The Angel of the North

I'm a bit behind in updating our blog. Not much has happened this week, but we did get out a little last weekend. We drove to Gateshead, Newcastle's "sister city" on the other side of the River Tyne, to see The Angel of the North, one of the most famous landmarks in our immediate area.

Because it's located just off one of the main highways (or "dual carriageways," as they say here), we have driven past this hard-to-miss sculpture a few times, but have never stopped before.

From the plaque at The Angel's feet: "The Angel of the North was commissioned by Gateshead Council and created by internationally renowned sculptor Antony Gormley. It is Britain's largest sculpture and believed to the be the world's largest angel sculpture. It is one of the most-viewed pieces of art in the world--seen by more than one person every second, 90,000 every day or 33 million every year. Work on the sculpture started in July 1997 and it was assembled on site seven months later in February 1998. The Angel was fabricated from 200 tonnes of weathering steel by Hartlepool Steel Fabrications, Ltd. on Teeside. It rises 20 metres (65 feet) and has a wingspan of 54 metres (175 feet), almost as big as a jumbo jet."

We also ducked down a little path that led off behind the sculpture. The leaves are turning, though it's still fairly warm--light jacket weather. Perfect weather for a mini-hike through the woods.

Check out more of Antony Gormley's sculpture here. Coincidentally, I watched a documentary a couple of months ago about Horizon Field (excerpt of that documentary below), an installation of Gormley's in Austria. Enjoy...

Mother's Day with Wallace and Gromit

After a delicious Mother's Day breakfast, we took the train into Newcastle. It rained during the night and earlier this morning but by 10am, the skies were blue and the sun was shining brightly! It had turned out to be a gorgeous day!

In front of our house.

Ollie gets so excited when the train pulls up to the platform.

It takes about 20 minutes to get to Newcastle by Metro.
Merrit and I get a quick hug in. He was wishing me Happy Mother's
Day when Mike took this picture. Sweet thing.

The Salvation Army band was playing hymns in the city centre. This spot
is right by Grey's Monument (of Earl Grey Tea fame).

Walking to a restaurant that Mike wanted us to try.

Mike suggested that we eat lunch at this great, authentic Chinese restaurant; he's eaten there twice with folks from work and says it's nothing like the Chinese food we've had before. But...it was closed. Poo. So, we walked up the street a bit to an Italian restaurant instead called Portofino's. According to Mike's friend from work Carlo--who is from Rome, so  he ought to know, right?--Portofino's is the best Italian food in Newcastle. It didn't disappoint; though it was a bit pricey. Mike said, "Hey! It's Mother's Day!" :-)

We all shared an order of insalata caprese (Roma tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, olive oil, salt and pepper) as a starter. I had grilled balsamic salmon with roasted vegetables and salad. Oh my goodness, the salmon was so light and the texture so perfect, it almost had the mouth-feel of a dessert. (Do I sound just crazy? I know I'm a bit of a foodie, but it was soooo good.) The boys split an order of lasagna and Mike ordered (I forget what it was called) a pounded chicken filet, breaded and topped with ham, some cheese, and other stuff. I actually didn't really pay attention...I was in salmon heaven.

They all ate creme brulee for dessert, but I was "good" and only had one tiny bite when Mike wasn't looking. 

We really should have inquired about this
building's history. It had such a neat interior.
Hm, I guess we'll just have to go back! :-)

Pictures from our walk to the Centre for Life Museum, our next destination...

The Centre for Life is a museum in the city centre. I'm a big fan of free museums, which seem to be the norm in the US but not here. I have found, though, that you can typically join for a yearly family membership for less than the cost of two visits and they'll let you decide after your first visit if you want to upgrade. I've said no to a museum and an aquarium because I felt like "we'd seen it all" in one visit and the value just didn't seem to be that great for the price. Anyway, what's your point? (as Mike would say). After our Mother's Day visit, we applied the day's admission price towards an annual membership, so we're sure to go back.

There was lots to see at the museum, but we spent all our time at the Wallace and Gromit exhibit, which was partly about the claymation behind the animated duo and partly about fantastic (and forgettable) inventions of our time. If you've seen any of the Wallace and Gromit movies/shorts, you know that they are always coming up with some new invention, some of which go horribly awry! :-)

Mike and I have been fans of W and G since 1997 or so, when our friend Bill Stevens gave Mike a VHS tape and said, "You've got to watch this!" It was really, really cool to see the miniature sets where the movies were filmed. You just really can't imagine the kind of time, patience, attention to detail, creativity, and effort that goes into animation done to this level of perfection. The dollhouse-like sets were unbelievable. Here are some close-ups:

Wallace trying to help Gromit and the runaway vacuum.

"It's okay, Gromit. Everything is under control."

I love this dog's expressiveness. 

"Cracking toast, Gromit."

To give you a sense of scope, here's Ollie looking in at the dining room set.

We have this same refrigerator! (actually called a SMEG)

The little girl in me loved the dollhouse feeling of these sets. The little veggies
on the kitchen cart, the spoons in the ceramic pitcher, all the little details
in miniature! 

The exhibit was very interactive. Here Ollie toyed around with (not really)
making his own music. I gave him a shot because I honestly thought, "Maybe
he is a little Mozart." But, naah, he just got tangled up in the headphone wires.

At this center, you could design your own wallpaper, too.

There's much more to see at the Centre for Life, including a planetarium, so I'm sure we'll be back! Thanks to my three awesome guys for such a grand day out.

From the Coal Era to the Information Age

The coal era and the information age were like bookends at our visit to the Woodhorn Museum today.

Northeast England, like a lot of industrial areas--I'm thinking of North Carolina's textile mills--suffered when its primary industry, in this case coal, went away. Newcastle has spent the last 15 to 20 years trying to reinvent itself as a high-tech and media city. Video games have played a pretty significant part in reviving the area's economy. There's an exhibit on now at the Woodhorn Museum called Videogame Nation--and today we went to go see it.

Billed as "a fun-filled exhibition charting the meteoric rise of videogaming--from the geek-tastic realm of the bedroom programmer to the multi-billion pound industry it is today," the Videogame Nation exhibit was fascinating.

It was strange and nostalgic--even for me, not a big gamer--to see old video game console systems like the Atari on display as artifacts in a museum. The exhibit was a retrospective of the last 35 years of game development, told mostly from the perspective of Britain's contributions to the industry.

After the video game exhibit, we toured the rest of the museum, housed in a collection of old brick buildings that used to be the Woodburn Colliery. The coal mine opened in 1894 and was in operation until the mid 1980s. We all learned a lot about coal mining, the role that unions played in the mining industry here in the UK, and about the hard life that miners and their families lived.

After we saw it all, we had lunch in the cafe.

Then a short kiddie train ride along the old narrow gauge railway through the scenic Queen Elizabeth II Country Park.

Then a sleepy 20-minute drive home.

Then the boys all napped and I went for a run. I've entered a 10K that I'll be running in a couple of weeks; I need to keep training so that I don't end up barfing in the bushes on race day! Actually, today I ran the full 6.2 miles and felt great. I didn't run the actual course, just the correct distance. What a gorgeous day! I ran along the seafront, 3.1 miles down to Tynemouth and 3.1 miles back. Right by the Tynemouth Priory and Castle.

People were out in serious numbers today. It was 14 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit) and you would have thought it was the middle of summer! Shorts and flip-flops. Surfers in the water (in wet suits of course). Joggers. Bikers. People playing rugby on the beaches. Dog walkers. Kids eating ice cream. Even the main drag had bumper to bumper traffic, like Myrtle Beach in June.

Makes me wonder what summer will be like when it rolls around. I am excited to live in a beachside community. A first for me. I can't wait!

Foggy, Cold Visit to the Blue Reef Aquarium

This is Science Week for local schools (I sure hope they do science every other week of the year...LOL) so I had to stop by a charity shop for a white button down men's shirt, a.k.a. Merrit's lab coat for the week. Yesterday they asked if I could send him in with one.

Uh, no. We don't have any clothes that we don't need and wear since we only have about five outfits each until our stuff gets here. So, I dropped Merrit off at school at 9:00; Ollie and I were waiting outside the charity shop when they opened at 9:30. Men's shirt. Three pounds. Done. We walked it down to the school and left it at the front desk for Merrit.

First educational hurdle of the day, hurdled. 

The next educational hurdle: Find the bus to Tynemouth. Get on it. Go to the aquarium.

Easier said than done. Ollie and I stood in the foggy, cold weather for at least a half an hour before I realized we were at the wrong bus stop. By this time, I was holding him (biceps burning) and he'd fallen asleep.

I was talking to this sweet couple in their 70s (I would have sworn they were in their 50s); they were self-proclaimed Geordies (locals, with a very strong accent that I sometimes can't understand at all) and they were so friendly and funny. He said, "We met here in Whitley Bay. Isn't that right, dear?" [She nods and smiles, knowing the punchline] He goes on, "She was a nurse at the insane asylum and I was an inmate." And they both laugh like it's the first time he's told the joke.

The Geordie couple pointed me to the right bus stop. And finally we were on a heated bus on our way to Tynemouth and the aquarium.

The aquarium is on the sea front just above the cliffs that lead down to Longsands Beach, the most popular place to surf around here. It was so foggy, it would blow your mind if I tried to tell you. And cold. The max temp for today is 6 degrees C (or about 42 degrees F). From the bus stop, I could hardly see the aquarium across the street. 

We walked over, I pulled out my credit card to pay the admission. Uh oh, third educational hurdle of the day. They don't take swipe cards.

Tangent: All cards here are what they call chip-and-PIN. We don't have this in the US, at least not as far as I know. It's supposedly more secure because you have to use a PIN instead of a signature to complete your purchase, but our cards don't have chips and don't work that way. What I'm getting at is that not all merchants have a card reader that can even read swipe cards. Ah, and the aquarium is one of them. I didn't have enough cash on me for the admission. No ATM nearby. 

I was like, "We ARE going to the aquarium today. I did NOT stand in the fog and cold for half an hour waiting for a bus to turn back now." As I stood there weighing my options, the teenage girl behind the counter says in her lilting accent, "Ahhh, just go in...Shhhh!" and shooed us through the door.

Yes!

The aquarium was great. Not too big, which I'm always thankful for when you have a kid under age five. Sometimes the big museums are just too much for the littler ones to take in.

We saw lots of great fish. The lobster, crab, and crayfish tank was probably my favorite. (Okay, they're not fish, they're crustaceans. And they're delicious.) Ollie liked the vivid blue-and-yellow and "Nemo" fish in the tropical tank best. There was someone vacuuming out the rocks in that tank, and that was interesting to watch, too.

And now I know why the River Otter exhibits are usually outdoors. Oh my gosh, they are so smelly! Cute, but smelly. The sign on the wall read:

We Hope You Don't Find the River Otters' Musk Offensive
Territorial Marking Is Natural Otter Behavior

Outside now into the fresh air (cold!) to see the seals. We happened to catch the 12:00 feeding and exercise exhibition. The seals shimmied through hula hoops, popped out of the water to wave, jumped up to touch balls with their noses--all for fish that they greedily snapped up and swallowed whole. They were really beautiful, and seemed happy as clams (get it? we're at the aquarium? okay, that was a groaner) to be outside in the freezing cold water.

We ate lunch in the cafe. With no other food options nearby, I feared the worst...microwaved, processed junk food that costs an arm and a leg...but was pleasantly surprised when two bowls of homemade carrot and coriander soup and crusty rolls set us back by only 5 pounds.

Back to the cold, foggy bus stop. As we waited, we listened to the surf (though we couldn't see the water below) and the fog horns in the distance. 

We've been home over an hour but I still can't feel my toes. It's been this cold before, but not as damp. It's 99.7% humidity, according to the BBC Weather website. Just about the time I warm up, it'll be time to go pick up my little scientist from school.