English Summer 2010 #3 - Teaching & Sightseeing

NOTE: Check out Carol-Jean's great blog at CJWindow


I've been working fairly hard over here--just completed two days of a four-day, 20-hour class called Bible Overview. This came after presenting Hibrew Bible Interpretation and an introduction to my book Good Questions. Carol-Jean volunteered to answer phones for Silent Unity UK while I was teaching. Fortunately, we were able to work in some nice sightseeing time as well.



Carol-Jean and I have made two treks to London on the train from Maidenhead, about 45 minutes for the express or closer to an hour when riding the local. Our first outing was a pilgrimage to the center of the English-speaking world, Big Ben. After posing for the required photo (see left), we scooted across the street to Westminster Abbey to pay our respects to Queen Elizabeth. Not the one who lives at Windsor, but the one who commissioned Shakespeare to write plays in the 17th century.


The Abbey is a vast cavern of a place with famous dead people tucked away everywhere you look. Actually, you have to look down to find the best ones. Before I knew it, I was standing on the marble slab under which Charles Darwin is buried.



A few steps away is Sir Isacc Newton. They have poets and writers, too--Chaucer (the original), Kipling, Dickens, etc. Well, it's their language, so I guess they're entitled to hoarde the great literary figures.



After touching the stone monument under which lies Elizabeth I, Carol-Jean made our way across town via "the Tube" to the last stop on our Anglo-Saxton Haj, the British Museum. When we visited two years ago the Library was under repair so we couldn't sit in the same space where Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had worked. Now, in 2010, we whole-heartedly expected to enter this sanctum of radicals and high achievers. Alas...the work progresses yet. The nice man at the desk told Carol-Jean there would be two more years of renuvations. (See picture, above, which I did not take. Downloaded from the Museum website. URL below.)


The next day we repeated this process but aimed for different cultural Kaabahs. We managed to see (not necessarily tour or experience in depth--just see)the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, St. Paul's Cathedral, London Bridge,
the Tower of London, the "London Eye" ferris wheel, the recreated Globe Theatre of Shakespeare, and the church where the founder of my native state, William Penn, was married.


We stopped at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub where Dickens wrote for great lunch.







And we saw a familiar word in a surprising context.



More to follow....






Cheers!
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www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/history_and_the_building/reading_room.aspx