Paris, London & Oxford

Dear Friends,

Over our spring break from school we went to France and England. We spent the first weekend in Paris. On Saturday we took a walking tour. At the end of the tour we could look in a 360° angle and see 5 important landmarks and buildings which included the Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde and the Egyptian obelisk that is in Paris. After the tour we took a boat tour on the Seine River which runs through the center of Paris. From the river we could see the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Eiffel Tower. The boat went under a lot of bridges. The following day we went to the most famous art museum in the world, The Louvre, where we saw the Mona Lisa, a mummy and big statues of Sphinxes. After we went to the Louvre we went to Luxembourg Park and rented toy sail boats that you could push across the small pond there.

Sailboats in Luxembourg Gardens - Travis' is on the right

The next day we went to the most famous landmark in Paris: The Eiffel Tower. When we got to The Eiffel Tower we were glad we had bought tickets online because there were at least 200 people in each of the 2 lines. From the top of The Eiffel tower we could see all of Paris. Then we went to Notre Dame, which is a cathedral that was built in 1345. In the late afternoon, we went on a high speed rail train to England that went under the English Channel in a tunnel (the Chunnel). The trip wasn’t as exciting as we had anticipated. My mom thought there was going to be an announcement that we were going down into the Chunnel (She also thought there should have been little plastic fishes on the wall like at Disneyland, but it was just dark like all tunnels).

Views from the bottom and top of the Eiffel Tower.  The most well-traveled giraffe joins us for the trip.

In London, we went to Westminster Abbey, which is a massive cathedral where kings and queens are crowned and buried. Also many famous people get buried in Westminster Abbey. I got to walk on Charles Darwin’s grave. My dad really wanted to find all the important scientists graves.  Next we saw the Changing of the Guards at Buckingham Palace. Buckingham Palace gardens were very pretty but it looked like the palace itself could use a washing.  After lunch we walked to Primrose Hill and we got a view of London.  Then we went to the British Museum. On Wednesday my dad and I did the touristy thing of riding the sightseeing bus. We got off at the bus stop for Tower Bridge. My dad and I went up 200 stairs (you could take the elevator) to the top of Tower Bridge. There was an interesting museum about some of the most famous bridges in the world, such as The Golden Gate Bridge. After my dad and I met my mum (as English people say it) and we saw Mamma Mia, which is a musical with many ABBA songs and flamboyant costumes. On Thursday we went to Kew (pronounced Q) which is the Royal Botanical Gardens. We saw cacti in the Royal Botanical Gardens and at one point a guard came by to make sure my dad was not stealing any cacti.

Beautiful flowers and lots of people at Buckingham Palace

We spent our last couple days in Oxford which is about an hour northwest of London. On Saturday we went hiking with some of my dad’s friends and I played with their kid Alex who is 7 years old.  We also saw some rocks that were placed in a circle by Neolithic people around 3,500 B.C. The rocks looked sort of like a small Stonehenge. On Sunday we met some other friends and walked around the grounds of a palace. I played with their 3-year old son Alan and we walked through a cool maze made of tall shrubs.

Alex and Travis read up on the World Cup teams

Travis catches Alan before he escapes

A few comments from Karen – One of the high points of the trip for me was meeting up with scientific colleagues at Kew.  We stayed with Bruce Pavlik, who I know from restoration work in California and is now the head of Restoration Ecology at Kew.  I spent a couple of days meeting with various scientists at Kew who are doing research on the ecology of tropical forest trees to use for reforestation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  I visited the Millenium Seed Bank where Kew has already stored seeds of 64,000 species of plants (and they continue to add species) to serve as a reserve in case the plants become extinct in the wild; it’s an impressive operation and facility.  Besides science, we were also pleased to be able to meet up with Ole Rummel, a friend from college, and David Goodman, a retired faculty colleague from UCSC.  

And the last word from Michael – I was really amazed by the amount and diversity of items in The Louvre.  I have never really considered myself a huge afficianado of sculpture, but there were some items there that were fascinating. For example, the Roman-era piece "Diana the Hunter" had this amazingly flowing quality to it.  La Jaconde (the Mona Lisa) was somewhat anticlimatic; I was much more taken with the painting The Coronation of the Emporer Napoleon I (in which he is crowing Josephine and himself in Notre Dame Cathedral) as well as The Wedding Feast at Cana. I have to admit that it was pretty cool to hear the bells of Big Ben, see the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and to cross the Tower Bridge in London. One of the personal highlights for me was being able to spend time in the cactus section of the herbarium at Kew and pouring over all the old specimens, as well as seeing the research succulent collection. 

One of Michael's MANY cactus photos (genus Melocactus for those who are wondering.  The brownish structures are their flowering stalks!)

We had a great time catching up with Andrew Smith and his family (wife Fran and son Alex) in Oxford. Andrew and I know each other from when I was a graduate student at UCLA; we spent a lot of time talking about the evolution and biochemistry of desert plants. He took us on a tour of Magdalen College, one of 38 colleges at Oxford and where Andrew is a tutor.  It has an impressive chapel (built in 1474) that rivals many European churches and a few noteworthy graduates include Oscar Wilder, Henry VIIIth, and Dudley Moore.  We were also able to meet up with my good friend and colleague Lisa (Patrick) Bentley, her husband Topher, and son Alan.  Lisa is doing a postdoc at Oxford, and we spent a perfectly relaxing Sunday at Blenheim Palace walking around, chatting, and watching the boys have a fun time. 

Cheers - Travis, Karen, and Michael

a few more thoughts on life in Spain

Dear Friends and Family,

We’ve spent the better part of the last three months outside of Barcelona and thought we’d each write a little bit on a few of our impressions/experiences here (this is Karen writing now).  During the week Michael and I have been working (research, writing, grant proposals, lots of Skype calls with colleagues & graduate students, etc.) and Travis has been going to school.  On weekends Travis has soccer games on Saturday mornings (so that hasn’t changed) and then we’ve been doing various local outings.  I have given several seminars at various Universities in Spain which has given me an opportunity to also visit some habitat restoration field sites.  Spring is approaching and the trees have leafed out here.  Michael and I have been enjoying being able to bike 30 min. to the University all with dedicated bike paths (quite a change from our bike commute route in Santa Cruz). We also appreciate how easy it is to get around by foot and public transit here.  

As any of you who have traveled in Europe know one of the things that is most striking is the difference is the ages of the buildings.  A couple weekends ago we were attending a calçotada, a uniquely Catalonian social event, where people eat large quantities of green onions roasted on an open fire (calçotes) and served with a tomato-based sauce and other food, and drink wine.  The event was held at a farm of the family of one of the graduate students in the department where we are based; the farm had been owned by the same family since the 13^th century!

Calcotada - onions on fire and Michael demonstrates proper calçotada eating technique with mandatory bib

Another weekend we were hiking at the Costa Brava which is an hour and a half northeast of where we are based and along the coast.  We were hiking through some hills with a view of the Mediterranean on one side and the snow-covered Pyrenees Mountains on the other.  The vegetation looked much like coastal scrub in California (always fun to see examples of convergent evolution) with many of the same plant genera (for the plant nerds reading this - e.g. Quercus, Mimulus, Rubus, various brooms in their native habitat).  One big difference as we were hiking, however, was that we came across ruins of churches and fortresses, and a monastery dating back a thousand years.  The day before we had visited a site with both ruins of the Greeks (~200 BC-100 AD) and the Romans (~100-400 AD).

Costa Brava - Greek ruins at Empuries (above) and view of monastery and coast from hike (below)(photos courtesy of the Spanish tourism department - we accidentally left our camera at home)

But, we haven’t just seen old buildings.  Yesterday we finally made it to the La Sagrada Familia church designed by Gaudi.  Construction was started in the late 1800s but it’s definitely still a “work in progress” (with three cranes and much scaffolding on the site) and isn’t slated to be completed until 2026.  I had just hit the point of “I’m not sure I can visit another church” as we've seen so many.  It is, however, a truly amazing structure both respect to the size (designed to hold 13000 people and rising ultimately to a height of 170 m) and the level of detail both inside and out.

La Sagrada familia - exterior and interior ceiling (looking upward, below) - photos courtesy of Wikipedia (ours didn't really do it justice)

Michael writing now - For me, one of the most amazing things has been the time scale of things here.  In North America we have amazing spatial scales in our deserts, prairies, and mountains (which I suspect may be one reason why German tourists are often in awe of the desert vistas of the US southwest.)  Here, I have been constantly amazed by the age of buildings, monuments, art, and other things that date back to the Middle Ages, or Roman times, or even earlier (such as the Greek ruins at Empurias that Karen mentioned above).  I have taken to touching (whenever or wherever possible) old columns, walls, stones, etc. and try to think about the nameless and faceless worker who placed the stone in the wall, and when.  I have been wondering about questions such as “How many rainstorms has this wall experienced?  How many people have walked by this church over the ages?  How long will this column last? Has this place where I am currently standing really been sacked by legions of Romans, boatloads of Vikings, and marauding Visigoths?”

In high school I took a history class in which we learned about Greek and Roman times which included some architecture (things such as the differences between Doric and Corinthian columns.) I enjoyed the history but was only slightly interested in the architecture.  This trip has started me thinking much more about architecture and how certain structures were designed and built, particularly given the lack of “modern” methods for transporting, lifting, and cementing large stones in place. The aqueduct in Segovia, Spain was really eye-opening in this respect.  The aqueduct is huge (813 meters long), tall (~30 m tall), and contains 88 arches. It was built in the 1^st century AD, and it still stands, despite being held together entirely by gravity.  The ingenuity that went into building something that massive and that has stood the test of time is truly mind-boggling to me. How did they figure it out?  How did they transport the stones, and lift them into place?  How did they stabilize arches or tall walls while under construction? Before we traveled to Spain, we saw a documentary on TV that showed the engineering that underlies load-bearing in tall, narrow arches in cathedrals, and how flying buttresses work to maintain the forces bearing downward on their walls (and not out, which would cause the walls to bow out and collapse.) So, perhaps part of what amazes me is that the science and engineering was done without our slide rules, calculators, or computer models. Likewise, the architecture in Morocco amazed me for the Islamic influences, the lack of figures (human and animal), and the preponderance and similarity and yet variation of geometric shapes and patterns. And, trying to imagine the time and skill required to attain the level of detail and workmanship still causes me to wonder how it was all done and how long it must have taken. P.S. I now know the difference between a Romanesque and Gothic arch! 

Now Travis’ turn - A few weeks ago we went to a Barcelona (Barça) soccer game. Being the Loik-Holl family we arrived to the game 1.5 hours early. The stadium in Barcelona fits just over 100,000 people inside. The day we went there were 67,000 fans at the game because the team they were playing was a team that was in the middle of the league. It was raining the whole game, but we were lucky and had seats under the overhang. Barcelona won the game 3-0 but their goalie got injured in the first half, which means Spain’s national team is without their starting goalie.  They will be without their starting goalie for the World Cup, so they may not be as good.

Barca vs. Celta de Vigo.  

Some things that are different at my school in Spain are: first, every Friday we get on a bus and go swimming for 35 minutes. The second thing that is different is that the school has sports teams for elementary grades. I am on the school soccer team and we won yesterday. Another thing that is different is that the school is trilingual so some classes are in Catalan, some are in Spanish, and some are in English. One other thing is you must learn French or German. Another thing that is different is that the teachers come to our classes. Instead of having one teacher we have multiple teachers. The final thing is everybody has to play a musical instrument.

(All of us) We have two more months here left (boy time flies) and have a couple trips planned before we return to the US in early June.  Despite our adventures here we are looking forward to seeing everybody and our pets when we get back.

Karen, Michael, and Travis