Love and Dead Animals

So Friday night happened to be the night the Natural History Museum stays open each month.  So I thought I'd hang around after I visited the Library. 

As it turns out, "Lates at NHM" is one giant bad first date, complete with weird mood lighting, an open mic, and ambient taxidermy. Lots of pretty (and not so pretty), young (and not so young...) Londoners descended on the place in awkward couplings, clutching their beers and discussing their jobs. "I know it sounds crazy, but I actually..."

Not all the dates went extinct, though.  There was a surprising number of (human) couples making out in the dinosaur exhibit.  I blame the dramatic lighting.

 

I, meanwhile, took refuge in the bug exhibit, downed my superduperfancy boyfriend-replacement of a sandwich while squeezed on bench with an entire Eastern European family, and dashed out as soon as off-peak hours pricing started on the Tube.

On Friday, I Did a Triathlon!

 Ish.

Click the title below for more.


Hauser Sophomore Scholars 2013: Reports from the Field: Day 5: I Did a Triathlon!:

...In the morning I said goodbye to Lorna and the Kew Library, Art & Archives team...

...Or the debilitating fear of accidentally dropping a box from the top of the ladder...

...And some of those people were....other Harvard students!...

Read the rest here!

Why the Potato Blight Saved America

Hauser Sophomore Scholars 2013: Reports from the Field: The Tale of the Magical Mushrooms:

 

...“FORMER SECRET U.S. CONTRACTOR/PLANT PATHOLOGIST: Fungi are far more important than people realize.  Look at the potato blight.

BEGOÑA: The Kennedys!

Silence.

BEGOÑA: All the Irish immigrants…

F.S.U.S.C./P.P.: Barack Obama’s great-grandmother too.

BEGOÑA: The potato blight gave you presidents!”...

 

More witticisms and exasperation at the link.

At the "Maids of Honour" Cafe

A lovely little tea shop recommended to me by a professor at the Harvard Herbaria.  I enjoyed the eponymous pastry and jasmine tea for lunch.

Big Flora, Big Birds, and BIG (research) NEWS!

From the scholarship blog...

Hauser Sophomore Scholars 2013: Reports from the Field: Day 3: Big Flora, Big Birds, and BIG NEWS!:

...If you ask big questions, you’ve got to think big.  World’s largest surviving Victorian glass house big.  Galleries covered floor-to-ceiling in botanical painting big.  Hundreds of acres of gardens, palaces, lakes, and trails big.

“I hope…I may be able to see the magnificent Palm house at Kew.  I have never hitherto been able to visit the Gardens, my time being so much occupied with pupils & the duties of a parish, as well as, a young family of six children.” -- Andrew Bloxam, 1855 letter.

How about a building full of tropical palms big?......

Click here to read more!!

PLANTS! BADGERS! GIANT WATER LILIES! A PEACOCK!

Yesterday I took a break from the piles of flattened dead trees and went to see some live ones!  Here's my photo-essay of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

INVASION OF THE CHILD MONSTERS. They’re everywhere.  They always match.  And they weirdly have a lot of male caretakers.  Progress?

  Bench on a little hill. (Or, a quiet spot away from the children.)

OMG you guys a peacock walked by me.

See hole in ground.  Crawl into hole.

Discover: A fake badger!  This, my friends, is a reconstructed badger “sett” (den) created, I presume to keep children out of the real badger setts.

The peacock likes a good fake badger too, apparently.

Steampunk tree roots.  Cool.

Climbing into the treetops!!  Also, annoying planes like that one kept landing or taking off from Heathrow every few minutes.  One imagines no such distractions existed when Queen Charlotte frequented the grounds.

I really did try…

Me in the trees!  The Temperate House in the background.

And now we’ve entered the Temperate House, the largest surviving Victorian glass structure in the world. 

Imposing. Impressive.  The Temperate House.

Tea party in the rose garden!  Isn’t this so cute??????

All the pots and bowls grow plants that make or accompany tea.  Smells divine.

GIANT LILYPADS.

The Palm House.  They pump visible (and audible…) steam in every few minutes.  I had to leave when my heart started pounding and everything got shiny.

Just posing with some rose trellises, nbd.

Kinda looks like the TARDIS, no?

Adieu, temple of the earth.  ‘Til next time.  (Likely tomorrow.)

Pitfalls of Being American in Britain

 

I didn’t take many photos yesterday (Tuesday June 25), so here, look at picturesque suburban London!

I do not understand how an entire country of citizens can tend toward the left.

No, I don’t mean politically.  I mean physically.  It’s mind-boggling.  A weird/stroller-pushing/brusquely-walking-briefcase-toting individual walks toward you on a narrow sidewalk? The solution is simple: move to the rig NO! NO! LEFT!  I’ve taken to walking blindly into intersections so as to avoid the embarrassment of looking the wrong direction.  (My second-best solution, so as to avoid death, is to look both directions about five times very quickly.)

And what about this whole accent deal?  Brits come to America and sound intelligent, cool, and, in the case of Benedict Cumberbatch -- love of my life and baddie in the recent Star Trek film -- simultaneously poised and dangerous.  AKA sexy.

I, on the other hand, open my mouth to whimper a “Yes, please” at the cash register and get shortchanged.  (This could also be because I keep forgetting that the dime coin is bigger than the 5p coin… but still, I deserve that coupon attached to the receipt you didn’t give me, Tesco cashier!  I buy a lot of sandwiches!)

And great, now I’ll have sandwich withdrawals when I get home.  Thanks Britain.  You’re the best.

OUTTAKES: The Kew Money Guy, The British Documentary Filmmaker, and The Loud Americans

Ever so slightly dramatized.

KMG: “Marianne North’s oil painting is preserved by the acidic paper.”

TLA: “That’s fascinating.  I mean, I’m just shocked that she’s so technically skilled.  Did she know about the acidic paper?”

BDF: “So if we make the movie – and we’re crossing our fingers – we’re gonna want to film this, so, can we film this, and what’s the format of this image, exactly?  Can we light it?”

KMG: “Well—”

TLA: “We know the paper’s acidic, right?  Here’s a question – would Marianne North have known the paper she was painting on was acidic?

KMG: “Well—”

KMG: “The Reading Room is open for use by anyone who needs to be here.”

TLA: “What’s the criteria for needs to be here? Who decides?”

BDF: *nods*

KMG: “Well, if someone came in and said, ‘I want to look at pictures of roses,’ we might suggest they may be better-suited elsewhere.”

TLA: “Good, good.  Gosh, these are some pretty flowers.  She definitely must have known about the acidic paper.”

Talking* to British** People

 Another entry from the blog of the scholarship that's generously funding my research!  Woohoo!  As always, link is the title below.

Hauser Sophomore Scholars 2013: Reports from the Field: Day 2: Talking* to British** People: *Includes overhearing and nodding. **And those pesky colonials.

Well, I ate lunch today, but I’m starting to think that six hours in a chair with a twenty-minute break still isn’t a terribly effective research strategy.

For instance, this morning my eyes started to glaze over as Mr. M.J. Berkeley’s handwriting on pages and pages of letters morphed into a stream of pretty, meaningless shapes.  This may also have been because I was eavesdropping on the very loud conversation between….

The Kew Money Guy, The British Documentary Filmmaker, and The Loud Americans.

KMG: “The Reading Room is open for use by anyone who needs to be here.”

TLA: “What’s the criteria for ‘needs to be here’? Who gets to decides?”

BDF: [Doesn’t speak, but I imagine he nods ingratiatingly, or else looks away in shame.]

KMG: “Well, if someone came in and said, ‘I want to look at pictures of roses,’ we might suggest they could be better-suited elsewhere.”

Lesson: A polite British let-down is a big fat rejection.  Also, just like Shakespeare and double entendres, if it sounds sarcastic, it is...........

Click here to read even more hilarious conversations with Brits+!

DAY ONE OF RESEARCH DONE!! Funny moments...

Another post on the scholarship blog!  Snippets below -- click the title link to read the full post. <3

Note: Does not include the five minutes it took me to find the automatic sliding glass doors into the Herbarium building.

Hauser Sophomore Scholars 2013: Reports from the Field: Day 1: Doubtful Decisions around Teatime

I arrived bright and early at the Reading Room at the Herbarium to find two huge piles of books and a trolley of archival materials with my name on them.  I felt like a kid in a candy store.  (Literally.  Every person who interacted with me looked very confused, as if a seven-year-old had walked into the sacred temple of fragile artifacts.  My mother says I’ll be thankful for my youthful looks when I’m older…)

..... 

QUOTATIONS OF THE DAY 

“Curtis wrote him again soon, undertaking to gather and preserve especially fleshy fungi.”  –Ronald Petersen, “B. & C.”: The Mycological Association of M.J. Berkeley and M.A. Curtis Petersen.

“Their correspondence is tedious in extremis, and I must vote Broome one of the most boring men in the history of mycology.” --Stefan Buczacki, in Pytophthora.

I Begin at Kew Gardens (Or, Lots of Mushrooms)

I'm blogging on behalf of the scholarship I won for summer research.  Click on the link (title in red) to read my whole post!

Hauser Sophomore Scholars 2013: Reports from the Field: I Begin at Kew Gardens (Or, Lots of Mushrooms): As of yesterday afternoon, I'm happily ensconced in the narrow suburban streets and scattered greens of Kew.  Sonia and Peter, the lovely old couple who run the place where I’m staying, do know how to put the breakfast in B&B.

So it was on a full stomach that I strolled down Bushwood Road to the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

I should backtrack.  Why, you ask, would somebody seek to become a Hauser Sophomore Scholar and then travel across the pond and four Tube zones out of London just to look at a bunch of plants?

In the spirit of 19^th century botanists, let me taxonomize for you.

I’m starting with two main characters, three research problems, four places of inquiry, and a Big Question.  Thanks to the advice of Dr. Phillips, I spoke with the good people at the Harvard University Herbaria, who introduced me to these lovely chaps.......

Click here to read the rest!

7 Easy Steps to Lose Weight!

1. Concoct a reason to do research at a posh archive (the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, perhaps?).

2. Obtain funding (fellowships, grandparents) for airfare and a bed & breakfast with no shower curtains.

3. Make appointments with every department at the archive.  Agree to leave all forbidden items at home.  That means you, candy bars! And laptop cases. And pens.

5. After agreeing to the rules, request every possible item marginally related to your research topic.

6. Arrive in the morning and watch the piles of paper amass on your desk.  Ready, set, HIKE!

7. Around 5pm, drag your dead laptop and starving body back to the B&B.  If you have the energy, go buy a cheap sandwich from the grocery store. Great workout, girlfriend, you deserve it!!!!~~~

Best Breakfast Everrrrrrr

"I'll leave you to have a munch, then." --Sonia

The Mother Country is Cold, Rainy, and Smells Like Tea and Doilies

Though that could just be the house of the nice little old couple who run the B&B where I'm staying...

In other news: I have arrived.

I landed at Heathrow this morning.  Flying British Airways reminds me of the good ol' days, when American airlines served free breakfast on all redeye flights.  Of course, the U.S. could never beat jam and croissants in cutely customized packaging.

After a ridiculously expensive cab ride to travel 20 minutes, I made it to the front steps of one in a line of modest brick and white-accented houses.  Sonia and Peter greeted me at the door and remarked at the size of my suitcase: "Did you bring all your books with you?"  I took a nap, then got my keys and headed to the best place in the UK: Tesco's, the all-purpose grocery store with tons of pre-packaged sandwiches.  Heaven.  (Maybe I just really like British food packaging.)

About to go to sleep in a little room that meets all the British stereotypes: florid, wooden, frumpy.