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

English Summer 2010 #2 - B4CJ

Tuesday AM - Aug 3. I arrived today and was able to struggle to a taxi and rendezvous with Kimerie Mapletoft at a local breakfast spot. As a civilian she couldn't drive onto RAF Mildenhall, so we met at the Running Chef in Barton Mills and I had my first English breakfast. Of course there were two Running Chefs within sight of each other, but the cabbie picked the right one.

After breakfast we start for Maidenhead by car. Quickly I remember, from previous visits to Britian, what a chore it is getting used to sitting on the left without driving. I'm always reaching for the steering wheel, which I now realize is as much a balancing hand-hold as it is part of the car's guidance system. We chatter away about Unity and England and Missouri as the English countryside flies past. Driving on the left is contrary to programming for Americans, but it's amazing how rapidly you adapt. Well, it helps to have good conversation and not being the driver, too.

I am pleased that the third floor flat at the Silent Unity-UK building is as nice as I remembered it. Well, it's technically the "Second Floor" because the British call the walk-in first story of a building the "Ground Floor" and start numbers at the second level. That of course does nothing to elminate the extra set of twisting narrow steps to climb to reach my second floor abode. Some of the Unity folks graciously help carry my cumbersome travel bags up the steps to the Silent Unity loft apartmemt.





It is now early afternoon. Since I've been awake for nearly two days and unable to sleep on the cargo plane, I decide to push toward evening before calling it a day. So, I set up my laptop, hook into the Unity hotspot wify, and spend a few hours working on the online course I'm teaching this summer, HTS 665 Emerson and the Transcendentalists. I also answer e-mails, some of which come from Unity Village offices and seem like the authors don't know I am off campus, six time zones to the east. Then I look at my PowerPoint lessons for the two-day seminar on Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures which I'll be teaching all day Saturday-Sunday.

Yep...that's a minister's vacation.

Okay. Enough work. I close the computer and saunter down the lane to the great cultural center which Britain has given the civilised (UK spelling) world: the local pub. On the way, I get confused about what seemed like simple instructions. Probably due to fatigue (although my students might disagree). A gentleman emerges from a house and gets into his car, and I ask directions. He very kindly insists on giving me a ride the rest of the way and so I climb into the driver's side to ride the last few blocks.

It is 8 pm local time. As I write this, I'm sitting in a pub called the Pond, about a half mile from my Unity-UK home. Sipping a chilled lager, watching a soccer game--excuse me...a football match, while waiting for my beef roll-up sandwich and chips (fries). Haven't slept since Sunday night, so I am getting a little woozy, and I am certain the food and good British brew will accelerate the process. Suddenly I wonder if this is all a dream and I'm still on the damned plane.

Ah...cold beer and hot food. Do not wake me!

This will be my last entry BCJ--before Carol-Jean arrives. She's flying in Thursday. Kimerie and I will pick her up at London's Gatwick Airport. (Picture below.)