indessed roscivs

St. Paul’s cathedral, where we went to Easter Mass.

Riding the “tube”, the London Underground.

Abbey Road Studios, next to the crosswalk where the Abbey Road album cover photo was shot.

The hedge maze at Blenheim Palace, which turned out to be impervious to the wall-following algorithm. Apparently the algorithm only works on mazes where all walls are connected.

The London Tower Bridge. (Not to be confused with the London Bridge, which is just a normal bridge.)

Big Ben, as seen from the London Eye.

Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, when we went there were no guards with fuzzy hats for tourists to taunt.

A Go board and stones from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The plaque is rather amusing. It reads:

Encirclement Chess (weiqi) has been played in China and other East Asian countries for more than 2000 years. Each player tries to encircle as much territory as possible, but at the same time must ensure that their chess pieces are not encircled by their opponent. The person who has occupied the most territory and left with the most chess pieces on the chess board is the winner.

Pair of wooden chess boxes: 18th century
FE.26&27-1999 (Gift of Galerie Bork, Copenhagen)
Chess board and chess pieces: modern

(”Encirclement chess” is, I suppose, the literal translation of the Chinese word for the game, “wei qi”. Still, an odd way to put it.)

In preparation for our trip, we’ve been waking up earlier and earlier this week. This morning we succeeded in waking up at 5:00 am, which is approximately three hours earlier than normal. That means the normally eight hour difference has gone down to five. Only time will tell whether our strategy will actually make a difference in how quickly we adjust to London time.

Unfortunately, this means that, despite it not being noon yet, I’ve been up for over six hours, just waiting. Rather impatiently, I might add.

Oh well. At least I have a hockey game to watch!

The other day, I was going to make some tacos and asked the wife if there was any hamburger meat in the fridge, or if it was all in the freezer. “Do we have any thawed meat in the fridge?” I called out. “No, I don’t think so,” she replied. I looked in the freezer. “Aha! But we do have some unthawed meat in the freezer!”

Today, however, I’m not making tacos, I’m packing for London. My suitcase consists of half clothes and half electronics. Thank heavens the UK is no longer banning all electronic devices on their flights. I don’t know what I’d do for nine hours without some sort of digital gizmo.

Hopefully I won’t be spending too much time with digital gizmos anyway, but rather catching some shut-eye, since due to the time-space-continuum-warping nature of trans-Atlantic flights (and time zone differences), we’ll basically skip the entire eight hours we should have been sleeping. It’s like daylight savings time on steroids.