Day 7: To Paris

I took it easy and relaxed at home, and did some reading. In the afternoon, we were headed to Paris, the city I have been wanting so much to visit. The Eurostar ride was nice, quiet, and fast. After 2.5 hours, there we were, at Paris. It was night by then, and we headed towards our hotel, close to St. Paul station.

Apparently the region we were staying in, used to be a poor area in the old times, where Jews lived under hard conditions. Now, it is the center of the city and a nice area. Laleh did not look forward to riding the metros in Paris. "They are dirty and they smell", she claimed. "Come on, it is not that bad", I told her. After coming out of the metro station and walking through a narrow street, we found our hostel behind tall doors. We buzzed in and the door was opened from the inside.

We went to the office. The guy pulled out our reservation. "Passport", he asked for. First, I thought he was just checking our IDs. Then, I realized he wanted to keep it until the next morning to make sure we pay. I gave him my credit card, asking him to charge the costs right then. "The receptionist works here until noon, I cannot charge your card now, you have to come back in the morning". I asked for a receipt, a piece of paper indicating he has our passports. "No", he said. They never do that. What? If I come back in the morning and our passports had disappeared, what were we supposed to do? I told him keep my credit card instead, you can charge it in the morning. He did not accept. Laleh reassured me it was going to be fine, this is how they work here. I complied but I was not happy.

The hostel we stayed in used to be a Montessori school in 1700s, where nuns lived. It was well-maintained and clean. There were three single beds in our room, two of which were stacked. There were small lights on the wall, next to the pillow side of the beds, with switches in case each person wanted to read at night. In the bathroom, the light would go off every 5 seconds and I had to move to tell its sensors to come back on. It was annoying. We soon crashed.

Day 6: Green Park, Hyde Park, and the Buckingham Palace

This was a sunny day, a treasure in London to go and enjoy the parks. I wanted to visit the famous Hyde park and its gardens. I took the metro and came out of the Hyde Park corner station. As I came out, I saw statues and gates and tourists taking pictures. There were statues of war heroes, recognition of different nationalities and cultures. I even saw Palestine and Persia carved on the stone of a statue, but sadly I did not learn their significance and why they were mentioned. I joined the many tourists in taking pictures.

I then decided to move towards the Hyde park, only to realize I had gone in the opposite direction and had ended up in the second largest park, the Green park. It was just beautiful. Tall trees that were about to change colors, pigeons everywhere not scared of the people, green grass, perfect weather, the peace and quiet, all made it like walking in paintings of a dreamland. After a short walk, there was a small fountain-like area in appreciation of Canada and Canadian soldiers who fought for Britain. After a while, I gave up taking pictures of all the memorial statues.

I reached a large area with many more people, a tall statue with a golden part on top, and then I saw it across the street. The large Buckingham palace. What a nice surprise! I did not know it was just around the corner. I tried to remember what I had in mind of this palace, mainly through ceremonies for Princess Diana and then the Wedding of Prince Charles. Well, it did not look that glorious now. You could actually feel the palace had aged and the walls were not that clean and shining, like one would expect a palace to be. I do not know, maybe one comes with high expectations, or after seeing so many nice buildings I got spoiled, but when I saw the palace I was thinking to myself "this is it"?

Next, I really wanted to get to my original destination: Hyde park. Green park was triangular shape and as I was trying to go out of it from one end, I realized I had traversed the wrong side of it. I ended up walking a lot just to get out of the Green park. From the maps, I was under the impression that Hyde park is just across the street from Green park, but that was quiet misleading. It took me a while to discover Hyde park, but once I entered it, it was like entering heaven. There were small colorful gardens on each corner, usually with a small water pond in the middle. There was a nice large lake in the middle of the park. I sat there and treated myself to a cappuccino and cake. I noticed there were many Arabs around me. Some Arab women were covering their hair and were simple. Some, on the other hand, had so much make up and perfume on, it was not even nice. It was as if they were painted with brushes and getting ready to play on a theater for people to see the features of their face from hundreds of meters away. One of them looked at me from head to toe and back, and I was wondering what is she searching for? Maybe she was hoping to find something more interesting, not so plain and simple. On the other corner, two moms with their babies in strollers were having a chat over coffee and dessert. I thought they have a nice life. What is better than spending a day with your baby in such a nice place, having conversation with a friend over sweet pastries? What the hell am I doing everyday driving frantically back and forth to places, meeting deadlines, stressing over issues created by other people's mistakes in life just to get enough money to pay for plumbers and repairing my place and getting a vacation, which until the last day I did not even know I could take or not? Maybe I have it all wrong! But how did I know they were not traveling like myself? Who says their life is like this every day? I decided to think it was not the case for them everyday, just to make myself feel better and not ruin my vacation.

Different sections of the park had different signs. One was called the Peter Pan walk! The other was Princess Diana's! I decided to go visit the latter in her memory. It took a long while getting to princess Diana's fountain. It was designed using high tech computer modeling, and the fountain was supposed to be like her life: from the highest point it was pouring down in different directions, and the circle of water was accessible via small stone bridges in three different parts, an indicator of her openness to people of all walks and cultures.

And for day 6, that is all folks!

Day 5: Greenwich!

I finally made it to Greenwich. The night before as I was brainstorming with Laleh about places to visit next, she said "It would be funny if after all this talk the only place you end up not seeing be Greenwich!". Her comment frightened me and I made it my mission to visit Greenwich the next day, rain or shine. It was a rainy day, not the best day to walk in countryside.

It took me about an hour with train to get there. As soon as I came out, there were signs for Maritime Museum, Naval College, Royal Observatory, all in the same direction. I followed the signs. I saw beautiful gates in front of nice set of buildings. I thought maybe this is where the Observatory was. Soon from the scene of so many students rushing in, I realized it was the Greenwich university campus. I learned later on the same day from the local newspaper on my way back that the Physics Nobel prize was given to Dr. Kao, a Greenwich university alumni. They were taking pride in him. How interesting that I was there on the same day. Also, the same newspaper reported that NASA scientists had found a new ring around Saturn. I thought it was very appropriate dedicating this day to visiting the Observatory.

I came out of the campus and went inside the next big building around the corner. They were welcoming and handed me brochures immediately. It was the Maritime museum, a place to learn about space exploration, stars, etc. Working at the home of Hubble and so many other missions, and having been to the aerospace museum in DC and different NASA centers, I did not feel the need to hear the same stories from them. Besides, I was running out of time. It was around 2 pm and the observatory would close at 5. I asked the lady working there about the observatory. She pointed me towards it. It was up on a hill. I thanked her, and started climbing the hill.

The higher I went, the nicer the view would get. The Maritime museum appeared like a wide White-house from the hill. Its view from the top with grass and trees around it was just gorgeous. I arrived at the top. The observatory building was small. I started exploring. In the first room, there were collections of telescopes that were made and improved over time. As I was trying to figure out the stories and the history of the place, an announcement was made that a public tour is available shortly. So, I happily joined. Our tour guide very nicely narrated the story of why this place was built, who lived there, and what came out.

In 1670s British government realized that they were losing a lot of money in trades since many ships drowned and sailors did not have much luck finding their positions in the ocean. Sometimes they meant to go west and they would make a mistake and go east, or the other way around. They did not have a way of determining longitude. Latitude was easy to determine from either the sun or the North star. One way to determine longitude was by knowing the position of the stars and observing them. However, there was not a good atlas of the sky at the time. So, the British government decided to build an observatory and support an astronomer in the task of determining longitude. The British government allocated only 500 GBP for building this observatory in 1670s. Even back then, it was not much money for such a task. So, the architect of the building, Christopher Wren who also was the architect of the St. Paul cathedral, found a cheap real estate in Greenwich and built the observatory for 525 GBP in 1675. He had practically got the land for free. So, there was no particular reason for choosing Greenwich other than the price of the land at the time.

The observatory was built and the first astronomer John Flamsteed moved there. He was considered Royalty in the British government and that place was his residence too. We saw his study, dining room, etc. Apparently Newton paid him visits too. It was amazing thinking I was in the same room that once Newton, Flamsteed, and Halley (the one the comet is named after) lived, met, and argued. Over decades Flamsteed worked on cataloging and preparing an atlas of the sky. However, he would not publish his atlas until his work was complete. Newton and Halley needed his results desperately. Newton got a position of authority over him and published his results in 400 copies. The angry Flamsteed burnt 300 of them. And here I thought publishing issues and disagreements were a new age problem!

Flamsteed, however, did not succeed in solving the longitude problem. The ships were still drowning and sailors were getting lost. The British government lost patience and allocated a 20,000 GBP award for whoever solves this problem, equivalent of today's 6 million GBP. Flamsteed passed away shortly after. His wife was determined to publish his results but she did not have enough money to do so. She sold all her furniture to pay for the publication of the results. Thus, most of the furniture in the observatory while belonged to that time, did not belong to Flamsteed personally. Some were acquired later though.

There was a different approach from astronomy for determining the longitude problem. It was via knowing the local time and the time at another place at the same time. By calculating the difference, one could figure out where s/he was with respect to that reference, say Greenwich. Well, this sounds easy but at the time there were no telecommunication system. One approach would be to take a clock with Greenwich time and carry it on a ship with you. You can always get the local time from the sun. This sounds easy but the clocks back then were not advanced. They had pendulums that could move irregularly on a moving ship. A mechanical watchmaker John Harrison spent his life making clocks that would work on ships. He in fact did solve the longitude problem and claimed the 20,000 GBP prize. The British government only paid him half of it unless he could reproduced 4 additional versions of the same clock and demonstrated that they worked equally well. Much of this resistance was also from the astronomical society who failed to solve the problem and did not like to see a watchmaker winning over them. After all even back then there were fights over funding and awards! The mad Harrison did not accept the 10,000 GBP. He wanted the complete prize and more than anything else he wanted the recognition that he had solved the longitude problem. We saw the watches that Harrison made. They started large and big and got more compact and smaller over time. The British government finally gave him the 20,000 after Harrison proved the other copies of the watch worked equally well. He only lived 3 years after that to enjoy the 20,000 GBP. The complete story is in a book called Longitude by Sobel. Apparently, it was only three years ago when he got the appropriate recognition and a statue of him was built. I do not know where in the city it is though.

We saw so many watches and telescopes there. There was a section where visitors could leave notes. The cards started with "Time stopped for me when ...". People from all over the world who visited the observatory completed the sentence differently. Here were some of the responses: when 9/11 happened, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, when that special someone kissed me, when I heard my ex was getting married four months after we broke up because he did not like commitments, when shuttle Challenger collapsed, ....

We then went to the top floor, where the 28 inch telescope was. It is the 7th largest telescope in the world and the largest in the U.K. Of course the view of Greenwich from there was also beautiful. I had bought a postcard from the shop downstairs and could not find a better place to write it to my astrophysicist colleague back in Goddard, who would have appreciated this visit the most. "Hi from Greenwich to Greenbelt, I am sitting in front of the 28 inch telescope right now ...".

Just one week before my trip to the U.K., I had visited the Naval Observatory in D.C. as part of a conference event. Over there, they are now working on atomic clocks, to define a second up to so many decimal points. It is amazing how far we have come. Their telescope is 26 inch in diameter and they took pride in Asaph Hall for observing the moons of Mars with that telescope. That observatory is not as open to the public as the Royal observatory was. Mainly because the U.S. Navy is still actively using it and working in its campus. That campus was on Connecticut avenue close to vice President's house and we learned in that visit that vice President Biden sits in front of Hall's library there when giving his weekly address.

Finally, I visited the 0 degree longitude line passing through the observatory courtyard. I placed one foot on its left side and another on its right side, and took a typical picture that all visitors of the Greenwich Meridian take. On the ground they had marked famous cities with their relative longitude to Greenwich. Tehran and D.C. were both carved on the ground there.

I was drenched and soaked climbing up and down that hill and making it to the train. I am glad I did it, even though it was not a fancy place in London.

Day 4: Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Parliament, and the National Gallery.

This was the day I fell for London. I took the train to the Westminster station, just to come out and see the Big Ben in front of me. To me, Big Ben is associated with Around the World in Eighty Days, with Jules Verne, with my childhood. I could not believe I did not have to walk around much to find it. I asked someone foolishly: "Is this the Big Ben?". Sure it was. Then, across the street was the gorgeous Westminster Abbey. Further down, the Parliament. All these buildings were magnificent. Although I had seen everything quickly as they were located next to each other, I did not feel like leaving. I kept walking around these buildings. There was a park behind the Parliament. It was called the Victoria Garden. By American standards, it was such a small park. But it was gorgeous. One could not ask for better views. Colorful trees in fall in front of the Parliament on one side, the river and the London Eye on the other. I could stay there forever.

I still had a good portion of the afternoon. So, I hit the National Gallery. I could not believe my eyes. Room after room of so many large gorgeous paintings of so many famous artists including Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas, and Picasso. Although I had seen some of the most famous paintings on postcards or large prints of them in many places,seeing the real ones, with the signature of the artists, learning about their lives and their relationships with their families, colleagues, and friends was something else. Like the British Museum, I could spend days in this museum, looking at each painting carefully, and learning about the stories behind each one of them. One of the many paintings I liked was called Cupid Complaining to Venus by Lucas Cranach the Elder.




Cupid complains to Venus of being stung by bees when stealing a honeycomb. This is to be taken as a moral commentary; as the inscription observes: 'life's pleasure is mixed with pain.'

I like London. I am beginning to feel sorry for myself, spending so much of my life just commuting to different places in Maryland.

Prayer

Aunt Nargess says a prayer for Natalie and Victoria tonight.
Aunt Nargess asks you to do the same please,
For tomorrow is a big day in their lives.
May the outcome be what is the best for them.

Day 3: The British Museum

After a good night sleep, nice relaxing breakfast, reading emails and blogs, I headed towards the British museum. As I entered the building, its huge size and tall gorgeous ceiling haunted me. There were so many sections: ancient Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Africa, etc. I could spend days visiting this museum. The first part I encountered attracted me immediately. It was about how people in various countries, cultures, and religions deal with hardships.


People everywhere experience trouble, sorrow, need, and sickness and develop skills and knowledge in response to these adversities.

There were pictures of various disasters, natural or man-made, from all over the world through out the years accompanied by nice poems and quotations. Poems were probably not the focus of this museum, but I was most focused on reading those. Here are some of them:

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew, the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet. And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it.
from I know the truth- give up all other truths! by Marina Tsvetayeva, 1892-1941

Pain splinters me. I am cracked like glass. I taste salt, my own fear, can save me nothing.
from In Hospital by Gwen Harwood, 1920-1995

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
(from Sometimes by Sheenagh Pugh, 1950-)

Here is a glass of water from my well.
It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;
It is the best I have, my only spell,
And it is cold, and better than champagne.
from A Glass of Water by May Sarton, 1912-1995

The Single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting,
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.
Choose by Carl Sandburg, 1878-196?

Then, I saw a section on ancient China with so many gorgeous jeweleries made of Jade. They described the two chemical combinations of Jadeitite and Nephrite, and how one is much more expensive than the other. Guess how jewelers identify a real jade from a fake one? The same way in remotes sensing we recognize fire, water, different minerals, vegetation, etc : spectroscopy. They each have their unique spectral signature.

I later went to the Enlightenment era (1680-1820), apparently the age of reason, discovery, and learning that changed the way people viewed the world. This was achieved by observing and studying the natural and man-made world. Did you know the word scientist has been used only in 1900s and had we were living in 1800s I would have been a philosopher? There were minerals collected by a physician called Sir Hans Sloane. He used them as medicine for kidney, skin, cold, poisoning, etc. There is also a museum named after him here. I should learn more about him. There were Parkinson's fossils named after the surgeon who found them and is famous for describing what is called today the Parkinson's disease. However, his fossils had enabled Darwin to identify one type of whale as an extinct species.

The Rosetta stone was there too. So was parts of Persepolis (actual rocks of it) and of Nemrud. There were large statues, gates, reconstructed models, real broken parts, etc. It gave the atmosphere of Persepolis. How on earth did they transport all of these here, and where was the Iranian government? Well, there was also a section on how many Mesopotamian remnants have been destroyed since 2003 as a result of the Iraq war. Maybe it is a good idea to have historical valuables in different parts of the world.

Finally, I stopped by a table where a lady was describing some historical items. She called them prehistoric. She asked us "what does prehistoric mean"? I responded: "before writing started". She was so happy. She asked where I was from. "Welcome! We do not get many visitors from Iran", she said happily. "In places like Iran, writing had started about 7000 years ago, but it arrived in Britain only 3-4 thousands years ago. So, prehistoric means different times for different places", she continued. The items were clays formed for cutting meat, smoking, etc. She was passionate about her stories and did not have a British accent. After she learned I am traveling from Maryland, she happily said "I am from Washington DC.", "Do you miss D.C.?", I asked. "I came here for one summer twenty five years ago, and I never went back. They do not have guns here, no mosquitoes, and they have the health system, not like the nonsense that is happening in the U.S. now. My sister, she has five kids and no health insurance. no health insurance!", she yelled. "How can you not want the public health insurance?!", she wondered. She asked me if I knew of any prehistoric items or sites in Iran. Things that are discovered and are older than the age of writing in Iran. Things that no one had written on them. Well, it showed how poor my history is. I did not know of any such site or object. Do you?

London, Day 2.

We visited the Regions Park, which was just gorgeous. A Parsee named Jehangir from India had a statue there since he had contributed money to the park in appreciation of what British community did for Parsee community in India (which I am not sure what it was other than colonizing them)! My camera of 4.5 years decided to break on the second day of my trip. We continued getting photos with Laleh's iPhone. I will have to borrow her camera for the rest of my trip. Then we took the train to Soho, a nice looking area with restaurants and coffee shops, fancy department stores, but mainly famous for its exotic sex shops. As we were coming out of the train station, I see a couple lifting their child's stroller to go up the stairs. I look around. There is no escalator, no elevator, no flat section with a slope for carrying wheelchairs and strollers. "How are handicaps supposed to come out of the station?", I asked. "They cannot", Laleh responded.

Laleh was trying to impress me with so many designer and fashion stores. There was a scarf with skulls printed on it for only 265 GBP. "What is this? It is not even beautiful! They are out of their minds!", I said angrily. Jesse, Laleh's boyfriend, made a comment about another expensive item. "Ok, if this store is disturbing people's mental health we should leave", Laleh said jokingly. It was nice being exposed to different aspects of London, but I was not enjoying visiting these shops as much as she did. Well, we have all these expensive designer stores in the States too. Just because I do not live like characters of the Sex and the City, I should not have thought of these stores to be a London phenomenon. It was just depressing seeing all those ridiculously expensive items, maybe because they were a reminder of how hard I had to work to afford an ugly scarf.

A nice lunch and later a very nice cappuccino and baghlava in a coffee shop perfected my Soho experience. As we were sipping our coffees and chatting, we heard a loud noise. A painting behind a customer had dropped! He was so lucky it did not hit his head. Suddenly, everyone in the coffee shop looked back to see if there were a painting behind them. This event started a conversation by Jesse on how nothing works perfectly well here. Windows in Laleh's place drift air so much that the first night it felt like we were just sleeping outside. Jesse also mentioned how he had noticed a hole in size of a Frisbee, where his apartment's fan was in the middle of the windows. He initially had thought they forgot to cover the fan. Later, he was informed it was their solution to the possible hazard of having gas leaks in his place. I regretted the fact that I had just replaced my windows in the U.S. to make them energy efficient and to take advantage of president Obama's tax credit towards their cost. My old windows were like the king of windows compared to these British ones. I wondered how long they run their heaters in their cold winters and how much they are contributing to the global warming because of their bad windows. Not that people in the U.S. do not waste energy in so many other ways.

We took one of those famous red buses towards Chelsea. "Where do you want to visit during your stay?", Jesse asked. "Greenwich!", I said immediately. "She is obsessed with Greenwich. Ever since she has arrived she is asking me how she can get there, how far it is,..., I tell her it is ok, but Soho and other areas are as important to see if not more, there is not much there", Laleh said in an attempt to enlighten me. "I want to go to the Greenwich observatory!", I replied wondering how on earth she does not consider it the place to visit.

We arrived at Chelsea with its million GBP real estates. "You almost have to be embarrassed to drive a Porch here", Jesse said, indicating that would be the cheapest car residents of this region would have. "Arab princes live here, maybe we can find you a prince", Laleh joked. I enjoyed the gorgeous architecture of the buildings with beautiful flowers decorating them.

After a long day, we arrived home. We chatted with Alison, Laleh's flatmate, and Stephan, Alison's boyfriend. Alison is originally from Vancouver, her boyfriend from Switzerland. It is just wonderful meeting young people from all over the world and learning from their experiences.