I played with fossils!!!!

Mr. P.

I thought I would start off today's post with Mr. P. (or is it Mr. Pea? I could never get confirmation from anybody), the peacock who strolls around the grounds and gardens of Quex House and Park. I realized I didn't get around to mentioning him in my last mega-post, and it was an omission keenly felt. There were a few relatively sunny days (remember, this is England, so amount of sunlight is DEFINITELY relative) where Julia and I decided to have lunch outside, and Mr. P. always came by begging for food. Julia was happy to throw him little tidbits of salad, fruit, and - once - a piece of chicken (I know. Apparently Mr. Pea has no Family loyalties. And yes, I had to look up how closely chickens and peafowl are related - they are both Galliformes. Taxonomic lesson of the day? Check.), but I was afraid to give him anything because I could just see him choking on it and then I would forever be known as the researcher who killed the Quex Peacock. And nobody wants that nomen.

Mr. P. and Julia share a moment of mutual skepticism.

While we're on the subject of Quex and the Powell-Cotton collection, just in case any of my colleagues find themselves working there in the future, be forewarned that Birchington-on-sea is, shall we say, a rather small seaside town with not a whole lot going on in the off season. I frankly find it hard to believe it's really that hopping during the on season, but the locals assure me it is. (Which probably means the tourist population jumps from two to ten or something.) You've basically got one main street with the shops and restaurants (by which I mean two branches of the same grocery store, a few fish & chips and Chinese take-aways, one each fairly decent Indian and Thai place, half a dozen cafes that are only open for lunch, one rather nice English farm-to-table type place, and several pubs). Julia and I found ourselves spending part of just about every evening in Christie's pub, mainly due to 1) a nice Kroenenberg on tap, 2) the free wifi, and 3) a general lack of anywhere else to go. So, in short, my recommendation for this collection is: if you can bring along a research buddy, do it!

But enough of cold, rainy, dreary England - for the last three weeks I've been basking in the beautiful, mild, sunny weather of South Africa!! Johannesburg (or Jo'burg or Jozi) became a major city because of (and retains its prominence due to) gold mining; gold was first discovered here in the 1880s, and the fortunes of the city (and the country) have relied on it ever since. South Africa of course spent much of the twentieth century under apartheid (or apartheid-like practices before it was formally institutionalized), so although the governmentally-driven segregation and repression are technically over, huge social and economic disparities still exist between black and white South Africans. Johannesburg in particular is said to bear the scars of apartheid more than some of the other major SA cities and is thus not as popular a tourist destination as places like Cape Town, but parts of the city are definitely undergoing gentrification and/or revitalization. I'm staying in Melville, a small part of town with one major street known for its restaurants, bars, and small shops. It's a nice, walkable area, and my hosts, Alison and Andrew (and their son Adam), are great. Andrew is a psychology professor at Wits and gives me a lift into the university every day. They have been super welcoming, and I (okay, mostly the games on my iPad) have been a big hit with Adam. Actually, as I write this, he's giving me a Nat Geo kids magazine quiz about how normal you are. (Update: apparently, I'm pretty normal. Only in the world of Nat Geo...).

View of Jo'burg from Carlton Centre.

Here in Johannesburg I am back to working with human skeletal remains, and I'm using the Dart Collection, a huge collection housed in the anatomy department of the medical school of the University of the Witswatersrand (known more simply as Wits). The bones are overall in pretty good shape, except most of the ribs were cut during dissection and do not always refit terribly well. Sad face. Other than that, my data collection is rolling along, and I find it incredibly hard to believe I've essentially been doing this since June! For some reason, every time I move on to a new place I feel like I'll be able to get so much extra work done in the evenings because I won't know anyone, and every single time I underestimate my ability to meet and connect with people. On the one hand, it's great because it leads to lots of fun experiences, but it also means I'm going to have a huge pile of data to sift through come February...

Library Lawns and Great Hall, Wits

I hadn't given much thought to Thanksgiving other than the fact that I would be missing it this year (and missing the traditional pre-Thanksgiving dinner party I always throw for my NYC friends - always a great time), but after only a couple of days in Jozi I found myself with an invite to Thanksgiving! One of the professors in the department is from the States and was having a party, and she promptly invited me upon learning I too was American. Most of the crowd ending up being SA paleoanthropologists (yes, I ate turkey with Ron Clarke and Bernard Zipfel), and there may have also been ostrich carpaccio on the menu, but it was Thanksgiving!

For my first weekend in Jozi, I spent a day poking around some of the shops in Melville and taking care of errands like obtaining a local SIM card for my travel phone. On Sunday, I decided to join a group hike in the Melville Koppies Nature Reserve. The reserve is the only area in the city that actively conserves the ridges and flora of the original landscape (koppie is the Afrikaans word for small mountain, ridge, etc). There are also both Stone Age and Iron Age settlements in the reserve. The hike lasted for a little over three hours and wended its way through the eastern, central, and western parts of the koppies, and luckily it was a beautiful morning. The guides were very knowledgeable and pointed out many unique plants, such as the 'underground tree' whose roots and trunk are, as the name implies, all beneath the surface, while the terminal branches and leaves basically spring from the ground.

View from Melville Koppies East

 

Melville Koppies Central.

Another aspect of the varied koppies landscape.

In the biggest news of my South African adventure, last week I was lucky enough to score an invite to the fossil site of Rising Star. For those of you outside the paleoanthropology world, Rising Star is a new cave site located outside of Johannesburg in the Cradle of Humankind that in its first few weeks has already yielded over 1,200 hominin (human ancestor) fossils. To put that in perspective, it is an absolutely staggering amount of material for ANY fossil human site, and with further excavations will probably end up being the most prolific hominin site EVER. The cave was found by recreational cavers, who happened to mention it to a geologist friend at Wits University, who happened to mention it to Lee Berger. After securing funding for a preliminary investigation, the call went out for small humans with caving and excavating experience, and several short female anthropologists were selected to excavate the cave. With National Geographic funding the expedition, there was lots of $$$ to spend on things like multiple cameras down in the cave system so that everyone above ground could watch the excavations in real time.

Cave entrance, with the bundle of blue extension cords powering all of the video cameras down below.

The main chamber with the fossils is pretty open, but to get there the excavators have to essentially squeeze/inch through a 22 meter long tunnel. The whole thing is just absolutely wild, and the amount but also the state of the fossils is amazing. I went out to the site at the invitation of Scott Williams, an NYU professor (and one of my PhD committee members!) who is working on the project. I drove out to the site with Jason, one of the lecturers at Wits, who happens to be friends with one of the cave excavators. We had intended to just tour the site, but there was so much work to be done that Scott asked if I was willing to help out for a bit - so I got to play with fossils!!! New fossils!! I spent several hours helping Scott sort, identify, and catalog fragments of bone. It was pretty fan-freaking-tastic. Imagine sitting in stiflingly hot canvas tent under the highveld afternoon sun playing with bones. Awesome, right?! Of course right!! Incredible, even. Just incredible. Hard to believe that they've barely scratched the surface of what's down in the cave, too. The preliminary field season has now ended, but you can read about it here in the Nat Geo blog if you're interested (but stay away from the comments section because people are nutty).

Scott and his knife at the site of his (un)heroic stab wound - the entrance to the Science tent. (Science goes on inside this tent. You can tell from the sign. Stabbing yourself in the leg is generally not part of Science, but on this day it was.)

The Command Center tent of Rising Star

After our (awesome) day at Rising Star, Jason and I decided to visit the site of Sterkonfontein on our way back to Jo'burg. Over the last seventy years or so Sterkfontein has yielded some of the most famous of the South African fossils, including Sts 5 (Mrs Ples) and Stw 573 (Little Foot). As with the majority of South African paleo sites, Sterkfontein is a set of limestone caves. Most of it was blasted out by miners and so is pretty open, but even knowing that going in I was still not expecting the sheer scale of the place - it's impressive. To view the cave you have to be part of a guided tour, and although we didn't really need anyone to explain to us the importance of Mrs. Ples for human evolution, the guide did do a good job and had some interesting anecdotes to tell.

Sterkfontein, inside the entrance.

Locked entrance to the Silberberg Grotto, home of Little Foot.

Underground lake, Sterkfontein.

Emerging from the Sterkfontein caves, leading up to Member 4.

Member 4 - the small plaque in the middle marks the find location of Mrs. Ples.

View from Sterkfontein across the Cradle of Humankind - Drimolen and Kromdraai are both in the distance.

This past weekend, I joined Andrew for the 5K Parkrun in Rietvlei Park on Saturday morning. Parkrun is a really cool organization that holds free 5K runs every weekend; you can register online and get a bar code that tracks all of your runs. Andrew recently got his 'red shirt' for completing 50 runs, so he was super excited to wear it that morning for the first time. The Rietvlei course is essentially trail running and even though it started at 8am, it was still HOT. One thing I learned that morning - scratch that, two things - 1) Johannesburg is located in the highveld region of South Africa, which means it is 5,751 feet (1,753 m) above sea level, and 2) it is REALLY hard to run at 5,751 feet above sea level when you are out of shape. But, even though my time was not impressive, I did manage to run the whole thing, so that felt pretty good.

In the afternoon, I joined Andrew, Alison, and Adam for the Christmas Market in Parkview. Vendors set up tents for the weekend with all kinds of crafts and such to buy; there was also a large stage that throughout the day hosted performances ranging from a middle school girls marimba band, a high school girls drumming and dance performance, a kid on a trumpet working his way through 'O Come All Ye Faithful,' some cheerleaders, a comedian, and a guy auctioning off a giant watermelon for charity. If I thought the morning run was hot, man, by the afternoon it was toasty. I sat in the shade with Adam for a while to watch some of the performances, but eventually we all retreated to the champagne and oyster tent and a good time was had by all.

I'll end today by saying farewell to Madiba - it's definitely a profound time to be here in South Africa. I'm glad I had the chance to come here and learn more about his extraordinary life. What a place this world could be, with more people like him, hey?

Hero.

Hearts and bones. (My data collection soundtrack has been a bit Paul Simon-heavy lately...)

Well, somehow I thought I'd be able to detail the rest of my U.K. adventures before actually leaving England, but that has not turned out to be the case! I will therefore be summarizing the last month (I know, seriously, where did it go?) from the couch of my awesome little guest cottage in Johannesburg, South Africa. Yup, I've switched continents again!

One of the reasons I've had no extra time to devote to blogging is due to the fact that I've spent a good portion of every evening for the last few weeks working on a fellowship grant for next year - the application was due this past Friday and was quite involved. But, it is finished, so keep your fingers crossed that I get some $$ to write this dissertation after collecting all of the data for it!

Here's a picture of me diligently working on my fellowship app on the train to London while Julia naps.

So, now it's time to get in the WayBack Machine and return to mid-October. Seems like a lifetime ago, doesn't it? People were still picking out Halloween costumes, not prepping for Turkey Day. I was in London, in the midst of my stint at the Natural History Museum. One weekend, I spent Saturday touring the Tower of London with Jason and Sunday roaming the city with my friend Loring, who was in the country for a short bit working on some data collection of her own.

Jason and I started out the day by climbing the Monument, something I had been wanting to do for weeks. The Monument was built in the 1670's to commemorate the Great Fire of 1666, which started nearby in a baker's house and took out most of London. (The most famous account of the fire is provided by everyone's favorite 17th century diarist, Samuel Pepys.) We climbed all 311 winding steps to the platform at the top for some great views of the city. Designed by good old Sir Christopher Wren (he of St. Paul's Cathedral fame), the height of the tower - 202 feet - is the exact distance from the location of the Monument to the place where the fire started in Pudding Lane.

Monument - street view

@ the top of the Monument

All 311 steps of the Monument. Looks like an Escher painting!

Not sure what these niches are supposed to hold, but turns out they are Jason-sized!

From the Monument we walked over to the Tower of London, the historic castle on the banks of the Thames that houses the Crown Jewels, a huge armory display, the Royal Fusiliers, and much more. We started off with one of the Yeoman Warder tours, which unfortunately was slightly truncated due to inclement weather. It's a shame, because our Beefeater was highly entertaining. Fun facts learned that day: their uniforms are ridiculously expensive (upwards of 7,000 pounds for the dress uniform), and the moat around the castle used to be the repository for all sorts of garbage and human refuse brought in on the tide from the Thames. After hundreds of years of festering nastiness, Queen Victoria made the excellent decision to drain the moat. Although, talk about an effective deterrent for would-be attackers... Today, the moat is apparently an "ideal place" for picnics. You know, if you like looming stone walls for ambiance.

The Tower moat - just imagine this whole thing filled with garbage. Ugh.

The White Tower boasts a large display of armor, weaponry, and displays about the Royal Mint that used to be on-site. Numerous executions were held on nearby Tower Hill, and famous prisoners have been held in most of the buildings that make up the Tower complex.

The Armory

I don't envy the person who had to squeeze some four year old prince into this get-up.

The White Tower

Wire sculpture baboons. The Tower was also the Royal Menagerie for a time, serving as the home to assorted lions, monkeys, elephants, and even a polar bear they put on a chain and let fish in the Thames.

Traitor's Gate, with Tower Bridge in the background

One of the Tower ravens, overlooking the Tower Hill execution square

The Crown Jewels were very impressive and glittery, and along the route to the main display, Zadok the Priest (Handel's coronation anthem) played on repeat. Which means I had it stuck in my head all afternoon, as I sang the alto part with one of the OSU choirs back in college.

Overall, we had great fun touring the Tower, although the afternoon quickly devolved into a competition of which one of us could take the most ridiculous picture of the other.

Jason in his best Henry VIII pose.

"Off with her head!"

I think the Henry VIII picture wins it. It's one of those I need to put on permanent rotation, along with the one of Luca holding the outraged cat. What's that you say? You're not familiar with that picture? Well, here you go!

You're welcome, world.

After spending a good chunk of the day at the Tower, Jason and I had another failed attempt at trying to have scones (the places always stop serving them like ten minutes before we get there. sigh), so we walked along the North Bank for a while and then headed back to Brick Lane for more delicious Indian food.

South Bank skyline @ sunset

Tower Bridge @ twilight

I got to spend the next day with my friend Loring, who I haven't seen since April! She was in the UK working with the Powell-Cotton collection out in Kent, where I went (will go? this timeline is getting confusing) the first couple weeks of November. We wandered around the British Museum for a bit and then headed over to Bea's of Bloomsbury for the most sugar-filled afternoon tea I have ever experienced.

Loring looking with trepidation at the ginormous pile of saccharine morsels in front of her. As well she should, as she was defeated by her half. With great personal fortitude and an apparently limitless penchant for sugar, I, however, persevered and demolished every last crumb.

After tea we meandered over to the British Library, which has an awesome "treasure room" filled with things such as a 10th century copy of Beowulf, Shakespeare's first folio, Da Vinci notebook pages, Handel's handwritten copy of the Messiah, original Beatles lyrics penned by John Lennon on the back of his son's birthday card, the Magna Carta, a Gutenberg bible, a letter written by Darwin, scrolls of the buddha, etc, etc. Let's just say it's an amazing microcosm of Eurasian history tucked into one space.

After heading down to the river and strolling around St. James Park, Buckingham Palace, and Parliament, we ended up at Westminster Abbey shortly before one of their free Sunday evening organ recitals, so we decided to queue up and head inside for a listen. The acoustics in the place are of course amazing, and it was great to hear the organ open up and fill the space.

With Loring @ Victoria Monument

Westminster courtyard

After the concert, Loring headed back out to Kent, and I went home to gear up for another week of data collection in the chilly basement of the NHM. The next weekend, I flew to Amsterdam to meet up with Luca (he of the outraged cat fame)!

Similar to New York, Amsterdam seems to be a city that never sleeps, at least on the weekends. After meeting up with Luca at the train station Friday night, we dropped our stuff at our rented studio apartment (on the third floor of a building housing a stir fry noodle place - very tasty) and decided to explore the city a bit. Not far from our digs we ran into a Halloween fair in Dam Square. It had a ferris wheel, flying swing carousel, tilt a whirl, fair games, street food - the whole nine. We adventurously ventured into the "Spuk house of doom" (more hilariously bad than terrifying), rode the flying swing high rise carousel thing, had a Belgian waffle covered in chocolate, and then wandered around the canals until the wee hours catching up (and eating some tasty fried frites in a cone).

The Spuk House of Doom!

First view of the canals by night

We started off Saturday with a traditional dutch pancake brunch and then took a canal boat cruise around the city. I was kind of expecting a bit more information from the cruise, but they repeated every announcement in six languages so I suppose there wasn't exactly time for an in-depth history of Amsterdam. The one very interesting fact we did learn concerns the roof hooks. See the pic below for deets.

Lovely Amsterdam

Canal cruise with Luca!

Another canal cruise view

This is how they move in Amsterdam - the staircases are too narrow so everything goes through the windows and gets hoisted up or down by the hook on the roof. Every single house has one.

There are a lot of canals in Amsterdam... and they're all just so darn scenic!

I think that's the Westerkerk clock tower in the background...

After the canal cruise we wandered through the fun neighborhood of Jordaan to the awesomely delicious Small World Catering (thanks for the rec, Dale!) for some amazing sandwiches. We also passed through a large outdoor market (and sampled lots of cheese) and did some browsing in the shops. We then decided to brave the long line to visit the Anne Frank house - there was literally a wrap-around the block, hour long wait every time we passed by. It was definitely worth it, of course, because the exhibit is interesting and powerful and depressing. The building is the very one that contains the Secret Annex where she hid with her family and a few others for two years during WWII. Otto Frank (Anne's father and the only survivor of the group who went into hiding) campaigned for the building to be turned into a museum, and to this day all of the rooms in the Secret Annex remain empty by his wish. There are photographs and small model reconstructions, however, to show how it looked when they lived there. It was definitely surreal to walk through the secret door behind the bookcase that led to the hidden rooms.

To revive our spirits after that stark reminder of the second world war, we headed to an Indonesian restaurant, Kantjil & de Tijger, for dinner. They had these great platters that allowed you to sample all kinds of different regional dishes, and so we filled up on tasty food before heading out to enjoy some Amsterdam nightlife with drinks and dancing.

We started out our last day by trying to find a non-packed place for brunch, and here's where the city again resembles NYC - there weren't any. We eventually found a good place with not too bad of a wait, and I had my first eggs benedict in a looong time. Too long. (All of my brunch buddies know how much I love my eggs bennie.) After brunch we headed down to the Museumplein, a park-like area where the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum are located. We had planned on taking a look around one of the museums, but they both had super long lines out the door (as apparently all Amsterdam museums do), and we didn't feel like spending more time waiting in line, so we walked through the gardens of the Rijksmuseum and popped into the gift shops instead. We spent the rest of the afternoon meandering around the city and checking out the shops (especially the cheese shops - so many free samples!) - I feel like I have now walked almost every street in Amsterdam. For those of you familiar with the movie Spaceballs, remember when they're lost in the desert, and Barf asks "How many more dunes?" Well, that's what I kept asking Luca: "How many more canals?" "Two." "You said that three canals ago." True story.

Helpful pedestrian crossing graphic.

Don't let the scenic bikes on the canal fool you - I think Amsterdamers let out all of their aggression while cycling.

After an absolutely lovely weekend with my Luca, I headed back to London Monday morning on the tail end of a big storm (which led to one bumpy flight) and went in for my last week of work at the NHM. All in all, I got a pretty decent sample there, but not as great as I had hoped. On my last day I took a long lunch break and walked around a few of the parts of the museum I hadn't seen yet. It really is a very cool building with some great displays.

Natural History Museum, entry hall (the white marble statue on the stairs is Darwin!)

For my last weekend in London, I met up with Jason (he really is always up for a new British adventure), and we trekked out to Greenwich. I figured after straddling the northern and southern hemispheres at La Mitad del Mundo in Ecuador several years back it was time to visit the Prime Meridian Line at 0 degrees longitude where east meets west. It's also the home of Greenwich Mean Time (incidentally, also the name of a nice pub in the Village - GMT).

I feel like a lot of my blog is devoted to food, but since it's one of the best parts of traveling, I will unabashedly continue to document it - we started out the day by picking up lunch at Greenwich Market: tasty sliced roast beef on bread pudding and a Turkish haloumi wrap. Yum. Then we walked through the park and up the hill to the Royal Observatory, founded in the late 17th century as a base for navigational research. We took in a great planetarium show at the observatory, where our knowledgeable guide chatted about everything from the history of the periodic table to how to take great photos of astronomical phenomena to the constellations we would be able to see above our heads that night. This place really had some top-notch staff: in addition to our planetarium guide, there was another gent in period costume regaling an entire room about the decision that placed the Prime Meridian at Greenwich.

Old Royal Naval College. We ate lunch on the grounds.

 

View of the Queen's House from the observatory hill.

Jason & I on opposite sides of the world.

Royal Observatory Greenwich, entrance.

Straddling the Prime Meridian.

There is actually a ton of stuff to do at Greenwich, but we had a very important mission to finally have scones. We came close to missing out AGAIN because apparently the stupid National Maritime Cafe requires you to book at least a day in advance, but google saved the day and we found a nearby cafe and FINALLY enjoyed a cream tea - sandwiches, scones, and cake! It was very enjoyable, but it did cause us to be late and miss the train we were going to take out to Wokingham, where we were planning on meeting up with some of Jason's colleagues for a Guy Fawkes celebration (fireworks and a bonfire!). Upon learning we had thirty minutes to wait until the next train, we (un)wisely decided to pass this time by having a quick drink in the pub. This meant we only left ourselves a few minutes to get to the train and missed THAT train too because the platform was way at the other end of the station. Yup. We missed two trains. Which means we also missed the torch lit procession over to the field. Le sigh. But, we made it in time to see a great fireworks display and the bonfire! Although, we were extremely disappointed that they were not burning Guy Fawkes in effigy.

Fireworks!

Non-effigy bonfire

On Sunday, I packed up all of my worldly goods again and headed to Victoria Station to meet up with my friend Julia! Juls is based at the University of Barcelona, and we met over a year ago when she came to New York to do some data collection. Since we literally like all of the same  books, movies, musicals, etc, we hit it off and have stayed in contact, and when it turned out we both needed to work at the Powell-Cotton Museum, we managed to schedule it so we would be there for the same two weeks! Yay! After a happy reunion in London, we boarded a train to take us out to the little town of Birchington-on-sea where the Quex Park complex that houses the Powell-Cotton Museum is located. It's about a two hour train ride outside of London into southeastern Kent, but on that particular day they were doing track work, so we had to drag all of our luggage and equipment (admittedly, most of it mine) from a train to a bus to another train to reach Birchington. Ugh.

Next stop: Birchington-on-sea!

The Powell-Cotton Museum houses the natural history specimens and ethnographic stuff collected by members of the Powell-Cotton family during the late 19th/early 20th century. The adjacent Quex House and Gardens was (/is) the family home. If I remember correctly, centuries ago the family had a vague connection to the royal family and subsequent generations struck it rich by investing in the East India Company, so the more recent generations had the money to throw around on expeditions to Africa and Asia. The museum houses lots of large-scale natural history diorama exhibits, including the lion that almost took out Major Percy Powell-Cotton himself (the jacket he was wearing during the lion attack is also on display, the shoulder in shreds). It seems a bit backwards, but the museum stresses that the Major was not an indiscriminate big game hunter but really wanted people back home to have the chance to "see" the animals in their natural habitats. Whatever the reason, it is definitely one of the best collections of primate skeletons anywhere in the world. I came here thinking I'd get around 50% of my chimpanzee outgroup sample, and in only two weeks I got about 85% of what I need. It was strange to switch gears from human bones to chimp bones but made for a nice change of pace. And it was great fun to have a data collection buddy for a couple of weeks!

The museum is very nicely laid out, but the area for researchers is definitely a little quirky. The upper workshop where Julia and I were working has rows of drawers with monkey skulls, open shelves with African drums, and huge crates of gorilla pelts, bush pig hides, and hippo feet. Atop those crates, and directly over my head, were dried, folded elephant skins. Like, a lot of them. Just sitting there. Most of the bones are stored in the attic, which one enters via a 3x3 foot hole in the wall and then by proceeding down a set of tiny off-centered wooden steps. You have to navigate your way around the buckets on the tiny steps that are positioned to catch the water from the leaky roof. Then you are surrounded by open shelves full of bovid and antelope skulls (all with horns) and plastic bins full of chimpanzee bones. Other rooms off to the back hold more boxes of other primate and animal bones. They apparently were just awarded a grant to re-do the collections space, which is good in terms of the leaky roof, but I find the "rooting through some rich old British person's attic" atmosphere to be very quaint.

As the town of Birchington-on-sea holds few attractions apart from Quex and the sea (the latter which we never saw until the last day anyway, given the short amount of daylight and its location in the opposite direction from Quex), on the weekend we decided to head back to London to do some shopping and to take in a show in the West End. After much discussion on what to see (okay, not so much of a discussion as several hours of me trying to convince Julia she didn't need to see Billy Elliot for the fourth time), we agreed upon Wicked, as neither of us had ever seen it performed. The two leads were fantastic, and the overall show was great. Jason was kind enough to put us up on his new futon, so after brunch with him on Sunday we headed out for some shopping in and around Covent Garden, and then I took Julia to see the great stuff in the British Library. Then it was back on the train for the two hour ride back to Birchington.

On our very last day in Birchington, literally an hour before we were due to catch our train, Julia and I finally saw the sea! It was actually an amazingly clear day, so I got a few lovely shots.

Birchington-on-sea

Mini white cliffs by the sea

All our gear at the train station (again, mostly mine). Literally five seconds after I stepped away to take a picture of the tracks, an announcement came on about leaving baggage unattended, so here Julia is helpfully attending all of it.

And that's just about the end of my time in the U.K.! I'll pick up next time with my trip to South Africa, but let me say that even though I was sad to leave London, the 80 degree sunny weather in Johannesburg was a pretty great consolation prize!

Can't believe I'm already on my last stop of this leg of the great dissertation data collection adventure!