It took several weeks to feel like myself again.  And by that time I had to start getting ready for Christmas.  All three kids came home, and I finally received the gift I had hoped for for several years — a portrait photo of the three of them together.

After Christmas I began doing all the stuff I had to do to get ready for a total knee replacement on February 10.  The Physician Assistant told me it would take up most of my time, and it has.   Right now I am working on finding a nursing home to go to for a week following my discharge from the hospital.  I looked up all the scores on the Medicare website, and there really aren’t very many nearby that score well.  And of those, I can go only to ones my insurance will pay for.   So my choices are quite limited.  Nevertheless,  I found one relatively quickly.  The person who took me for a tour told me that if I decided to stay there, I could come in before the surgery to fill out the paperwork and guarantee a bed.   But when I called to arrange to do this, no one returned my calls for two days, and then, finally, the supervisor called and told me that they no longer had the policy of holding beds.  I would have to have the social worker call them when I was in the hospital.  Bill and I think what happened is that after I told them the stinky health insurance we have, they decided that they would take me if they happened to have an open bed, but if they could get paid more money by another insurance company, they would take that person instead.

I couldn’t sleep last night because I was unhappy not to have taken care of finding a nursing home.  I stayed up until 3am reading reports on other nursing homes which are more or less in our area; found three that sound on paper that they will be OK.  Have an appointment tomorrow to visit one of them.  Not exactly what I would like to be doing,  but the two I visited in my first round of searching for a nursing home had about the same scores, but there was a vast difference in the way they “felt”.  So, I am using the scores to rule out places, but visits to select them.

So, those are my obvious excuses for not having finished telling you about the end of my trip.  I think that some depression also contributed to my procrastination.  It took a while to adjust to the fact that I was home, back to all the boring stuff I hadn’t missed. Ohio in November looked barren.  Flowers were still blooming in the UK when we left.  I spent a lot of time wishing I could  live abroad permanently.  And I missed being pampered in our B&B.

During our final week in the UK, we did some last-minute sightseeing.  Bill and I went to Stonehenge.  Neither of us had particularly wanted to go there as tourists who are “in the know” go to Avebury instead — fewer people and at Avebury you can touch the stones; at Stonehenge, you have to stand behind a fence.  We went to Stonehenge mostly because it was near Chippenham, and it was on the way to Salisbury.  But, when we topped a hill overlooking the monument, it took my breath away.  Even from a distance, it was beautiful and awe-inspiring.

The thing that everyone complained about with Stonehenge was the fence which keeps tourists from walking among the stones.  I actually was glad for the fence because it allowed me to look at the monument without distraction and to take photos without people in them.   My National Trust Pass allowed me into the area between the road and the fence.  Bill would have had to pay,  and, unlike me, he was pretty unimpressed by the monument, so he waited for me outside the outer fence.

I had read a book my B&B host, Jenny, had loaned to me about the construction of a henge similar to Stonehenge.  The imagined story about the tribes of early humans who figured out how to transport and install the huge stones gave me more appreciation for the immensity of the feat.  I knew details of construction: the upright stones had pegs chiseled into the top which fit into shallow holes scraped out of the bottom of the stones that were placed on top.

We drove south from Stonehenge to Salisbury where we visited the cathedral which had been recommended by a friend.   I wasn’t anticipating being too excited about it because we, especially I, had seen a lot of cathedrals on this trip.  But it was truly incredible.  I thought it was even more beautiful  than Westminster Abbey.

We celebrated Halloween by going out to dinner “disguised” as old people.  The waiters at the Indian restaurant thought that was pretty funny.  There are many, many Indian restaurants here, probably as a result of India having been part of the British Empire and also because the reputation for the blandness of British food provided an opportunity here for food that was spicy and hot.  Indian restaurants are called “curry houses” here, no matter how fancy they are.

We have been going to two Indian restaurants in Chippenham.  One is very modern in appearance and serves lighter dishes and also gives you a choice of a full or a half portion.  That’s where we went tonight to eat and to say goodbye to the wait staff.  Yes, our time here is almost over.  We leave for Heathrow on Wednesday afternoon and fly home on Thursday.

The other Indian restaurant is much more traditional in appearance, and it is actually famous.  For several consecutive years it has been among the top curry houses in the UK.  There is a proclamation on the wall signed by Queen Elizabeth, and there is a photo of Tony Blair dining there, as well as pictures of other English dignitaries, unknown to us.  What I learned at this restaurant was to put myself in the hands of a wonderful cook.   He asked what characteristics I liked in food.  I told him deeply spicy but not very hot, and, of course, vegetarian.  He brought me vegetarian Bhuna.  It was truly amazing, so wonderful I couldn’t keep from smiling the whole time I was eating.  He told me that I could ask for this dish in any Indian restaurant, and they would know what I wanted and cook it for me.  I’m a little afraid to try that in the New Krishna at home, but I’m going to see if they can do it.

One thing that Bill reminded me of that we don’t particularly like here is that none of the restaurants serve food Sunday night.  Some of the pubs are open, but for a drinking and games night.   This was an unpleasant surprise for us the first Sunday we were here.  Seems we were supposed to have eaten a big Sunday dinner around 2pm. But nobody told us that.  As usual, we had eaten a light meal in the early afternoon, and we were not very happy.  Which leads to a thought.  All the years I lived in dorms, they didn’t serve dinner on Sundays.  Even at UC Riverside, which was out in the middle of nowhere, we were on our own for dinner.  There was a tiny hamburger shed within walking distance of campus, and they did a lot of business Sunday evenings.  Don’t even the people who eat a formal Sunday Dinner get hungry by the evening?  A true mystery.

The category of food which has been least appealing for me in the UK is dessert.  The things I have tried have all been too sweet for my taste.  Exceptions have been the wonderful black currant and clotted cream ice cream which was available through September and the healthy desserts we had at Tony and Mary’ s.  You don’t have to worry about me being treat deprived, though.  I can be very resourceful at finding chocolate.

One thing I did last week was have a cream tea.  I knew that I was going to love it, so I put it off until near the end of our trip so I could only do it once.  Traditionally this includes a pot of tea, but I substituted coffee.  You are served two warm scones.  I had ones with fruit in them, and black currant jam, and clotted cream.  Heaven.  Oh yes, I forgot to mention that I ate this in a tea shop built in the 15th century.  I have enjoyed high tea with my friend Beverly in San Francisco, and the clotted cream we had in the US was the consistency of well-whipped cream.  The clotted cream here is about the consistency of cream cheese, and it has a soft yellow tint.  I knew that I was eating three weeks’ worth of sat fat at that one sitting, but I used my denial skills to ignore that and just revel in the incredible creaminess.  After I had finished eating, I asked the cook to tell me just what clotted cream is.  He said it was heavy whipping cream (the British have heavy cream that is higher in fat than we have in the US) that was beaten until just the point where it began to turn into butter.  Hence, the light yellow color.  I did penance for a couple of days after the tea by eating no chocolate.  It was so worth it.

Another bit of food info:  the people who make the sandwiches at the Subway here, as a matter of course, remove their gloves, wash their hands, and put on clean gloves before they make a vegetarian sandwich.  Wow!  It’s not that I haven’t thought about the fact that they had been handling meat before they made my sandwiches at home, but it was just something I chose not to think about because I didn’t think there was anything I could do.  What a pleasure that someone really knew what it means to be a vegetarian.

No photos today because Bill, and to a lesser extent, I have been under the weather and we’ve taken a few days off sightseeing to recuperate.  Of course, we still have a few things we want to see before we come home.  Tomorrow we’re going to Stonehenge and 10 miles away to Salisbury where there is a magnificent cathedral which was all built within about 40 years in the 13th century.  This is extremely rare.  Most cathedrals have been added onto and remodeled through the years.  As a matter of fact, yesterday I visited a church in a nearby village in which the main body of the church where the pews were was at an angle from the front part of the church.  The difference in orientation wasn’t huge, but it was noticeable.  When people were expanding the church, they noticed that the old church was not oriented due east.  For some reason, it was very important to the remodlers that the part they were adding on faced exactly to the east.  Hence, the crooked church.  Anyway, back to Salisbury.  I was told by my friend, Mike, that the cathedral was a must-see.  We really thought we had blown it today when I looked on the internet for the hours it was open.  Well, it’s only open Monday-Saturday.  No surprise when I thought about it.  But we are resourceful, and so we are going to an organ concert  tomorrow afternoon in the cathedral and staying for sung evensong afterwards.  Even Bill, who has a strong aversion to churches, is looking forward to the music.

I have bought train tickets for another day in London on Tuesday.  This is another good catch of an almost-missed sight.  I had planned to go to the Advertising and Packaging Museum in nearby Gloucester this coming week, but when I looked up hours on the internet, I learned the crucial detail that the museum had moved to London.  What a great reason to spend another day there!  For those of you who are wondering WHY I am going to the museum, remember, I am in charge of advertising and packaging for Liberty Instruments.  And I’ve always had a weird affinity for boxes — have aways had a pile of them in my basements for no apparent reason until we started our business, which has given me an excuse for having a stock of all sorts of boxes.  Who says entrepreneurism has no rewards!  Another reason for going to the museum is that my dad worked in advertising (during the same time period as Mad Men), so I’ve always had some curiosity about it.  I read something on the internet about TV ads a while ago that said that advertisers don’t care if they irritate you.  People who are irritated remember a hated ad and it’s just as effective in terms of getting them to buy something as making an ad that people like.  And all this time, I thought they were just stupid.

On my last visit to London, I apparently walked through a pretty dicey neighborhood to get to the museum on interior decorating styles.  After I got back to Chippenham, I heard on BBC news that police in that area had begun to carry machine guns because of gang violence.  For those of you who don’t know, police in the UK usually do not carry firearms, so having them carry machine guns is a BIG deal.  I had noticed that the neighborhood was a bit rundown, but from my old social work home visiting days, my criterion for a neighborhood being safe is the presence of women and children in the streets.  The neighborhood passed that test.  Just shows the possible complications of visiting a place with which you are unfamiliar.

Then we leave Chippenham Wednesday afternoon and spend the night at Heathrow and fly home Thursday.   Bill and I are sad to be leaving.  We have had a really good time here.  But, of course home has its wonderful pleasures too.  Bill said he would be glad to see our cat.  I’m not so sure.  She’s an VERY ornery lady, and I have become very fond of our B&B host’s cat Dizzy who is the most friendly cat you can imagine.  He is also beautiful.  Sigh.  Back to the old crabby cat I live with.  I actually do like her a lot, but I spend quite a bit of my time being irritated by her.  Oh well, you know what they say about two women living in the same house.

I hope to get some photos of our adventures tomorrow up on the blog before we go home, but if I don’t make it, I’ll post them from Liberty Township.

First thing, and this doesn’t really qualify as either an odd or an end, I didn’t finish telling you about our visit with Mary and Tony.  I left out Tony’s big surprise.  He told us on the day we arrived that he was going to take us to see something special, but he wouldn’t tell us what it was.  Clues came out as time passed: we learned that we were going to a gallery, and as we drove into the parking lot, Tony told us we were going to see some glass.  I was still asking him to tell me if it was old or new glass when we entered a room containing Tiffany glass!  And this wasn’t just the lamps we are accustomed to seeing copied and for sale at Wal-Mart.  There were so many styles and techniques: some bright blue opalescent pieces, some with gold drizzled over them, and some that even after reading the explanation of how they were made, I still couldn’t figure out how it was done.  How could someone blow glass to make a huge vase with delicate flower designs on it, or I should say, IN it?  The flowers were not painted on; they were in the blown glass.  Amazing and beautiful.

OK, now to the odds and ends and observations.

You know how they’re always talking about how we use too many antibiotics in the US?  Well, Britain has actually done something about it.  You cannot find “antibacterial” soap, or topical antibiotic first aid cream in the stores.  There are “antiseptic” things which help clean things and get rid of germs that way, but no OTC antibiotics.

I must amend my early writing about British roundabouts.  At first they looked chaotic to me, and I mentioned seeing an accident on my first morning here.  Well, other than a parking lot backing up fender bender, that’s the only accident I have seen since we’ve been away from home.

I have come to think of roundabouts, now that I have learned the rules of who goes first etc. as incredibly efficient, truly time and aggravation saving inventions.  Basically the only rule you have to know is that you yield to people on your right.  So if someone is entering or driving around the roundabout and coming your way on the right, you wait till they pass, and then you enter the roundabout.  If there’s no one coming from the right as you approach the roundabout, you don’t have to stop.  All roads but the expressways have roundabouts.  You make right and left turns from roundabouts, and you go “straight” by entering the roundabout and getting off at the exit that continues the road you were on.  So you can drive for long distances without ever stopping.  Also, at first we panicked because there are often quite a few exits on the roundabouts and we were afraid of taking the wrong one.  Once we got accustomed to them, we found two solutions to this problem.  First of all, nobody says you have to get off at your exit the first time you go around the roundabout.  You can use your first trip around to figure out where you want to turn the next time you go around.  And if you do make a mistake and take the wrong exit, you know there will be another roundabout relatively soon that you can use to go back onto the road you arrived on and retrace your path to the first roundabout and, hopefully, you will get off at the correct exit this time.

Bill and I agree that we are going to absolutely HATE stop lights and stop signs when we get home.  We will be acutely aware of how much time we  are wasting sitting at intersections.  One thing to note, though, is that for roundabouts to work, everybody has to cooperate and obey the rules.  I’m not sure that Americans are capable of such deference to the benefit of all, when maybe if a single person broke the rules and blasted through a roundabout they could save a little time for themselves at the cost of increasing commuting time for others.

Which brings me to more general observation.  In the UK and Europe, people seem to have a much more communitarian way of looking at things.  This contrasts with the “get mine for me and to hell with everybody else” attitude that is so prevalent in the US — perhaps more so in Liberty Township and West Chester than in some other places because most people who live in these areas are very good at getting stuff for themselves and they can’t imagine ever needing help.

This communitarian attitude expresses itself in many ways.  Certainly in traffic, but also in the prevalence of recycling, which, of course, is a way of looking after future generations.  And the NHS.  Yes, people acknowledge that there is some waste, and they have to pay for it with taxes, but most would not trade their health care system for ours for anything.  Most people are proud that no one is denied treatment here.

Perhaps also because of the general feeling of being all in it together, people seem more relaxed here.  Dinner is a leisurely affair.  Quick service doesn’t seem to be that important and tipping is rare.  Wait staff are paid enough here that they do not have to reply on tips to stay alive.  And the people waiting on tables and at the bar seem to be happy to be there.  They get a chance to see their friends and neighbors, and I’ve seen no evidence of the kind of rudeness, toward waitresses especially, that goes on in the US.  I don’t see wait staff being considered “second class” like they are in the States.   I pay a lot of attention to this stuff because both my girls have worked as waitresses and Darek has worked in food service.  I’ve heard their stories about unbelievably nasty things customers have said and done.  Oh, and one more thing about restaurants: you practically have to beg for your bill.  None of that keeping the restaurant cold and dropping off your check the minute you’ve finished your last bite (or before) stuff so that you’ll hurry out of the restaurant so they can make more money by serving another customer.  Especially on the continent, but also here, after you eat or have a drink, the table is yours for as long as you want it.

I’ll finish with another observation about communitarianism.  Parks in the UK are full of people.  Old people sitting on a bench reading the paper, women friends chatting.  People walking their dogs, and a zillion kids in the playground area.  In the park behind our B&B, there is a snack truck which comes by a couple of days a week so the kids can get treats.  In contrast, when I lived in Cincinnati, we had a really nice park right around the corner.  But I was afraid to take the kids to it on weekdays because no one else was there.  If someone with bad intentions had shown up, there would have been no one to help us.

I think parks are busy here for several reasons.  First, people don’t have playground equipment in their back yards like we do at home.  They have a sense of group ownership of the park because they live nearby and they pay taxes for its upkeep.  And, I think they just like to be around other people.  I remember how isolated I felt as a young mother home with kids.  No need for that here.  And really no need for elderly people to be isolated either.  And when you get together with others in the park, no one has to clean up their house or provide refreshments.  How nice.

After I finished the Churchill Museum on day 2, I went to Evensong at Westminster Abbey.  Good old Rick Steves.  I never would have thought of doing that without his recommendation.  I would have paid the 12 pounds entry fee during the day to walk around looking at all the famous people buried there — the cathedral really is full of famous bodies!  Instead, I went inside with no fee, and as our group walked toward the very front of the church, I gawked at the sumptuous architecture and the carved wall behind the first altar which dripped with gold decoration.

Behind that altar was the choir loft, a set of pews which ran perpendicular to the altar and faced one another across a wide aisle. We were led into this area and escorted to seats on both ends of the choir pews.  We waited in silence for about 30 minutes.  I just let my eyes wander over the beauty of that area.  To my left, against the back wall of the church, was the 2nd altar, much bigger than the first one and made almost entirely of gold.  The roof of the cathedral was constructed in stone, with the beautiful fan design I showed you in one of my early posts in another church where it was done in wood.

At 5:30 the silence was broken by the singing of the Introit.  The choir was behind the half-wall separating the main body of the church from the choir loft.  The sweetest sounds wafted over the divider and filled the cavernous building.  It seemed like they were coming from all around me.

After the Introit, there was a procession of  about 20 men dressed in ceremonial clothing, and at the end, a woman too.  Some of the men carried gold scepters.  They all looked very somber.  The all male choir followed, in robes I remember from the Episcopal church I was raised in and haven’t seen since: long red gowns covered with a white — I don’t know how to describe it other than to say it looked like a maternity top — I know, but it really did!  The choir filed into the central areas of the pews where we were sitting.  They sang the rest of the service from there.  The sound was different because I could hear the nearby voices as well as the sound which filled up the cathedral.  I spent most of the time with my eyes closed, just listening.

There was a fair amount of processing during the service.  One of the vicars read the first lesson and a second read the second lesson.  Each walked slowly behind a man carrying a scepter, up to one of the two pulpits, read some scripture, and then followed the scepter back to his seat.  I remembered my mother telling me when I was a kid that there are two forms of the Episcopal (in Britain, the Anglican) church: high and low.  I had never seen high before and it felt unfamiliar.  But I did remember that we always bowed to the altar whenever we walked in front of it, and the choir and vicars did that at the abbey.

After about an hour, there was a reverse procession which we visitors followed.  At the doorway, I was greeted by the one woman minister who invited me to come again.  I would if I could.  Very peaceful and very beautiful.

My third morning, I checked out of my B&B, and with all my belongings on my back, I took two tubes and an overground train to Hampton Court.  This was a country palace of Henry VIII and his wives.  It was not used for running the country; it was a vacation home, and everything was geared toward entertaining guests.  The front entry was flanked by two large wings of the “hotel” part of the building where the guests stayed.  The audio guide pointed out the profusion of chimneys on the roof of the hotel.  Each guestroom had its own fireplace and chimney.  And each room included a toilet which emptied into a pipe leading to a trough where it washed away from the hotel and went I don’t know where.  I was startled by this because I had seen many places of later vintage which didn’t have such sophisticated plumbing.

Chimneys of Guest Wing

Chapel

Two Live Court Ladies Chatting and Playing a Game

Great Hall

Many of the walls, as in the Great Hall, were covered with tapestries, which provided insulation.

Head Table in the Great Hall (modern children)

Food preparation was a huge task at Hampton Court.  Often there would be 800 people to feed, when you counted all the invited guests, the family, the servants, and the servants of the guests.

The “kitchen” was actually a group of rooms where different foods were prepared.  There was a HUGE cauldron in one kitchen room where boiled foods were made.  Someone had to tend the fire under the cauldron all the time food was cooking.  That was the way most common people cooked their food in those days because soups and stews were “stretchable”, made less than choice pieces of meat palatable, and it was a safe way to prepare food.  When you went to visit the king, however, you expected to be fed what was considered to be the best food, which basically was meat roasted on a spit over an open fire.  The diet at Hampton Court was 80% meat.

Meat Roasting Room

I learned quite a bit about food because the audio tour had a basic tour and then you could push a button for a more in-depth discussion.  Of course, the only in-depth ones I listened to were about food by two “food historians” – a category of expertise that was new to me.

They said that, even though in Henry VIII’s time people rarely washed themselves and apparently never washed their hair, the kitchens were very clean.  This wasn’t a matter of the cooks knowing more about hygiene; it was trial-and-error knowledge.  They had learned that if you didn’t wash out the cauldron, you killed people. They died from poisoning by chemicals that leached out of the copper pots into food that was kept in them for a long time.  Utensils and counter tops were cleaned to avoid flies and maggots.  And food was carefully stored to prevent spoilage.

Outside the kitchen rooms was a series of food storage rooms at ground level with a narrow path leading to the doors so that they were protected from the warming sunlight by shadows of the buildings.

Cool Food Storage Rooms

There was one person whose job was to keep watch over the delivery and storage of food, as well as making sure that all the cutlery and pewter plates and bowls were returned to the kitchens after the meal.  Much of what is known about cooking and eating habits in the 1500′s came from food historians pouring over the detailed records kept by this important person.

Another way of cooking and preserving meat was to bake it into pies which could sit out for a while before being eaten.  The crust of the pie was not considered to be food.  It was peeled off and thrown away and only the filling was eaten.

Meat Pies

Half of Hampton Court was as it was during the reign of  Henry VIII.  The other half had been redone in the 1700′s by King George II and Queen Charlotte, whose son was the George who was king during the American Revolution.  I’ll mostly show you some photos, just because this side of the palace was so opulent and beautiful.  But I wanted to mention that Queen Charlotte was the first known Royal to take a daily bath –  I’m sure this is a fact that you will remember always.

Queen Charlotte's Formal Reception Room

This room would have had no furniture in it.  People waiting to see the Queen were expected to stand.  And my (totally uninformed) guess is that the Queen may have spoken to people she didn’t want to spend much time with here — couldn’t let them get comfortable.

Queen Charlotte's Bedroom

Queen Charlotte's Bed

The Queen's Sitting Room

Ceiling of Queen Charlotte's Entry Hall

I really wish my photos of the staircase below this ceiling had come out.  The Queen made her grand entrance down the stairs into a hall that was about the same square footage as our entire house.  Stairs and hall were carved and painted and trimmed in gold.

Now for a few photos of the gardens:

Inner Courtyard

Some of the Back of Hampton Court, From the Garden

The Largest Grapevine in the World!

This is taken from inside a greenhouse that was completely covered by the vine, which also covered nearby walls and the ground.  And that’s just what you can see.  The next photo shows the area of the garden which is cleared so that the underground roots of the vine can get nourishment without competition from other plants.

And, finally…

Europe's Largest Maze

And I conquered it!  Well, actually I made it to the middle and then used the bail-out exit because I had to catch a train to get back to London to catch a train back to Chippenham.  I was so exhausted from all my sight-seeing that I told Bill to look for a little pile of protoplasm on the floor of the Chippenham station.  Luckily, he was able to scoop me up and put me to bed.

I spent three days in London last week on my own.  Bill really didn’t want to visit London, and he especially didn’t want to do the things I was interested in doing, so I left him in Chippenham working.

I took the train from Chippenham, and the first thing I did when I arrived in London was purchase a 3-day metro pass which covers tube trains, buses, and some above ground trains.  Then I set off to see my first museum with all my stuff for the three days in a small backpack, which didn’t feel heavy for a while… Got off the tube and realized that I had no idea which direction I was facing.  Streets are not identified very well here (at least in my opinion).  There might be a small plaque on a building on a corner that names the street it is on, but that is not guaranteed, and there are no overhead street signs, so if you don’t know where you’re going, you are only able to find out the street name after you have passed it, if then.  The tube station was on a big roundabout where six streets intersected.   I knew it would take me 5-10 minutes to walk around the whole thing, and even after that, I might not know which direction to go.  So I just picked a street and started walking on it until I found a named street that I could find on my map.  Naturally, I had gone in the opposite direction I wanted to go.  So I got on a bus that retraced my steps and took me to the front door of the museum.

The Geffrye Museum showed how interior design in Britain changed over 400 years to 1990.  There was a series of  rooms which all served the same purpose — they were where families gathered to socialize and eat — over the 400 years.  The styles of the rooms changed, not only according to fashion, but also according to the different ways society viewed children and the proper role of family.  It was fascinating to listen to a recorded tour that pointed out how interior decorating and use of the “main” room reflected  changes in society.  I also enjoyed seeing the changes in style in time sequence so I could get a better perspective on all that I have been seeing in the various houses, palaces, and castles I have visited.  And at the end of the exhibit, there was an eco house of the future showing many low carbon impact flooring materials, fabrics (did you know that cotton requires a lot of petroleum-based energy to produce?), and construction materials and techniques.  They also displayed low energy use appliances and attractive furniture made from recycled milk bottles and recycled tires.

I had a pleasant lunch in the museum dining room and then set off for my B&B to deposit my now heavy backpack.  I had reserved a room in a B&B outside of the city center because the reviews of all the relatively cheap hotels downtown were pretty sketchy.  I knew I would have a significant tube commute, but I had underestimated just how significant.  That was a bit of a pain, but the room was wonderful — and silent, which I never could have found in the city, and there was a nice little neighborhood shopping street right around the corner which turned out to be very important during my visit because, after the lunch at the Geffrye, I couldn’t ever manage to fit another restaurant meal into my sightseeing schedule.  I greatly appreciated the nice grocery store around the corner.

The first evening, after I had some rest, I went back into the city, and, after getting turned around backwards several times on the way, found the small theater where I had tickets to see a show.  I had purchased the tickets online on a website which showed all the performances in London.  I picked this particular show because it was in preview, and so it cost 9 pounds (about $14.00) instead of 50 pounds (about $80.00).  The man sitting next to me told me that the theater was a showcase for new playwrights.  He had submitted a play which he had written, but he didn’t know whether it was accepted yet.  The theater gives free tickets to all the playwrights who apply.  We had an interesting conversation about writing until the show began.

The play was a coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old girl who was quite overweight and having a lot of social problems in school.  Her devil-may-care uncle comes to visit and they develop an “interesting” relationship — sometimes very warm and supportive, sometimes weirdly sexualized.  This plays out on a background of the disintegration of the girl’s parents’ marriage.  The play definitely held your attention, with richly drawn characters and a great deal of humor.  But for some reason, I thought it went on too long.  I wasn’t sure whether it was the play or the rotten seats which got more and more uncomfortable as time went on.  After the show, the playwright next to me said he had wanted it to be over sooner too.  So we decided that the play needed a good editor.

Getting back to the B&B that night was a bit of an adventure.  The neighborhood where the theater was located, which had looked colorful and full of life before the show, was a little bit menacing with the shops closed and not many people on the streets.  But, as elsewhere, nobody bothered me, and going into the tube station was not the take-your-life-in-your-hands experience that riding the NY City subway at night was when I lived there in the early 70′s at the height of a terrible crime wave.

My second London morning, I headed out to the Churchill Museum, located in the heart of the tourist area near Big Ben, Westminster Abbey,the Houses of Parliament, 10 Downing Street etc.  Just to proved to you that I actually was there, here are some “tourist” photos.

Big Ben

Westminster Abbey

Parliament Building

Sadly, no photo of #10.  Forty years ago, when I was here, you could walk right up and snap a picture.  There were some guards and a small corded off area.  Now all of that block of Downing Street is closed off by tall black metal fences and guards everywhere.

Ok, now the Churchill Museum.  Absolutely fascinating!  The first thing I saw were two underground rooms, located directly below 10 Downing Street, which were exactly the same as when they were closed up on VJ Day in 1945.  These were the secret Wartime Cabinet rooms where Churchill and his top advisors met, and where some of the about 200 other people worked 24 hours a day.   When the war ended, the people working in these two rooms turned out the lights for the first time in six years and closed the doors.  The rooms remained shut up until, in the 1970′s, I think, the people who had worked there began to tell their stories publicly.  The rooms were reopened and eventually made available for the public to see.  Later, old photos and the memories of the people who used to work in other rooms enabled the curators to replicate what they looked like in wartime.  Madame Tussaud made wax figures for a few of the rooms.

In the Map Room, workers kept track of the location of every Allied service person,  and all the front lines.

On another map, convoys of supplies from the US were tracked, with each pin representing one ship, and pins removed when they were destroyed by the Germans.   The original map of shipments was black with pinholes between US and British shipping ports.

Few of my other photos turned out at all, because, in order not to damage the exhibits, the lighting was kept low.  I will try to describe the basement complex.  First, although when they first constructed it, they thought it would be bomb-proof, it wasn’t, and despite all their attempts to make it safer, it never was entirely safe from a direct hit.  Lots of huge wood timbers were installed as supports, and one room, which was particularly vulnerable, was filled up with concrete.

What protected the complex was the absolute secrecy of everyone who worked there.  No one except the complex workers knew that it existed.  The museum showed tapes of some of the employees who were still alive talking about how they had not said a word, not even to their families, until the existence of the complex was made public about 30 years after the war.

An aside, my dad was in the US intelligence group which decoded Japanese transmissions.  The Japanese changed their code every day, so my dad and the others had to start from scratch each morning.  That is the sum total of what I know about his wartime experience.  He felt it was important for him never to reveal more to anyone.  What other things I know about decoding work, I learned from a great PBS program called “The Codebreakers”.

Anyway, back to the complex.  Each of the private offices for higher ups contained a bed because they often worked around the clock with short breaks for sleep as possible.  Even the secretaries’ offices had beds.  Someone had to be there all the time to transcribe Morse Code messages.   The woman who did that described her job.  She sat with headphones on all the time she was at work, and when the messages came in, she translated them into typed prose as they came through.  She said it wasn’t hard after you got used to it, but it sounds pretty difficult to me.  Other secretaries were working 24 hours typing up-to-the-moment reports and keeping records.  In short, when the officers worked, the secretaries worked.  Sometimes they didn’t see their children for long periods of time.

There was a sleeping room, even further underground than the work complex for people who didn’t have their own beds.  One person described it as low-ceilinged, unventilated, with uncomfortable beds.  The one flush toilet in the complex was two floors up, so, like all the other workers, the dormitory sleepers kept chamber pots under their beds.

Curchill’s Bedroom and Chamber Pot

Churchill was about 65 at the beginning of the war.  He had incredible stamina, and he worked as hard, or harder, than anyone else in the complex.  He slept just several hours a night, and every afternoon at 3 sharp, he took a one hour long nap.  The one thing he indulged was his appetite.  Despite severe, widespread food shortages in Britain, Churchill ate three large meals a day.  Must have known someone in the ration office!

There was a mystery room in the complex with an unlabeled door and an “occupied” warning on the handle like you see in airplanes today.  The workers thought that it was a toilet that the higher ups were keeping for themselves and that they used it a lot.  Actually, it was a room where Churchill had a direct phone line to Roosevelt.

Communications Room with Color-Coded Telephones

A second part of the Churchill Museum told the story of Churchill’s youth (his parents totally rejected him — put him in boarding school at seven and never visited!), his career etc.  The best part of this display was the tape recordings of parts of his speeches.  Wow!  He was great.  The night when he told the British people that the war had begun was really good.  Since there was no news coverage of the events of that day, Churchill described in great detail what was happening.  He didn’t sugar coat it at all, but his voice was reassuringly calm.  And then he ended the speech with the theme he repeated over and over during the war that even though things looked dark, Britain would come out OK.  There would be great sacrifices, but they would not be ruled by the Nazis.  He made a similar speech during the bombing of London.  I could imagine how important his words and his courage were to the people who listened.

There were other recordings of some of the really very funny  things he said.  No matter how bad things were, he could always put a wry twist to them.  His optimism — at least what showed in public — was amazing.

As I learned what kind of a man he was, I fell in love with Churchill.  His dedication, self-sacrifice, and concern for the people of England touched me deeply.

I’m going to have to take a break for awhile.  There’s still more London, but my butt is getting sore from sitting so long, and you are probably tired of reading the 2086 words in this post!

Sorry it’s been so long since I posted.  We just returned from a four-day trip to visit our friends, Tony and Mary, and before that I was sick — didn’t do anything except hope I’d be well enough to travel Friday.

We had a delightful visit with Tony and Mary.  We ate really well — Mary is a great! cook — visited interesting places, and relaxed in their beautiful home in a village near Manchester in the pretty far north of England.  I enjoyed listening to Mary play the piano and overhearing her working with one of voice students.  Bill and Tony spent some time doing techy things.

Well, not to keep the garden fans waiting:  I think our friends’ garden is the nicest one I’ve seen on this trip.  Mary calls it a “wild garden”, because it is not as stylized as the formal gardens I have posted pictures of.  But “wild” doesn’t mean untended.  You can tell how much work has gone into creating and maintaining it.  Here are some photos.

View from our Upstairs Bedroom

Tony and Mary have the most energy-efficient house I have ever been in.  The solar panels on the left side of the roof heat water which is stored for bathing and kitchen use and contributes to the heating of the house by radiators.  The larger solar panels to the right make electricity for other household uses.  When they make more electricity than is needed, the excess power is sold to the grid.   They aren’t electricity-self-sufficient, but it does save them quite a bit of money, as well as helping the environment.

They also have aerated showers that make just a little water feel like a lot.  And, of course, those great English toilets that only flush just enough.

Tony and Mary took us sight-seeing close to their home.  We saw a castle which had been built in the 1100′s.  It was a little the worse for wear.

Looking up at What had Been the Ground Floor (see door)

View from the Tower

View From the Castle of the Lancashire Countryside

Oh, and I forgot to show you a photo of Tony and Mary welcoming us to their home:

Actually Tony and Mary in front of a National Trust Historic Home

Tony suggested this photo as an “enhancement” of their house.  The home really belonged to a successful cotton manufacturer, who in the mid-19th century, commissioned its restoration.  The rooms are opulent, lush with dark wood paneling, carved ceilings, and massive furniture.  There are many paintings on the walls, which we all pretty much ignored.  But what just about took my breath away was the exhibit of lace and embroidery collected by the last owner of the house, Rachel Kay-Shuttlesworth, during her extensive travel abroad.  There was stunning work from Afghanistan, Persia, India,  Belgium, Norway, and many other countries.  The work from each country was in a different, very recognizable, style.  The stitches in some of the work were 8 per centimeter — amazing!

Rachel herself was a master embroiderer. The most impressive piece she did was an intricately stitched  queen-size bed covering with a matching band decorating the tall frame of the bed, which took her, I think, five years to complete.  During the time she was working on this gift for her father,  World War I finally ended.  Rachel was so overjoyed by the conclusion of that war that she included in the bed decoration an embroidered commemoration of the armistice on September 11.

I need to add here that my sight-seeing companions, none of whom had the slightest interest in any type of needlework, were incredibly patient while I drank it all in.

There is more to tell you about our visit with Tony and Mary.  I’m not sure when I can get back to writing, as tomorrow at 7:30am I will be getting on a train for three days in London.  Yes, I do mean I — Bill has to work.  But don’t feel too sorry for him; he’s glad to have an excuse not to go to what he remembers from his tour 40 years ago as a huge, noisy city.  My memories of London at that time (we were in Europe the same summer) are that it was a huge, noisy, and endlessly fascinating city.  I spent six weeks of my 12-week Europe trip in London, visiting all the places I had learned about in Brit History and Brit Lit classes and in my own young adolescent devouring of history books and novels about English royalty.  This time I won’t be hitting the tourist hot spots, but I’ve got some other interesting things I want to see.

I’ll be back in Chippenham this Friday, just in time for Bill and me to spend our next-to-the-last weekend here (sniff, SNIFF, SNIFF!!!) seeing some more sights.  So it will probably be a while before I can do much writing.  Sorry, but my sight-seeing duty calls.

Not wanting to be too brave, I asked my B&B hostess where I should go.  Turns out her sister-in-law works in a beauty salon just a few blocks from the B&B.  Perfect. Of course the sister-in-law is on vacation this week.  So I took a deep breath and put myself in the hands of one of sister-in-law’s co-workers.  And it turned out OK!  Very short, but OK.  Bill said he likes it.  Amazing.  Usually when I get my hair cut, he says it looks fine, but he really misses the shoulder length hair I had in another lifetime when I first met him.

I’ve been trying to get my hands on something to treat a cold.  Can’t find any zinc lozenges.  Thank goodness I came prepared with those.  But if Bill catches the cold, he’s up a creek.   I’ve been lying low for the past two days, resting and willing myself to get well.  We were afraid that our friends, Tony and Mary, in Manchester, wouldn’t want us to come for our planned visit bringing cold germs.  But they both had it last week.  So we’re going Friday-Monday to see them.  We can all snuffle together.

The last sightseeing we did was Saturday when we went to two medieval towns.  We returned to Lacock where we had eaten when we first arrived in Chippenham, and walked around the village.  There are no new structures in the village.  All are well-preserved medieval buildings.  It’s tempting to imagine that you are living back in the 1300′s, but every once in a while you are brought back to the present by a sign on the town hall about an upcoming community dinner, or a through-a-window glimpse of a TV.

Near the town, there is a huge Abbey, which was founded in 1232, partially destroyed by good old Henry VIII who was intent on getting divorced, and rebuilt as a private home in the 16th century.  Although the living areas of the old abbey were remodeled by each successive owner, the cloisters remain in essentially their 13th century condition.

Path to the Abbey

Gate to Lacock Abbey

View of Part of the (huge) Abbey

We went on a tour of the residential part of the abbey.  Our guide pointed out all the remodeling that had been done.  Since each owner changed some things to suit his taste, the interior is a hodgepodge of different architectural styles.  There was one area which had started as a medieval hallway, to which had been annexed part of the old nuns’ dormitory, and to which had been added at various times, two large bay windows, a fireplace, and a sitting area.  The original medieval ceiling and thick (like 4 feet thick) walls remained.  Somehow this all worked together to create a pleasing space.  I think the owners had some artistic sense, or, at least they had the sense to hire good architects!  Of course, no photos were allowed inside.

But we were able to walk around the original church part of the abbey and take photos to our hearts’ content.  You may recognize some of these photos as parts of Pride and Prejudice, The Other Boleyn Girl, and the Harry Potter movies were shot here.

Outdoor Walkway Surrounding Courtyard Garden

This was used for some classroom and some hallway scenes in Harry Potter.

View from Walkway of Center Garden

The purpose of the center garden was to refresh the nuns’ eyes so they could go back to studying.

Room Used as a Classroom in HP

There were probably ten similar rooms in the abbey, which had been used for storage, or washing, or cooking.  Something I had not seen before was original 13th century dirt and rock floors.  They make for rather difficult walking, but they are evocative of the ancient abbey.  Despite warm weather the day we visited, I was chilly in the cloisters.  When the nuns lived there, it must have been  miserably cold in winter as there was a fireplace in only the “Warm Room” which was used for cooking and, well, keeping warm.  The rooms where the nuns studied and prayed all day and where they slept at night were unheated.

The Fireplace

After touring the abbey, we visited the Fox-Talbot Museum next door, which showcased the many scientific achievements of  19th century abbey owner, William Henry Fox Talbot.

Talbot conducted scientific experiments which contributed to knowledge in biology, physics, mathematics, and chemistry.  Most of his work, however, was in photography.  The exhibit showed how Fox-Talbot gradually learned though his experiments each facet of capturing images, which led to his invention of the first camera.

The museum also showed a small exhibition of some of Fox-Talbot’s photographs, as well as some very clever trompe-l’oeil (fool the eye) photographic works by a modern artist.

We had lunch in the garden of  King John’s Hunting Lodge in Lacock Village.

The Garden of King John's Lodge

Notice the modern addition to the back of the house.  I assure you that the side which faces the street is 13th century.

The Garden

The first stop on the walk was the modern Gay Monument.  It consisted of three large pink stone triangles set flat in the ground.

This triangle is set next to the canal.  The purpose of this monument is to remind us that just because Hitler is dead, doesn’t mean that we can forget about our responsibility to protect minorities.  There are still people in Amsterdam and around the world who are treated cruelly and unfairly.  Gay people in Hitler’s concentration camps had to wear pink triangles as identification.

Hitler's Troops Entered Amsterdam on This Street

Can you imagine being a citizen of Amsterdam watching the Nazis marching down your street?

The German army wanted to put on a show of discipline and invincibility so no damaged tanks were allowed in the parade, and the German soldiers were not allowed to lean their elbows out of the windows.

The Telephone Exchange

This gorgeous building, which now houses a shopping area, was the central telephone station through which all calls in and out of Amsterdam had to pass.  During the war, its street level walls were covered with the Resistance symbol “V” for victory.  The  occupying Germans responded by putting up posters saying “V is for Victory because the German army is Winning on all Fronts”.  Amsterdam residents altered the posters, changing the “V” into the “V” for Verliest (is losing) or into “W” for the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina.

The Royal Palace across the street from the Telephone Exchange was used to house Jews and other young men who were trying to avoid forced labor in Germany.

Another beautiful building in downtown Amsterdam was the Central Post Office.  The Allies wanted to protect the three buildings when they liberated the Netherlands, so a special group armed of Resistance fighters was given the task of taking the “Three Castles”.

Wartime Soup Kitchen

The winter of 1944 was known as the Hunger Winter.  Amsterdam residents had almost nothing to eat.  A typical days’ intake was shown at the Resistance Museum:  A large turnip and a potato.  Soup kitchens sprang up throughout the city.  Long lines of people waited for a small serving of “hunger gruel” made of meat waste, sugar beets, and tulip bulbs.

Underground Printing Office

“Het Parool”, the illegal newspaper that was printed in this building, was one of the largest of about 1300 underground newspapers published in The Netherlands.  Printing of a widely circulated newspaper was very dangerous because the heavy lead type could not be hidden if the Nazis raided the building.  Smaller newspapers were printed on a stenciling machine .  The original stencil sheet could be rolled up and put inside a bicycle frame for delivery to another stenciling operation.

A Hiding Place

Throughout the war, the basement of this former tobacco firm was used as a hiding place for Jews and others.  A serious problem for those sheltering people in hiding was how to obtain food for a large number of people.  Starting in 1943, illegal assault groups cooperated to steal food coupons from distribution offices.

Stars for Sale

This is one of the places that Jews bought the yellow stars they had to wear after May, 1942.  A Star of David cost 4 cents and a textile coupon.

This is the entrance to the theater I told you about in an earlier post where, after 1942, Jews were temporarily gathered before being deported to concentration camps.

The Day Care Center

This is the location, now commemorated by a plaque, where young Jewish children were housed awaiting deportation to concentration camps.  Day care workers managed to smuggle out over 500 children.

Site of Municipal Registry

This is where the Municipal Registry was located.  Information on all residents of Amsterdam were collected here.  The Nazis used the records to locate Jews for deportation.  Resistance workers burned the top floor, and firefighters soaked the rest of the building in March 1943, destroying almost all of the records.

Something I didn’t take a photo of was the Zoo.  Nazi soldiers enjoyed looking at the animals in their off-duty time, and Jews were forbidden to visit the Zoo.  But the zoo was a hiding place for Jews and young men wanting to avoid deportation for forced labor in Germany.

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That concludes the official tourist report of Amsterdam.  I will show you a few more photos we took there.

Graffiti in Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a lovely city.  The only thing that really marred its beauty was a huge amount of graffiti.  (Also the McDonald’s next door!)  It was everywhere.  You could see that people had attempted to clean it off, but it had been repainted.  One thing that seemed to work was a shiny painted on wall covering that felt like plastic.  Perhaps more people will begin to use that.

Bill Liked This Book

This book was displayed in a shop window near our hotel.

and this one

View from our Hotel Window

Apu's Kwik-E-Nightshop

Do you see Apu’s picture on the window?

One of Amsterdam's Elephants

Typical Spiral Staircase in Bruges and Amsterdam Hotels

This is why we made sure that we were on the ground floor in Bruges and that the hotel in Amsterdam had an elevator.  BTW, what the Europeans call the ground floor is what we would call the first floor.  Their first floor is a story up from the street.

In french these are called “pissoires”, and yes, this a men’s bathroom right out on the street.  Gross, in my opinion.  Never did see anyone using one.  But for this very non-sexist city not to have equal accommodation for women was surprising (ha!).  Women had to hunt down a bathroom and often pay to use it.  Hrmmph!

Street in Front of our Hotel

For Carin

This sign was in the Amsterdam train station.

I have not yet told you about the Anne Frank House.  Probably all I need to say is that only once in the hour I was inside the house did I hear any of the many other tourists talk above a whisper.  It must have felt to others the same way it felt to me, that we were in a holy place, and we were there to honor Anne and the many other people who suffered as she did.  I think a lot of people feel that in some way Anne belongs to them.  I realized that I have known about her and thought about her for over 50 years.  She has been a part of my life.

There was no furniture in the house; that’s the way Anne’s father wanted it.  But there was a model of the house with the small furniture arranged as it was when the families were hiding in the apartment.  And photos showed the furnished apartment.   I was surprised at how cozy they had made their hiding place.

The one thing that remained in the house for the public to see were the pictures that Anne had taped to her wall.  They were all of beautiful and happy things, lots of young children smiling, some nature photos, letters, and quite a few photos of movie stars.  The woman who brought the Frank’s supplies to them also brought the theater and book section of the paper for Anne each week.  From this, Anne cut out articles and pictures of movie stars.  I was touched by Anne’s attempt to make her world more beautiful despite the ugliness going on around her.

But what really made the tears in my eyes overflow was seeing one of her actual diary books lying open in a glass case so that I could see the careful, small,  handwriting she used so as not to waste precious paper.  I imagined her sitting at the table beside the blackout curtained window in her parents’ and Margot’s room, filling book after book with her life.

I don’t remember if I read or heard the following story.  Anne never wrote when anyone was around.  One day one of the other people in hiding with the Frank’s mistakenly opened the door to the room where Anne was writing.  Anne jumped up, furious.  The woman apologized, but Anne’s eyes were blazing.  The woman had never seen Anne act this way before; Anne was a well-mannered and considerate person.  The woman was so surprised that she froze.  Anne’s mother came in and nudged the woman out the door saying, “Anne is a Writer” to explain her daughter’s behavior.  I was struck by the mother’s respect for Anne.  Anne never showed her diaries to anyone, so her mother had no way of knowing about the insightful and luminous writing Anne was doing.  Her mother just respected her daughter’s PROCESS.  What a great gift for a mother to give her young daughter.

The one photo I was allowed to take is of the outside of the building where the Secret Annex was.  As I prepared to take the picture, I gazed around at the other houses on the street and the wide canal filled with boats.  This was Anne’s neighborhood.

What you  see is the front of the building where the entrance to the Annex was.  The Annex itself is not visible from either the front or the side street.  Only a handful of people who lived in the upper floors of neighboring buildings could have had any chance of seeing them in the Annex.  The families were silent during the day when workers were in the warehouse, and they kept blackout curtains across all the windows until it was fully dark.  Then they could peek outside.  Anne wrote of yearning to be able to go outside, breathe the fresh air and feel the sunlight on her arms while she ran.  I saw the roof window where she and Peter looked at the night sky.

The next day Bill came with me back to the Anne Frank House to begin a self-guided walking tour through Amsterdam ending at the Dutch Resistance Museum.  We were able to see the actual sites where things I had learned about in the two museums took place.  I’ll continue with that in my next entry.  We took lots of photos, so you will be spared another long all-writing entry.

An aside to Valerie, Darek, and Carin.  I saw some sibling rivalry on Facebook re who was the first to receive a postcard from me.  Let me assure you, children, that I mailed them all at the same time.  But in order to prevent any further competition, I bought 3 identical postcards to send from Amsterdam. I mailed them all at the same time in the Brussels train station.  So you all will be receiving postcards showing  Anne’s room.  There, I have done my part to keep the peace!

We really had a wonderful trip to Belgium and Amsterdam.  Bruges was beautiful and relaxing; Amsterdam was also beautiful, and it was stimulating.  I went to three museums there.  The last one was the VanGogh Museum, which holds the largest collection of Van Gogh paintings and drawings in the world.  Saw some famous paintings, which was wonderful, but equally wonderful was the way the exhibit was set up.  You started on the ground floor with some mostly well-known paintings with commentary to read, and then you went to a section with letters from Vincent, mostly to his brother, in which he talked about his art.  Often the letters contained  drawings of what he was working on.  And the letters would be about something you had already seen or something that was hung on the wall above the letters.  It was almost as if Vincent ( I call him this as this is the way he signed all his work, and, of course, his letters) were talking to you and sharing his process.  WOW!  This alternating pattern of paintings, drawings, and letters continued throughout the second floor.  On the third floor, they had an exhibition of paintings by artists who had influenced Vincent.  It was so cool, because in his letters he talked about what he had learned from other painters, and you could actually see it when you saw their original work.  For example, Vincent wrote that he was very interested in one painter’s use of black outlines, and then, when you saw the painting by that artist, you could actually see what Vincent was talking about.  It was all fascinating.  I had promised Bill that I would meet him after two hours at a cafe, and I made it, but just barely.

I now want to backtrack.  The first thing I visited on the morning after we arrived in Amsterdam was the Dutch Resistance Museum.  It is supposed to be the best such museum in Europe, and almost immediately, I understood why.  It is not set up to throw facts at you, or to make you depressed.  It attempts to help you understand, both emotionally and intellectually, what it is like to live in an occupied country.  It makes the point that, although it is clear that the Nazi Regime was evil, and that Holland was victimized, other things are not black and white.  For example, as the occupiers began the process of  “nazification” of Holland, some mayors resigned in protest.  Others remained in office, hoping to be able to mitigate some of the ways the Nazis were trying to take over civil society.  The museum makes you think about what you might have done in such terrible circumstances.  Would you have quit your job as a civil servant when they asked you to register ALL the residents of Amsterdam, not just the Jews? (Of course, the Nazis used the information to map out where all the Jews lived, but that was not clear at the beginning of the project.  A huge, very detailed map of Amsterdam was displayed that took my breath away.  They had gone block by block and inserted pins with black heads, one for every 10 Jews who lived there.  Later, of course, the Nazis used this information to raid homes and send more than 60,000 Jews to concentration camps.)

Unlike in other countries where the Nazis brutally crushed civil society as soon as they had sent the defending armies into retreat, they hoped to convert the Dutch into Nazis.  So the changes they made were incremental, and taken separately, not too alarming.  By the time the Nazis realized that the Dutch were not going to be converted, they had infiltrated all aspects of public life, so it was very difficult to resist.  Nazis controlled how many ration stamps you got, whether you had a job, what newspapers could print, and for Jews, they controlled a lot more: where your children could go to school, where you could live, forcing the wearing of the yellow Star of David cloth patches, not allowing Jews to go to the movies, or the theater, or to swimming pools etc, etc, etc.

I learned how incredibly inventive people were.  When there was no more petrol for the cars, they hitched some small cars up to horses, rode bikes, walked.  When there was no rubber to replace bike tires, Anne Frank’s family made tires out of a garden hose.  When the newspapers, which the Nazis took over, became useless for obtaining real information, and contained only propaganda, over 1300 underground newspapers started up in Holland.  Some were produced in private homes and circulated only to neighbors; others had circulation throughout the country.  The metal typeset pages were delivered around the country, mostly by women — in prams, in bicycle baskets, or in bags underneath their shopping — because the Nazis did not consider women to be a threat, and they allowed them to travel “to visit friends”.  After a while, the Nazis found out about the transport of the metal pages, and the Resistance changed to cardboard plates, which could be concealed in a satchel.  The Resistance had to be resourceful about everything to do with publishing.  Just getting paper required people to risk their lives to steal it.

There were a couple of particularly touching and amazing acts of resistance:

When the Nazis rounded up the first Jews in Amsterdam, there was a city-wide strike.  It started with the dock workers and spread by word-of mouth.  Factories, shops, schools, transport all shut down.  The strike lasted for days, and it was the only one in all of Europe to occur during the years of Nazi oppression.

When the Amsterdam Resistance found out that the Nazis were using information in the Municipal Registry Building to round up Jews for deportation, and to trace Resistance workers and young men who had to work in Germany, 10 resistance workers dressed up like police entered the building and sedated and removed the guards.  Then they blew up the top floor of the building, destroying many records.  Firemen destroyed pretty much all the rest by using huge amounts of water to put out the fire.  Almost all those involved in the attack were betrayed, arrested, and killed.

The Nazis put people who were awaiting deportation to camps in a theater.  They took away the babies and very young children to a “Nursery” across the street from the theater.  Nazi guards hung around outside the theater, smoking and talking.  The nursery building had only one exit, the front door.  But the Resistance figured out a way to smuggle out 50 babies.  One worker would stand outside the nursery door, and when she saw a tram coming, she would motion for smugglers inside to come out.  Several smugglers would run alongside the moving tram which kept them out of view of the German guards, and then jump onto the tram when it came to a stop.  People on the tram, who knew what was going on, smiled at the out-of-breath adults and “their” children.  We were able to visit the theater and nursery buildings, and there is still a tram stop there today.  It was thrilling to be able to see exactly how the child smuggling was accomplished.

I will tell you about the Anne Frank House tomorrow, and the wonderful guided walk Bill and I took between the AF House and the Resistance Museum, where we saw the places events had occurred.  Sorry I haven’t been able to include pictures today, but none of the museums let you take any inside.  Tomorrow on the walk, I’ll show you some.