Yes it is true, we had several inches of snow here in London and it is also true that we had a bit of a tough time dealing with it. No snow plows or salt trucks or shovels even. The first day after the snow (Monday) there was no school, no mail (no "neither rain nor sleet nor snow..." motto for the Royal Mail) , no buses and very few trains. I'm not sure exactly why the trains were effected since I don't think you have to clear the snow for the trains to drive on the tracks - I think it was more of a "no one else is going to work so I shouldn't have to go either" argument from the train staff. Tuesday, the second day, things were a bit more back to normal, the main road and sidewalks were mostly clear just from traffic and the side streets were coated with frozen slush. It seems that here, similarly to the US, people sort of assume that road rules are suspended when there is snow. The pedestrians were walking down the middle of the street and crossing in front of cars. Drivers were parking in odd places (like right outside the door of our building instead of in a parking space) and sliding around corners on the slush as if they expected to have normal amounts of traction with summer tires on frozen snow.

The snow continued to melt and we went to see Kim's parents in Plymouth. It was a fun visit; we even squeezed in a bit of yarn shopping. Then on the way back the train kept getting delayed and having to be re-routed because of the rain that was falling on top of the snow and creating small floods. It seems that British trains are neither able to deal with water in its crystallized form nor its liquid form. Given how wet the climate is here I would have expected slightly better engineering on the part of the train designers.

We didn't have too much time on Sunday. We slept in a bit and then had breakfast in a little cafe before we hopped on the posh bus back to the airport. I worked on a new sock pattern during the long flight (mostly due to a delay) on the way back.

We started off Saturday with the Castelo de S?o Jorge, one of the main attractions in Lisbon. Here is a photo that I took later in the day of the castle from afar.

We managed to get up so early in the morning that the castle was pleasantly empty for most of our visit there. Upon entering the castle the first thing we noticed was the statue of King Afonso Henriques and the view over Lisbon. Nothing like a militarily strategic location for a good view.

Like many of the castles we have been to we were allowed to climb up onto the battlements and along the walkways and into the towers. There was even a man playing the flute to add ambiance.

Of course any day of proper sight seeing involves a bit of camera faffing.

On our way from the castle to whatever we had planned to see next we stumbled across an old Roman Theater, as you do, and we stopped for a few photos which are unfortunately mostly tainted by modern conveniences such as metal poles to hold up the roof. To be honest it just looks like a pile of rocks but I felt obliged to take a photo anyway.

Next we went to the Igreja do Carmo which is a church that was ruined in the earthquake in 1755. A rebuilding project was started at some point but was not completed due to funding troubles and the roof was never rebuilt. (Of course if you want any actual facts about these things you should go to an actual source of facts, I'm just an armature tourist). Anyway, it was a lovely sunny day when we were there and I thought it was a rather peaceful, spiritual sort of place - a nice change to the dark and gaudy cathedrals that one usually sees in Europe.

In the tiny museum there were some tombs and a somewhat random mummy from Peru (which may have seemed somewhat less random if I could have read the caption). It is also worth noting that although we hardly saw any cats in Lisbon when we were wandering the streets we saw quite a few in each of the tourist attractions we went to. They were not all that friendly or excited to see people and this one was rather uncooperative in having its picture taken.

After all this sight seeing we were in need of some refreshment so we went to a restaurant which was recommended by a friend and finished off our meal with some tiny coffee.

Rejuvenated by our meal we popped into the lavishly decorated Igreja de S?o Roque which contained among other things two mysterious collections of tiny statues of heads and arms. According to Wikipedia these were actually reliquary altars which are shaped like the objects they contain. Let's not dwell on the details. We walked a bit more after that and I took a photo of this tiled walkway because Lisbon is covered by tiled sidewalks. According to our guide book there were many fires after the earthquake in 1755 that I mentioned before and during the rebuilding people were keen to use non flammable materials. We also passed this pair of jeans on a bench and at the time it seemed odd enough to be worth a photo. How exactly do you get up from a bench and not notice that you no longer have your trousers?

In the evening we relaxed in a friendly little bar for a bit and tried some green wine which wasn't really green at all but which was pleasantly refreshing. We also went to another fado house where we snacked on some cheese and bread while we listened to the slightly sadder sounding music and turned down offers to by more cd's.

Friday we packed, took the train to the airport, flew to Portugal and hopped on a bus into Lisbon. We were thinking about taking a cab but the woman in the tourist booth in the airport seemed quite confident that we could figure out the bus and in the end we had no problem since it was one of those tour buses with plush seats and an announcement when we got to each stop. We found our hotel with only minor difficulty - the even and odd numbers were on opposite sides of the street and we found the odd numbers surrounding the number we wanted but when we got across the street we discovered we were in front of completely unrelated even number and we had to walk several blocks to get to our hotel.

After we checked in we went for a walk around an area called Alfama. Alfama is an old, rather hilly part of the city and we walked up and down lots of little staircases and alleyways before we stumbled across S? Patriarchal Cathedral.

Satisfied that we had accomplished our turist duties for the day we popped into a little coffee shop and then a bar for a few pre-dinner drinks. The bar was outdoors and had several cages of little birds that seemed to be having a disagreement of some kind. They all chirped wildly and eventually seemed to calm down until one little bird made a quiet chirp (which seemed to be equivalent to "but I was right all along" in Portugese bird language) and then they all started chirping and arguing again. Finally we found a restaurant with some proper (aka touristy) fado which is traditional music sung by usually one person with guitar backup and is supposed to be soulful and sad according to our guide book but which sounded a bit more upbeat in the restaurant we went to. The main performer also tried to sell us cd's of him and his family singing and although he tried to enthusiastically tell us about the booklet of family history(written in Portuguese) that was included we decided to pass. The fact that he kept forgetting what language we speak and tried to communicate with us in French just made the whole transaction all that more interesting.

I finished the vest. I had a different gauge than the pattern called for and so I had to make up the neck myself. It isn't quite as square as it was in the photos, mine is more of a cross between a scoop and a v-neck. Overall I'm quite pleased and I think it fits well.

Well I finally made it through the colorwork with minimal frogging. I tried to do one color with each hand but that was tough to keep loose enough to avoid puckering so I went back to just dropping the color I wasn't using. I would like to give the one color per hand method another try some time though because it seems like it would be faster. Overall I'm happy with how this bit came out and I'm looking forward to finishing.

Recently I went on a road trip from Michigan to Tennessee to Ohio. This seemed a fitting farewell to America before I said goodbye to the big open spaces of the Midwest and moved to tiny grassy patches of downtown London. The total trip distance was reported to be about 1036 miles according to Google maps. I set out early on a cold Sunday morning in my mom's minivan but for the purposes of this story lets just pretend it was a great American SUV - one of the really huge ones like an Envoy. A truly luxury vehicle (for this we don't need to pretend) with built in navigation, seat warmers, dvd player (to placate the pillows and the blender so that they wouldn't get into a squabble and suddenly make it snow inside the car) and fancy proximity detecting cruise control. Actually, I started out outside of my mom's minivan with an expanse of freezing air and a frosting like snow coating between me and the heated seats. Obviously I'm man enough to deal with such minor encumbrances or this would be so much a story of a great American road trip as a great American sleep in.

One key aspect of a great road trip (especially one which you do by yourself) is some good distraction material. In this case I packed some Christmas music and a sci fi book on cd. I'm not sure if sci fi is really fitting for the quintessential American experience but it was crazy over the top with drama and action and violence and it was un-necessarily long winded which all seem like important qualities.

Anyway the first several hours went by pretty uneventfully, no major traffic, no extra snow, and the characters in the story just managed to discover out that their superconducting supercollider had a life of its own. I did discover that the company that recorded the story into digital format decided to leave off any disk ending/disk starting alert information and I had several confusing moments of characters teleporting back to the middle of the dessert when I thought they had already moved to the super secure underground bunker for superconducting supercollider testing.

After another hour or two I slipped into the road-trip-vortex in which one starts to loose all useful sense of time. When this happens I usually try to comfort myself with calculations like "I'm half way there" or "only half of the remaining half and I will need to stop for gas and chocolate" but somehow my internal clock is unable to process what that means and I start to feel like I might be in the car (or luxury SUV) forever. Then I usually start to try to compare the remaining time to something else like "only 4 more episodes of Firefly" and I will be there which only serves to make me wish I was home watching tv rather than driving past tiny towns and cornfields for hours on end.

I tried to break up the time by listening to the radio but by the time I had that great idea I was way to far south to get any stations besides country ones and after listening to several men complaining about being dumped and loosing their dogs their melodic sob stories ceased to help the time go by. I also tried listening to Christmas music but I was too far south for it to feel like a very Christmassy time of year and that also failed to help. I did pass a church with an enormous statue of either Jesus or Moses growing out of the ground and a variety of blow up and life sized plastic lawn ornaments of snow men and Santas to break up the tedium.

I did finally make it to Tennessee although the gps cheerfully announced about 5 minutes from my brother's place that no more route guidance could be provided and that I should use direction and shortest line distance figure out how to get the rest of the way there on my own. The return trip was much of the same although the characters in the audio book were starting to get killed at a rate that made me think it would be just me and the narrator left alone for the last hour or two of the journey. Overall it was a good trip and it was reassuring to know that I was leaving America much the way I remembered it from my childhood taking road trips to various parts of our extended family. Fortunately it has quenched any road trip needs I might have for some time which is good since I don't have a car here in London and I would have to drive to another country in order to achieve proper road trip mileage.