Ditton Park, Buckinghamshire, England

Ditton Park is a manor house near Heathrow Airport. It was owned by the crown at one point, but now is owned by an IT company. I've sometimes noticed it on the approach into Heathrow. Here it is up close:





The wet English summer has been good for the lawn and pond:



If you walk through the guard-house here, you walk over a bridge over a moat.



Picturesque. You could forget you are so close to Heathrow airport (though maybe the low-flying planes are a clue).

Mark Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern in London

For me, the "Rothko Room" at the Tate Modern is a must-see for any trip to London. Although it is a cliche to say it, the paintings do have a spiritual element, and to me are more spiritual than, for example, St Paul's Cathedral across the Thames. In the darkened Rothko Room, the paintings seem to shimmer.

Enjoying the September sunshine in London last Saturday, I walked over the Millennium Bridge across the Thames to the Tate Modern to see the Rothko Room. Here we see the Tate Modern silhouetted behind the glaring sun.



Once at the Tate Modern, I is hard to avoid noticing that the Tate is now running an exhibition around the Rothko paintings. This means that I pay 13 pounds to see the same paintings as usual (chiefly the famous 4 Seasons / Seagram Building paintings intended for New York). But, of course, there are more Rothko pieces than usual. And, this being the Tate Modern, more Rothko merchandise than usual to buy.



Tickets for the exhibition can be purchased in the cavernous Turbine Hall (is it possible to describe the Turbine Hall without using the word "Cavernous"?). The tickets are timed, as with "Fastpass" tickets at Disneyworld, so you have a set time to enter the exhibition itself.



The entrance is on the fourth floor. The quote from Rothko alludes to the "sacred experiences" which his works evoke, but also "profane experiences" too (you can also see in the paintings a womb-like evocation).



Looking down from the Fourth Floor to the Turbine Hall, we see people queuing up to get tickets for the exhibition:



I have not attempted to do the paintings justice with my mobile phone camera. Instead, here is
a video of Achim Borchardt-Hume, curator of the Rothko exhibition, describing the show.

Exiting the exhibition and looking back over the Millenium Bridge, we see the shadow of the Tate Modern stretching out halfway over the Thames towards St Paul's, connecting one modern, secular, representation of the spiritual with an older, religious, representation.

The land of the $46 breakfast

I just booked a hotel in London on Expedia. I notice that the breakfast option adds $46 (29 pounds, if you look at Expedia.co.uk).

You may think "For $46, it must be a great breakfast". But, this is a London hotel, so the breakfast most likely barely qualifies as a snack by American standards, and the coffee will taste like it was made on a frying pan.

Vonage Call forwarding to international mobiles

When I travel in Ireland, I forward my Boston number to an Irish mobile. This means that people in the US can continue to phone a US number, but it is my mobile in Ireland which rings.

In this way, I get the best of both worlds: No roaming charges in Ireland, and no international charges for family and friends calling me from the US, and no international charges for people in Ireland calling me when I am in Ireland.

I pay for the connection from the US to Ireland, through Vonage.

I use my Vonage number as my primary phone number. I do not give out my mobile number, even though I use my mobile phone a lot. When I am in the US, my Vonage number also rings my US mobile (what they call "Simulring") and I pick up whichever phone is closest to me. When I am not in the US, my Vonage number rings my mobile in that country (e.g. Ireland), and I simply do not use my US mobile (the SIM card is in my wallet now).

I recommend this approach to anyone spending any significant time in another country.

Flying to Ireland from Heathrow Terminal 1

For years, the Terminal 1 experience when flying from Heathrow to Dublin meant:

1) Security
2) A small Duty Free shop
3) A long walk through corrugated metal tubes to the Ireland gates (80 to 90), punctuated by an uninspiring cafe and a basic Duty Free shop.

Now, when you fly from Terminal 1 to Ireland, you can wander around the many shops and restaurants which previously had been off-limits to Ireland-bound travelers.

This means that now the Terminal 1 experience is:

1) Security
2) Many shops and pleasant places to eat (such as Giraffe, who do tasty breakfasts).
3) A long walk through corrugated metal tubes to the Ireland gates (80 to 90), punctuated by an uninspiring cafe and a basic Duty Free shop.

There is still no getting away from (1) and (3) unfortunately. But, it is pleasant to have much more space to roam, and shop, when flying from London to Ireland.

The map below does not show the corrugated metal tubes leading to the Ireland gates. If it did, the map would be twice as wide, with a long thin line stretching out to the left.


Image from BAA.com

Cadbury's Chocolate in the US

One lesson I've learned from frequent travel between the US and Europe is that if I take a lot of trouble to bring a hard-to-find item across the Atlantic, upon arrival I will find it in a convenience store and think "why did I go to so much trouble to bring it over with me?".

So it is with Cadbury's chocolate. I've often brought Cadbury's chocolate over with me to the US from Ireland. I have brought over bars, and in the Spring I've brought Easter Eggs (which, inexplicably, are not generally available in the US).

And, of course, I then find that Cadbury's chocolate is available in CVS. The package reports that it is made by Hershey's, not a good sign to someone like me who is used to UK and Irish chocolate (milk chocolate) and finds most Hershey products unpalatable. But, I tried the Hershey's Cadbury's chocolate and it is not bad. This means less chocolate being transported across the Atlantic by me, and less chocolate business for Tesco in Dublin, in favour of CVS in Boston. Another consequence of globalization.

Trinity College Dublin, Front Square

Back when I was a lad, I studied at Trinity College Dublin. Here are a couple of photos and a video of it. Trinity is one of the most-visited tourist attractions in Dublin.

Here is the Front Gate of Trinity. It is locked at night, but when I lived in college I could come and go as I pleased. It was nice to have a place right in the center of Dublin.

When I see the front of Trinity, I always think of the James Joyce line: "The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city's ignorance like a great dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind downward" (from "A Portrail of the Artist"). Joyce went to UCD, Trinity's rival.




Front Gate is always capitalized, and never called "the Front Gate" except by tourists or townies.

Walk through Front Gate, turn around, and you can see the Front Gate from inside Front Square. When I was a student there, the upper floors were taken over in a student protest by socialist students, but they were persuaded to end the occupation when it was pointed out that if they were arrested then the US Government would not give them J1 visas for summer work in the US.



Looking into Front Square from Front Gate, after rain:



The Chapel is on the left, and the Dining Hall / Commons on the right.



The Campanile and the Graduate Memorial Building (seen of many lively debates by Trinity's two debating societies, the Hist and the Phil):



The College Chapel:


It is, of course, free to stroll around Trinity's Front Square. If you want to visit the Book of Kells, an old copy of an illustrated bible housed in Trinity's Old Library, then you pay for that.

Tripadvisor donating $1m to good causes

Check out http://www.tripadvisor.com/Causes

I am registered with TripAdvisor, so I was able to choose which cause TripAdvisor should give money to. They are giving away $1m, and the money is spread out according to how people vote.

The causes are:

• Conservation International
• Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières)
  
• National Geographic Society
• The Nature Conservancy
• Save the Children

More Ryanair news - You can't make this stuff up

Three quite bizarre Ryanair news items, courtesy of Bernd Biege at About.com:

- A can of mushroom soup, being stored in overhead luggage on a Ryanair flight, spilt down on top of someone who happened to be allergic to mushroom soup. According to the Guardian, "a passenger on a Ryanair flight from Budapest to Dublin needed medical treatment after a jar of soup leaked in an overhead locker, dripping onto his face. The man suffered swelling to his neck and struggled to breathe, forcing the aircraft to be diverted to Frankfurt, in Germany."

- And not only did Michael O'Leary make an off-colour reference in a news conference to the kind of "B&B" service to be offered on potential transatlantic flights (and I don't mean "Bed and Breakfast" service), but then Ryanair put out a press release about how it was a most-watched clip on YouTube.

- And, least bizarre of all, there was suspected hanky-panky in the cockpit of a Ryanair flight, as reported in the Sunday Times and relayed by Bernd Biege.

Ronda, Andalucia, Spain

The Postcard a Day blog featured Ronda on Sunday. Ronda is in Andalucia, reachable via a very windy (and occasionally scary) road from Malaga. I'm sure there is another road, but that was the road I took anyway.

As people told me before I went there, Ronda is "all about the gorge", the 100m-deep (328ft) El Tajo gorge. In the photo below you can see the parador (a hotel) perched on the side of the gorge:



Here you can see another view of the gorge, looking down far below:


This part of Spain was one of the last Muslim strongholds of Al-Andalus during the Christian re-conquest (Reconquista) of Spain. The building below was the minaret of a mosque, and was made into a bell tower instead by Christians.



Ronda is also home to a spectacular bull-ring, whose entrance you can see below: