"They're Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace"

Okay, so they're not actually changing the guard in these pictures, but that was the coolest thing about this day in London.

Here Josh and I were all miffed that we wouldn't be able to tour the inside of Buckingham Palace or even see the outside on a day when they were changing the guard. We dragged ourselves all the way across St. James Park just to say that we had glimpsed the royal residence, and what do you know? We're shoved out of the street and onto the sidewalk by mounted bobbies to make way for a parade or royal guards that's about to come through!

From what I've been told, the parade was actually much more interesting than the changing of the guard usually is. What a surprise blessing!

In other news, farewell to the London Olympic Games!

I just found out yesterday that one of my college friends has spent the past month in London attending the games. Jealousy may have just caused our relationship to plummet from "friends" to "acquaintances."

Title is from the poem "Buckingham Palace" by my favorite poet, A. A. Milne.

More pics of the parade after the jump!

"Stockholm in My Heart"

 

I know it's no excuse, but Travel Tuesday has taken a nosedive amidst my efforts to weed through and edit seventy-three billion six hundred and nine kajillion photos of Stockholm, Sweden.

What can I say? The two days Josh and I spent in Stockholm were absolutely magical (despite the fact that I was in the middle of one of the longest and most intense IC flareups of my life. What does that tell you?) Stockholm is one of those places you love to just be. It doesn't matter what you're doing. Just taking in all of the colors, the culture, the crowds--it makes the experience worthwhile.

Title is from this fabulous Swedish pop song "Stockholm I Mitt Hjärta."

 

 

This is what the Swedes dress like.

I'm kidding. Of course they don't :-) This was a traditional Swedish festival that was going on downtown right as we arrived in Stockholm. Talk about luck! Josh and I even stopped to pose with a beautiful older couple in traditional garb. Who knows? Maybe this is how their parents dressed when this couple was growing up.

There was also a street dance festival going on while we were in town. What a weekend to pick, huh? There also happened to be a marathon going on. That wasn't so great. Lots of roads blocked off.

Anyway! The art culture of Sweden is just so vibrant. The crowds that turned up for these dancing street performers where so thick I literally couldn't get a single picture of the actual dancing! Plan on more than just a handful of posts about architecture, sculpture, decor, and street art out the wazoo.

 

 

A guard at the royal palace

Most Swedes practice a daily ritual called fika. While it's not unusual for the average American to have a cup of coffee in the morning and then head off to work in an office that keeps a pot of coffee on hand, a Swedish office will actually close for about 15 minutes in the mid-morning and again mid-afternoon so that everyone can take a break and fuel up on caffeine and a pastry of some kind.

And I thought the Spaniards were big on coffee!

 

More gorgeous pics of the most special city in Europe after the jump!

"All Creatures of Our God and King" (London, England)

Happy belated Travel Tuesday! I really just need to give in and make it Travel Wednesday . . .

Supposedly it's terrible blogging/photography/modeling/everything etiquette to include photos of multiple "poses" of the same thing when presenting a variety of photos publicly. They tell you to never include photos of the same outfit in a portfolio, no matter how different they may be in terms of angle, lighting, pose, etc.

Well, I've never been good at etiquette :-/

These photos of delightful critters at the London Zoo and Saint James Park are all so magnificent I couldn't possibly pick out just one photo of each beautiful beast! Part of why these pictures turned out so well is because they were taken with the childlike eye of my wonderfully creative husband Josh.

It's Josh's birthday today!

Happy birthday, sweetheart, and thank you for stopping time with me to capture the seemingly insignificant details of life's moments. I love sharing a hobby with you! Speaking of which, we're due for another photo shoot, don't you think?

Josh has taught me so much about enjoying life. He seems like such an amazingly balanced person to an over-achiever and over-committer like myself. He loves photography (between the two of us we have almost 5,000 photos from the past six months), but he loves to put the camera down and take in the moment with just our memories as well. He is extremely intelligent, but he still finds wonder in every day discoveries.

For example, the above zebra-giraffe-mule mashup known as an okapi was quite familiar to a veteran player of Zoo Tycoon such as myself. I remembered them not only from their unique appearance, but also because they are an endangered species that required a great deal of research and funds to procure in the computer game, and if you wanted to breed them--whew, that research program would keep you from your homework for days.

All this to say, while it was amazing to see the creatures in real life, my excitement paled in comparison to that of Josh who had never seen such a thing. I still remember the look in his eyes as he turned to me with his mouth ajar and said with disbelief, "Noooo . . ."

As in, "These things really exist????"

He snapped picture after picture of the okapis and their neighbors (the giraffes and zebras, of course). Sadly, I was too busy stewing over the fact that the camera battery was about to run out to appreciate his enthusiasm at the time.

Thank you, sweetheart, for keeping the innocence and excitement in our relationship even when I try to take life too seriously.

P.S. There's a freakin' huge pelican below the jump! So read on!!!!

Title is from the hymn by St. Francis of Assisi.

Mist machines for the indoor rainforest animals

These meerkats had so much personality. It's Timon!

The pics after the jump are for the birds! Teehee, I'm so clever ;-)

"City Port Took My Blues Away" (Marseilles, France)

I spent today on a lovely excursion to Watkins Glen, New York with my mom and sister. Walking the piers and later enjoying the most perfect Lobster Cobb salad one could imagine, I was reminded of a certain fact about my feelings towards docks, fish, boats, and water in general:

I love waterside communities. I love marinas where boats of sea-goers from every walk of life moor at the edge of the big blue waiting to begin a journey. Even better are European port cities--pockets of the wide open sea tucked under the wing of a bustling urban environment. Such is the Vieux-Port ("old port" in French) of Marseilles, France.

The Watkins Glen piers along Seneca lake do remind me of a much smaller scale Vieux Port, in a way. The above picture could have been taken in a marina from either location for example, but the same could not be said for some of the photos that follow.

Marseilles backs up from Vieux Port to the second largest city in France after Paris. Walking down Rue Canebiere, it's actually quite shocking how quickly this bustling broadway of art and culture cuts of completely and veers off in two gangly arms hugging a narrow boatyard hedged by cafes, cocktail lounges, tea rooms, hotels, and theaters.

As the stereotypical French high-life continues on either side of the port, directly in front of the wharf the culture quickly turns Mediterranean as fishmongers sell fresh wares every morning. And I mean fresh. They were literally hauling in loads of seafood while we stood there watching people barter at the fish market. The men and women who work the docks are dirty, gruff, and boisterous like characters out of a Dickens seaside epic.


This is not the glamorous lifestyle I associated with France before our trip, but it is a side of the country I am glad to have experienced. Who would have known that we are so similar in the Finger lakes region of New York state to the Marseillaises of France?

View of Notre Dame de la Garde from the Old Port

 

More pics of Marseilles' Old Port and one freaking huge fish after the jump!

European Bucket List

Whenever I have a goal or a series of goals--serious or lighthearted, it doesn't really matter--I like to form them into lists. It helps me see the big picture when I can look at a single piece of paper or a single word document or even a single Powerpoint and instantly see everything that I want to accomplish in the near--or sometimes not so near--future.

My latest habit is composing bucket list collages. If you can't really picture what this would entail, this should help:

This page was sketched over time in my Avila notepad. I call it our European bucket list. It lists everything that I wanted Josh and I to be able to accomplish while we were in Europe. Some of them you might expect: watch a flamenco dance, eat dinner on the Riviera, eat churros . . . yeah there's a lot about places and things that I wanted to eat. Others might seem really random: find a pet store, buy cereal, or learn a new card game. I guess these were personal challenges as well goals. I didn't want to just sit around!

This is my new favorite format for goal-making! Since Europe, I've started a summer bucket list and a lifelong reading bucket list.

Wouldn't you just love to check things off of a list as fun and quirky as this? What a great motivation to meet your goals!

The Jacket That Saw the World

All right, I swear on all that is holy that I did not plan this in the least, but it is just about the cutest coincidence in the world!

While looking through all of the 4,000-some photos from our life-changing trip to Europe this spring, I noticed an interesting trend. I may have only sported my turquoise blazer in a handful of outfit photos, but I can be seen sporting my (apparently) favorite jacket in at least one set of photos from each and every "touristy" trip we took to a country outside of Spain!

This coincidence ended up being a fun way to track of all of the traveling we have done in the past five months. There is a constant in all of the photos regardless of which country they were taken in. Who new that an article of clothing could come to contain so many memories? As I type this, my good old blazer is tucked in the drawer next to me in case I get chilly in the library's AC.

As of May 2012, the turquoise jacket has seen the following countries (including the US of course):

• Spain
• France
• Italy
• England
• Ireland
• Sweden

And now for some visual representations of the adventures of this intrepid piece of outerwear!

I challenge you to look through some old photos to find evidence of that one fallback piece that has always been there for you--and that has seen a lot of interesting places as a result!