Not quite snow

i've been really upset this week at the lack of snow in Leicester. It has been quite cold again with most days sitting below 3, and there has been snow in the towns outside leicester. Several mornings I have seen cars driving around with snow on their roofs, but that is the closest i've got.

However this afternoon at mixed hockey training we got caught in a big hail storm, with it hailing so hard that it was hard to see to the other side of the pitch. It came sort of close to snow, at least the pitch ended up white for about 10 minutes. I can't believe that we all continued to play, even though the hail was really hard, and hurt a whole lot when running into it. Hockey players really are a crazy crowd.

I want more snow - if it is going to be this horribly cold it could at least snow and make the world look nice, rather than the sleet, hail and rain we have had. My snow obession just hasn't been satisfied of late. I'll keep hoping and dreaming.

1/3 done

Handed in the last of the main essays today. That is the end of the core modules for the course. Strange to think that we have finished that main teaching part of the course. Now it is really just the dissertation and the work placements to go. There are a few small things to complete before April, but in essence we have finished the first main part of the course.

Spent most of the weekend in London. The weekend didn't quite go as planned, but i managed to get to the Docklands Museum down at Canary Wharf. It is a really interesting part of London, hadn't been there before, but had heard a bit about the building regeneration work they had done to reclaim the docks and build them into a useful and community based area. The museum is in one of the original warehouse buildings, but it is surrounded by very new, generally quite nice buildings.

The museum tells the history of the docklands area, looking at the way the Thames has shaped London from pre-Roman times to the 1980s. I quite enjoyed the 20th century section, they had some really interesting things on the Blitz. I amused myself though, by realising how much my visitation fitted into the conclusions drawn from visitor studies. The last essay i wrote had quite a bit on visitor studies and behaviour in museums, and it was interesting and amusing to assess my visiting behaviour against the research i had studied. After about 30 minutes i did start to drift between displays and not read all the labels, but merely those that caught my attention, just as the surveys suggested first time visitors to a museum would do. Nice to realise that there is a strong truth in all that research.

I visited an Inner Wheel club today, and spoke there. The Inner Wheel is a ladies club that is attached to Rotary, it started as a club for the wives of Rotarians when Rotary was a men's only club. It was quite nice, a lot less formal than the Rotary meetings i have been to so far. A few of the members are going to Australia during this year, so they were quite interested in some of the things I said, and asked a few questions. It was a really nice lunch, both the food (YUM) and the atmosphere. I really enjoyed it.

Other than that I haven't done too much. The last essay has been taking up a lot of my time, and I got a horrible cold yet again last week. So there isn't really all that much to report sorry.

Paris

Just come back from a weekend in Paris. It was a lovely two days, although i'm afraid there aren't that many photos ... didn't go to that many touristy places, sorry.

I stayed with Richard Owen and he took me around, translated for me and generally was a great tour guide. He was even happy to be dragged around museums, although I was very good and limited myself to one museum this time; I have every intention of going back!

On Saturday we went to to the Musee National du Moyen-Age which includes, and is mostly, the Musee de Cluny. Richard hadn't been to it before and it had a few things i wanted to see, including the Lady and the Unicorn Tapestry. The museum is built over two amazing historic sites, with bits from each forming the museum building. The main building is the mansion of the Abbots of Cluny, but part of it is also the remains of a Roman Baths. Despite these amazing sites and the amount of wonderful objects in the museum it was really dissapointing. In general the objects had no interpretation and the labels obviously hadn't been updated for far too many years. They simply gave the name, date and provenance of the objects. Each room was themed and often that was the only hint as to the importance of the objects. It was very obvious which objects were the star attractions, based on the display and interpretation. The lady and the unicorn tapestries were the show piece, and you had to go through over half of the museum before you got to their room. This was pretty much the only room that had top quality displays and interpretation in several languages. The tapestries were lovely, and in amazing condition when you remembered how old they were. I spent quite a while just gazing at them, then i went and had a closer look at the display cabinets and lighting, which i think made the guard a little nervous.

Other than those the Frigidarium from the baths and the scultpures from the Notre-Dame cathedral were really the only other things that were given any level of interpretation and explanation. Even those were sketchy in parts. It really was a bit dissapointing for a national museum to be so poorly maintained. It felt like a local council museum run by volunteers mostly.

After the museum we went for lunch, then richard gave me a bit of a driving tour of Paris. He drove me around the outside of the Lourve. I think i will need a week just to explore that. I hadn't realised just how big the building was. I was also blown away by the Place de la Concorde, the sheer magnificence of the buildings and the scope of the area, I want to walk around it and get a chance to really look at the buildings there. We drove up the Champs Elysees and then he drove me all the way around the Arc de Triomphe. At that point I kept my eyes on the Arc and didn't look at the traffic, even though Richard kept saying that there wasn't that much traffic and that it was a bit boring really. I can't believe that there are no lane markings on such a massive round-about. We then took a really senic route back to Richard's place including the Moulin Rouge and a few other sites.

Sunday was a free day for museums, so we decided not to battle the crowds and avoid the museums. Instead we did a lot of walking which was really nice as i got to see some of the back areas of paris, well away from the tourist route. I wanted to go to Montmarte, and Richard offered to give me an Amelie tour of it, which was lots of fun. He took me to the cafe where she worked, past the metro station, then up the steps to the Sacre-Coeur. We wandered around the back of Montmarte, saw the vineyard and a few other things.


Montmarte


Carousel at the bottom of the Sacre-Coeur



View from Sacre-Coeur



In general it was a very quiet weekend and a lovely chance to see some of the less touristy bits of Paris. Next time I will go to more museums and take lots more photos, promise.