Convergent Journey

A cuppa tea and a camera

Posts tagged ‘Photography’

Not a Bad Spot for a Picnic

By on July 19, 2012

My mom flew in for my graduation last week. London is having a historically bone-chilling July, with endless rain and gloom. Thankfully, after a few ho-hum days in London, it was time to whisk off to sunny, summery Switzerland!

Mom turned 60 yesterday, which is a big deal in Korean culture. So I packed us a birthday picnic and off we went!

Yum!

Tons to update on, but not enough time for another week or two. This is the briefest of previews, with many, many more updates to come!

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Stratford-upon-Avon

By on July 6, 2012

A daytrip to the picturesque birthplace of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon! Founded in 1198, this small town is a major tourist attraction because of its Shakespearean heritage.

I think with this trip, I’ve finally had my fill of Shakespeare for this theatregoing season. I’ve covered all the genres: a history (Henry V), a comedy (Taming of the Shrew) and with this trip, a tragedy (Julius Caesar). The first two performances I saw at the Globe, and this last play we saw was a production of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has quite a large and beautiful campus in Stratford-upon-Avon.

White swans on the River Avon.

We arrived around lunchtime, so we made a first stop for lunch at Strada, an Italian chain restaurant with decently-priced lunch and dinner specials. The Stratford-upon-Avon branch is housed in a curlicued Tudor building cater-corner from the Town Hall and the Mayor’s very large parking spot.

The well-preserved Tudor buildings, including the house where Shakespeare was born, alongside the newly added tourist attractions, make for a rather odd juxtaposition of old and new. I find it odd because the old is so old–I haven’t seen quite so many Tudor buildings anywhere else in England–while the new is so touristy-new.

An old facade of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre…

…attached to the more recent building extension…

… surrounded by a very modern park. Doesn’t this photo look like it could be from Anywhere, USA?

I loved the adaptation of Julius Caesar put on by the RSC. It was set in an unnamed modern-day African country, and so much about the production was brilliantly done. Great sound effects and music, powerful acting, seamless staging. The only thing I thought it could have benefited from was including an intermission–especially because the play deals with such intense themes and emotions, a bit of fresh air in between would have been welcome reprieve. (Read a full review by The Guardian here.)

The town’s public library, built with donations from Andrew Carnegie.

The birthplace of Shakespeare!

We wanted to see Anne Hathaway’s cottage too, but it turned out to be about a 30-minute walk from the town centre, and we wouldn’t have had time to make it there and back in time to catch our train to London. So we just ambled around among the throngs of tourists and tried to imagine this town 450 years ago. Standing in front of this carefully preserved building, it wasn’t hard to do.

Holy Trinity Stratford-upon-Avon, which houses Shakespeare’s grave.

In sum: If I were to redo the trip, I think I would have left enough time to go to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, as I’ve heard the garden is lovely. But the best part of the trip was the play–definitely catch a production if and when you go! When you’re watching the play, you are in a world of Shakespeare’s imagination. It doesn’t get more epic than the rise and fall of kings, the triumphs of love, the certainty of death, the depths of despair. Having left a legacy larger than life, William Shakespeare in real life is a less interesting study, especially since a good bit of it is conjecture.

The trip was really affordable, even on a student budget–£25 per person covered our roundtrip transportation and theatre tickets! By bus, the trip takes about 3 hours from London. However, the train wasn’t much quicker, taking 2.5 hours to get back to London. Seriously, the traffic jams along the freeway, and the slow crawl of a local train… at times I felt like I could have walked faster!

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Weather Talk: It’s a Cumulonimbus!

By on June 10, 2012

The other day, I read a BBC article about how to make weather conversations more interesting and scoffed. Of all the things to write a news article about, how to talk about the weather? As if the Brits need any help with that. And if “Cloudy today, eh?” wasn’t a particularly successful conversation-starter, I doubt “Take a look at that cumulonimbus” would fare much better.

But it got me thinking about clouds, because I honestly am fascinated with the clouds here in the UK. They seem much lower to the ground than anywhere else I’ve lived, and are much faster-moving. And then yesterday we went to the terrace of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to this gorgeous sight:

And I was won over.

That’s a fine-looking stratocumulus, wouldn’t you say?

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Dutch Breakfast with a Twist

By on April 23, 2012

Broodje hagelslag is a slice of bread slathered in butter and covered with chocolate sprinkles. But these aren’t just the plasticky chocolate sprinkles you eat on a cupcake. This is pure, melt-in-your-mouth chocolate.

You only live once, right? So for breakfast this morning I figured, why use butter when I can use Nutella to stick those sprinkles to my bread?


Step 1. Get a slice of bread. Maybe wheat bread if you want a few healthy points ;)
Step 2. Slather on a thin-to-generous layer of Nutella, as desired.
Step 3. Gather the chocolate in your hand and sprinkle a layer over the Nutella.


Step 4. Chomp chomp chomp. Yummmm. :]

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Childhood, European vs. American Style

By on April 11, 2012

NYC Chinatown. A hot summer day. He brazenly swigs the whole bottle.

I read an incredibly depressing article about parenting yesterday, called “The Non-Joie of Parenting.” Its bleak picture of American parenting almost made me want to stay in Europe to have kids. (Not that having kids is anywhere on the near horizon, mind you.)

The article is written from the perspective of a mother who raised her kids first in Paris, where she would sip Pouilly-Fumé and Stella Artois with other “half-watching parents” while her children played nearby. Then she moved to the U.S., where she became a full-time chaffeur for her kids’ activities.

Based on the models of American parenting in mainstream media these days, you’d think America was full of tiger mothers, seven-year-olds on forced diets and waiting lists just to get into pre-school. The modern archetype of motherhood is that of the Upper East Side, OCD, yoga-practicing, pearl-wearing, Laura Linney in The Nanny Diaries raising a spoiled monster-brat. The author of the NYT article supports that view, claiming her Parisian-bred “tidy, tantrum-free toddlers” were an amazement to American parents.

It certainly makes the European approach to parenting and parental involvement in education seem more attractive. In my education class this year, I’ve been learning about European countries’ approaches to education from early childhood to higher education, and many elements of the system here seem quite attractive. No system is perfect, of course, and it’s hard to generalize across the board. But there is far better provision of early childhood care, and in general there seems to be a more child-centered approach to learning. Importantly too, there isn’t that obsessive-compulsive mania that exists in the U.S. or South Korea, the two countries I’m most familiar with, around gaining entry to the higher echelons of education institutions.

But these are all extreme examples, swinging the pendulum from the bests and worsts of one country to the other, wishing for greener grass.

And that’s why this short film gives me so much hope. This, my friends, is what childhood should be like. Don’t ferry those kids off to math camp and soccer camp and band camp and everything else. Let their imaginations run free and see what happens!

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