A week in the UK, a week in Paris

Jonathan had a conference (EuMW2015) at which to deliver a paper, wanted to visit a colleague at Southamption and one in London, and it was Merinda's turn to have an educational trip, so he and Merinda set off to be away for almost 2 weeks.

The trip in each direction was nasty---32 to 36 hours---and that was with the slightly more-expensive tickets, to cut out a few extra hours connecting. The route out was AKL-LAX-LHR, and the return would be CDG-LHR-LAX-AKL.

LAX had, of course, the latest huge advertising/entertainment display. It was pretty big, about 15m high, and maybe 4m wide, perhaps with 10Mpixels, phew.

It had a dazzling variety of sequences from the pile of luggage with falling scarf that you see here to a B&W reconstruction of a silent film sequence with many levels of open windows on a clock tower.

We stayed with Bill in Four Marks. This locale has the excellent advantage that it is on a rescued and restored heritage steam-train line.

Bill clearly loves this setup. Merinda has always appreciated atmosphere and steam gives you that in spades.

Here you can see Bill waxing lyrical to Merinda at Alresford station about the railway club and its 400-odd members, but you get the feeling that Bill's daughter Carys has heard it before... meanwhile I used the 8-16mm wide-angle lens to include the hefty motion of the huge locomotive in the picture.

At the campus, Bill and I did our best impression of Norrell and Strange, courtesy of that lens.

It makes lousy photographs, but the campus is very impressive in EE terms. Second only to Imperial in reputation, Southamption EE has about 100 faculty and lives in two and two half buildings, including one with a full fab. They have a whole acoustics group. They have enechoic rooms, acoustic and electromagnetic. They have a wind tunnel into which you can put big things. All of this tends to depress one, when one remembers what little Waikato in weeny New Zealand is like.

They also have a condemned building, in which EE once resided, but whose demolition is proving to be an issue. Ah, nowhere is perfect, well not in the UK or NZ anyway.

We were taken through Winchester, a particularly medieval and picturesque town in England, just shortly north of Southampton.

Merinda and I walked the cloisters of Winchester Cathedral.

Winchester is one of those truly ancient places where the roads are cobbled and the buildings and waterways integrate intimately.

We spent a day learning how to take a narrowboat through English locks. This is a unique experience.

In London our hotel proved to be close to where Sherlock filmed the Baker-Street scenes, so we naturally took selfies and photos of each other, to the amusement of tourists doing likewise.

Jonathan has had a long association with the statue of Peter Pan, and we visited it to add a couple of images to the canon, images that are part of the composite below. The little fellow in white in the top-left photo is Jonathan, aged about 2.5. The bottom-left image includes Jonathan and his grandmother Dorothy Amy White, and his Teddy Bear, who still resides with him. The middle photos were taken in 1980 and 1981. The right-hand images were taken on this trip.

We needed to kill a day or two, so we took in the Natural History museum which is near Imperial. Fortunately Mr Charles Darwin was available, and we took the requisite selfies.

We also visited the zoo, especially the butterfly house, as Merinda has a special place for these creatures since our visit to the butterfly place in Penang on a previous trip.

We did some regular tourist things, including the London Eye, new since my last visit.

On to Paris, via the Chunnel.

This photo shows Merinda and I looking out of the window of our hotel room, always a pleasant activity in small Parisian hotels.

This is our hotel room, courtesy that lens.

Our hotel (Hotel de Sevigne) proved to be close to the Aero Club of France, and as Merinda is currently learning to fly in her school special subject, we thought she shold send them this picture.

We met Dan & Steph at the Arc de Triumph on the Sunday.

Only the French would think of this: Tour Paris in a rolling restaurant and bar, the Bustronome.

We toured it more on foot, including right up to the Sacre Coeur.

In the evenings we did touristy things. Of course, the Tour Eiffel is magnificent, but Merinda and I did not climb it, mostly because of huge queues, huge in spite of the fact that it was mid-week and with school back in.

I delivered my paper...

...and talked to various important people.

...and Merinda, wanting to visit every Disneyland, or at least wanting to be able to say that she has visited them all, was bent on making the Paris one. Now she has covered Anaheim, Tokyo, and Paris. There is some of the little princess left inside this girl.

Paris Disneyland does not offer the same level of pleasure and service as the Californian version, by the way. Costng more, they close at 6PM. They are also hugely busy, even mid-week in a week after school has gone back after the summer.

Nevertheless, one can see Chez Remy, with a hint of Gustav's in the background.

Having utterly failed both in London and Paris to find a single tasteful T-shirt, on the last night, I raced out alone to where I remembered having bought the wonderful chemisettes with which I returned in 1981. Those shops were still there, and I did find a handful of great shirts. The shops are not far from Notre Dame, and I stopped for a last selfie.

Au revoir, Paris.