risotto and sage frites. It was delish.

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Oxford: Old World Meets New

 Helen was sitting in Nero’s cafe with sheets of paper surrounding her like dining companions. It was great to see a familiar face after about 12 hours of travel and satisfying to know that I’d made it to Oxford. Helen looked like this is where she belonged, in a cafe grading papers, thoughtful and happy. I am looking forward to getting a peek at her professorial life.

I am bone tired. I didn’t sleep well on the flight due to a wailing baby and an older row mate who made frequent trips to the bathroom. I could barely keep my eyes open on the hour-and-a-half bus ride to Oxford, so I missed any scenery along the way. Helen vowed to keep me awake so that I could adjust to the five-hour time difference. We start by heading to the building where she works and dropping off my stuff. I meet a few of her research colleagues Kim, Lily, Leigh and Akiko and we grab lunch at Oxford’s covered market. Fruit stands, fish stalls and a butcher’s shop co-mingle with leather, paper and an assundry of other stores. Georgina’s, a funky cafe with pink walls, playbill and movie posters decorating its walls, sits in the middle and we decide to dine there. Helen and I catch up over salad and wraps and extoll the virtues of living lives without bounderies. She is contemplating taking on a third year as a research associate at Oxford because having tenure gives her that freedom, while I contemplate life after layoffs which gives me the freedom to travel and explore new opportunities. We count ourselves as lucky.

After Helen wraps up a few loose ends, we head to Christ Church College, which is engulfed with hoards of roving prepubescent teens, presumably fans of Harry Potter. There’s a tour that points out the hall on campus which inspired the Hogwarts dining scenes in the Harry Potter movies. But there is much more to see, including the goregeous stained glass windows and intricate ribbed ceilings of the Christ Church Cathedral, the smallest cathedral in England. We were reminded of our middle school religion class where we had to study the Washington National Cathedral’s bays. The courtyards are immaculate and men in derby hats are available to offer information and just add an air of authenticity to the place. Christ Church College is just one of 36 colleges dating as far back as the 11th century. What’s interesting is that they are surrounded by a modern bustling burg filled with shops, buses and taxis. I expected a sleepier place with men in graduate robes standing in a square having philosopical debates.

 

 

After touring Christ Church, we go to The Bear, a local pub where the tradition was for Oxford men to clip off their ties and leave them at the bar in exchange for a half pint of beer. We order half pints of cider, no ties clipped, and sit in the garden out back. The cider tastes stronger than any I’ve tasted in the states. I am looking forward to becoming a beer and cider conneisseur while here.

I am starting to fade, so we head back to Helen’s quaint flat that looks Victorian from the outside, but like a page from a 1970’s issue of Home annd Garden on the inside. She is renting the place from a woman who blends 70s chic with Asian design; a very ecclectic mix. Helen makes chinese dumplings, stir-fried green beans and a bamboo shoot and mushroom dish. Her friend Kim joins us and I learn more about the ins and outs of being a researcher at Oxford. There’s tea, wine, cookies and fruit. A nice end to a very long day.