London: Part One

This past weekend, as most of you know, was Easter weekend and most people in Europe get Good Friday and Easter Monday off from school or work.  Since this meant Darren had four consecutive days off, we decided to use all that time to go to one of the best destinations in Europe: London.  My dad took me and my brother to London nine years ago and I've always wanted to go back since.  When Darren and I started planning for our trip, we decided Darren would take Tuesday off, too, so that meant we would have five glorious days in London.  I spent hours looking up all the things to do before we left and my list was so long, that even with five days I still couldn't fit in everything I was interested in seeing.  I took this as a sign that this trip was going to be awesome.

We arrived Thursday early evening to a sunny, warm, and lively London.  We stayed at the Apex City of London Hotel (highly recommend it), which was near the Tower of London and in the financial district.  Since it was the end of the day and the beginning of a holiday weekend, tons of business people were enjoying a drink and soaking up the sun with coworkers outside all the bars and restaurants.  

We dropped our stuff at the hotel and immediately left to get some sightseeing in before the day was over.  We ate a quick dinner, where I enjoyed the food, but mostly enjoyed speaking English!  You just feel so empowered when you can communicate without any problems!  After dinner, we took the subway over to the National Portait Gallery.  The gallery features portraits of Britain's most famous/important citizens throughout history, beginning with the Tudor family all the way up to people like Paul McCartney and Princess Diana.  Darren and I both enjoyed this museum because it was nice to put a face with all these names you learn in school.  We were only able to see half of it before it closed, but since it is free (as are most museums here) we would just finish it up another day.

The entrance to the National Portrait Gallery, no photography allowed inside

The next day, Good Friday, we woke up and headed out to see the British Museum.  To get there from our hotel, we took a subway line in and would have had to transfer to another line, but we decided to walk from there to see some neighborhoods along the way.  We first stopped at Embankment Park to see the beautiful flowers that had bloomed.

Embankment Park

We then walked up through the Covent Garden neighborhood, which originally was an actual garden in medieval times, but now has lots of shops, restaurants, and a farmer's market.  I thought it was a really cute part of town.

The Covent Garden subway station

A cute, old restaurant in Covent Garden

Ran into this great street in Covent Garden

We finally arrived at The British Museum and it was packed, but this was to be expected on a holiday weekend.  The British Museum is the oldest public museum in the world.  It was established in 1753, but  came to its current home in the early 1800s.  The British Museum holds some of the world's greatest artifacts and luckily you can take pictures, so I'll show you some we saw.

Entrance gate to the British Museum

Entrance to the British Museum

The main hall inside the museum that connects all the galleries

Probably the most famous artifact in the museum is the Rosetta Stone.  As you might be able to see in the picture below, the stone tablet contains a government decree written in three languages: ancient Egyptian, a later form of Egyptian (I think), and ancient Greek.  By using the other two languages written on the tablet, historians were finally able to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

All the tourists swarming around the Rosetta Stone

The British Museum has artifacts from all over the world and from all periods of time, which are contained in 94 galleries stretch 2.5 miles long!  In other words: you can spend a lot of time here.  We managed to see most of the museum in four hours before I just refused to look at any more artifacts and demanded lunch.

Darren with an ancient Egyptian artifact

Statues taken from the Parthenon

Cleopatra

The first statue created of The Buddha

A Mayan artifact

So the first lunch I planned was not traditional British food, or even at a British restaurant.  We ate at the only Chipotle in Europe because I miss burritos a lot.  It was delicious.

We then took the subway over to the Notting Hill neighborhood to see what it looked like.  The area was a mix of cute, old residential streets and a few hipster streets where the popular stores were selling vintage clothes and accessories.

A cute Notting Hill street

Lovely Wisteria that was in bloom all over London and made everywhere smell wonderful

Just south of Notting Hill is the Kensington area, which features, among other things, a long, wide road where most foreign embassies are located.  You can see in the picture below all the large estates the embassies were located in.  It was a very pretty area.

The estates in Kensington that house ambassadors and foreign embassies

Next to these estates is Kensington Gardens, which has the famous Kensington Palace where Princess Diana lived and where people laid thousands of bouquets for her after her death.

Kensington Palace, usually open to the public, but is undergoing renovation currently

Everyone out enjoying the warm weather and sunshine in Kensington Gardens

After a quick dinner of meat pies and sandwiches at a local pub, our last stop of the night was to see the famous department store Harrod's before it closed.  Funnily enough, Switzerland tourism is currently advertising all over Harrod's department store, so it was a little weird to get away from Switzerland only to see tons of Swiss flags in London.

Harrod's department store decked out in Swiss flags

After that we headed back to the hotel and collapsed.

Beautiful Swiss Alps

All the days leading up to the spring festival were just beautiful here.  It got well into the 70s and since good weather is not a common occurrence in Zürich (though it doesn't seem that way this Spring), everyone has been out trying to enjoy the sun as much as possible.  The Saturday before the spring festival, I went over to the arboretum to read and came upon this mass of people.

All the city dwellers enjoying the sunshine

Almost every square-inch (or should I say square-centimeter) of grass was covered with people.  This park is right next to the lake, but there isn't a beach here, though lots of people were still wearing beach clothing anyways.  As most city dwellers know, not having a beach should not stop you from working on your tan. ;)  

I should just add that for some reason, the Swiss are obsessed with grilling.  The Swiss feel every summer activity should involve grilling.  Going on a hike?  There will be grills along the trail for you to stop and cook your sausage.  Don't have a grill handy?  You can buy disposable ones and take anywhere.  I haven't seen them, so I can't describe what a disposable grill means exactly, but they are popular.

Anyways, I walked along the park and the lake and got another great shot of some flowers, but really the highlight was having a clear view of the Alps.  A lot of times it is not clear enough to see the mountains, but on that day, they were very visible.  I took some pictures and even a video, since it's tough to capture them all in one shot.

On Thursday, we leave for a long weekend in London!  We will be there for five days and I still can't fit in everything I want to see.  No, we won't be there for the royal wedding, but I'm sure wedding fever will be high.  The weather is supposed to be unusually sunny and warm, which makes me even more excited than I was before, which I didn't think was possible.  Can't wait to share pictures with you next week!

Sechseläuten: The Best Swiss Holiday

Last Monday (the third Monday in April) was Zürich's spring festival called Sechseläuten, which means "the bells ringing at 6 o' clock" in Swiss German.  In honor of the winter ending, all the guilds come together in a parade and then burn the Böögg, the snowman, in a big bonfire at 6 pm.  Each of the guilds take turns riding around the bonfire until the snowman's head explodes/burns away (the snowman is filled with firecrackers).  How quickly it takes for the snowman's head to explode signals how hot the summer will be.  This is basically Zürich's version of Groundhog Day, but WAY better.

One of the best parts of this festival is that it started 700 years ago!  American holidays are babies compared to how long this holiday has been around.  Since 1336, working men (no women allowed until 20 years ago...) in the Zürich area have been grouped by profession (I think) into units called guilds.  In true Swiss fashion, the guilds had organized specific working hours for it's members: during the winter, work was done until the sun went down.  However, in spring and summer here, the sun doesn't set until 8 or 9 pm, so the end to the working day was set for 6 pm.  Therefore, the spring festival began as a celebration to having some daylight left after working hours.  Those same guilds are very much alive and well today, though I don't know who the members are.  The tradition involving burning a snowman started somewhere the 18th or 19th century, but was officially added to the Sechseläuten festivities in 1902.

All last week, Zürich started getting into the spirit of the holiday by putting out the Zürich canton and guild flags. A canton is like a state, except with a lot more governing power.  The Swiss have as much cantonal pride as they have national pride.

Grossmünster was decked out with the flag of the Zürich canton

The flags of each of the guilds in Zürich

Sprüngli even got into the spirit by making this snowman cake

On Sunday, the day before the holiday, they have a children's parade where all the children dress up in traditional Swiss outfits from all different eras.  Darren was (and is) out of town on a business trip, so I headed out on my own to see the children's parade.  During all these festivities I was grateful we live very close to downtown and I didn't have to worry about parking/take a train to get to anything.  This is one of the many reason why I love living in cities.

Bahnhofstrasse (the main shopping street) was lined with guild flags

The Swiss flag, the only national flag that is square

The parade went in order from oldest styles of dress to newest, with each era designated by a sign one of the children would hold.  Thousands of children participated and each of them wore a handmade costume.  I can't imagine who had to put all of those together.  I felt kind of bad for the kids though, since they made them walk the parade route twice (maybe three times?) and it was a hot day to be wearing heavy clothes.  Most of them seemed to do okay, though.  Below are pictures from the parade.  I kept moving around to try and find a better spot (the benefit of being by yourself), so that's why these shots are all in different places.

A group of children wearing Renaissance-era clothing

A horse and carriage led this group of children

Group of girls in farm dresses

Early 20th century attire for women

After all children with styles of Swiss clothing went by, the parade had a section for children from different countries around the world.  This part of the parade highlights what an international city Zürich is.  They obviously had a lot of other European countries, some Asian countries, and a few North African and Middle Eastern countries.  I took pictures of other countries besides Portugal, but this post is already getting long.

This one's for you, Papa.

At the end of the parade, they wheeled around the actual snowman they were going to burn the next day.  My camera had died at this point, so this is a picture from my phone.

Sorry, Böögg, you've only got one more day to live

The next day, on Monday, was the official guild parade and burning of the snowman.  Most people got a  half-day off from work, so by 1 or 2 pm, downtown Zürich was packed.  Before the parade started, I went over to see the snowman.  At 1 pm, they were still working on getting the woodpile stacked up to the snowman.

I met up with my friend, Michelle, and we found a great open spot to stand and watch the parade.  It started right at 3 with all 26 of the guild flags.  Neither Michelle nor I knew what all the guilds were, so sometimes we had fun making up what we thought their profession was.  Below are pictures from the parade and my guesses as to what is going on.

The parade began with Roman soldiers.  Maybe because the area was first controlled by the Romans?

One guild where everyone wore tall hats

I married into this guild

The tailor guild

The castle guild?

The winemaker guild, parade-watchers would run out and give people they knew flowers and kisses

"Zunft" means guild

The parade was so long.  Seriously, it was 3.5 hours!  The parade was still going even when everyone wasn't watching because they had started burning the snowman.  At 5 o' clock, Michelle and I left our parade-watching spot to go over to the snowman.  We sat on the street and talked for an hour and then right at 6, they lit the pyre.  We had an unobstructed view of the pyre when we first got there, but as more people came in the area, we got shuffled around and so my pictures all ended up with some street signs in them.  Oh well.  I'm happy with my pictures, though.  With the combination of 35x zoom, image stabilizer, and rotating screen, I just just hold my camera right over my head and take some good pictures.  Canon Powershot, you were a good buy.

Our view of the snowman before everyone pushed their way in and moved us around

As the pyre started to burn, the different guilds rode around it several times.  I tried to get a picture of that below, if you can see it.  The men in the blue coats and top hats are on horses riding around the pyre.

The wood begins to burn and the guilds ride around the snowman

Now the fire is about to reach the snowman

The snowman was filled with firecrackers, so as the fire got up to it, the firecrackers started going off.  The video below shows the snowman catching on fire and some of the firecrackers going off.  Be careful, this is a loud video.  But so cool!

The snowman has really caught on fire and starts to burn and firecrackers are going off

Burn, snowman, burn!

The head exploded, woohoo!

It took a little over ten minutes for the head to explode, which means a pretty normal summer.  One year it burned in five minutes, and two years ago, it was pouring down rain, so they had to spray kerosine on it and it still took 26 minutes.  According to friends, it really was a cold summer that year, so maybe this does work...

Walking home, and turned around to get another picture of the crowd and bonfire

Isn't that the coolest holiday ever?