January 2008 - Travel Stripe

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Travel Stripe - January 2008

London's burning

January 31st 2008 13:53

The Great Fire of London, painting, Museum of London

Painting of the Great Fire of London, Museum of London

At 1 a.m. on Sunday September 2, at the end of the particularly long, dry, hot summer of 1666, fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane in London City. Fanned by a fierce easterly wind, it spread quickly to the warehouses on the riverbanks. Filled with pitch, ropes and timber, they exploded and fueled the fire’s race through the crowded wooden houses which overhung the narrow streets.

Pandemonium followed. Most people concentrated on escaping from the fire rather than standing to fight it. The streets were soon packed with carts stacked with household goods and people laden with whatever treasures they could carry. Carters, exploiting the situation, charged outrageous prices. Thieves and looters ran through the abandoned houses seizing whatever they could. Vigilante groups hunted down scapegoats among the city’s long distrusted foreign communities.

Some bravely fought the blaze, including the King and the Duke of York. In a desperate attempt to stop the advancing inferno, forces of soldiers and sailors were organized to blow up houses in its path. Finally, after five days, the wind dropped and the fire died down.

It took the city years to recover. Slowly people moved back, rebuilt their houses and re-established their businesses. Others never returned, choosing to remain in the new settlements further out. Witch hunts continued and foreigners were held in suspicion long after. However, in the end, the blame was placed on greed, as the blaze had started in a bakery on Pudding Lane. A golden statue of a fat little boy stands on the corner of a building near Smithfield Market as reminder of the fire and of the wages of the sin of greed.

The Museum of London, in Aldergate Street in the City, has an excellent exhibition on the Great Fire of London. It tells the story through the real life experiences of famous writers, like diarist Samuel Pepys and also of some ordinary citizens. It explores the questions; How did people cope? Who caused the fire? What were the lasting effects?

The Museum of London

The museum, which sits alongside the ancient city wall, also explores the history of very early of London and Roman London.

The wall of old London

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Posted By: Patricia - Category: No Category

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The First Emperor and the Terracotta Army

January 29th 2008 12:44

The British Museum

Ying Zheng was born in 259 BC in Qin, one of the seven main states of ancient China. At the age of 13 he became King and immediately set about building his tomb complex, with a central burial mound which would become an eternal part of the landscape. He also began establishing a large and powerful army to crush the other states. Between 230 and 221BC Han, Wei, Zhao, Van, Qi and Chu fell one by one before Qin’s vast numbers, superior weaponry and brilliant military strategy. The first Empire was born and the King of Qin became Qin Shihuangdi: First August Divine Emperor of the Qin

Terracotta figures in the great hall of the British Museum

The new Empire was strictly governed. The Emperor kept his old enemies close in the new capital Xiangyang where he housed them in 270 grand palaces built in the styles of their conquered states. There were sweeping reforms and new laws which were tightly enforced. Weights and measures were standardized. A single currency and a universal script were introduced. Roads and canals were built and a Great wall, joining all the walls of the former states, was planned. Despite many years dedicated to finding a potion that might prolong his life and enable him to rule forever in this world, Qin Shihuandi died at the age of 49 and descended into his tomb complex to rule forever in the afterlife.

In 1974, a farmer digging in his fields unearthed a terracotta head – the head of a terracotta warrior. Since then the area, which covers 56 square kilometers, has become one of the world’s most important archaeological sites. Three pits have been found, containing 7000 terracotta soldiers standing guard, around the central tomb mound. There are also ceramic performers, musicians, courtiers and officials, bronze birds and chariots and skeletons of real animals. But the Emperor’s tomb, which according to ancient poetry, contains rivers of mercury and stars of pearls, has never been disturbed. The treasures within remain the First Emperor’s secret.

The First Empire; China’s Terracotta Army exhibition, is showing at the British Museum until April 6. It tells the story of Qin Shihuangdi; his military strategies, campaigns and conquests; the building of the Empire (the architecture, the engineering and the innovations) and the construction of the tomb complex. It does it brilliantly. But by far the most impressive part of the exhibition (and the one that has brought so many visitors that the museum has had to remain open until midnight three days a week) is the collection of terracotta characters; the court officials with their hands folded in their gowns or clutching documents, the performers - the strongman with his bulging muscles, the smiling musician, the team of horses and the soldiers on guard and alert. Each figure is unique and individual, created in the most careful detail, even down to the links in their armour and strands of their hair. There is something disturbingly real and eloquent about these figures resurrected from the tomb. They say so much about the might of the First August Divine Emperor of the Qin, one of the world's greatest rulers and the man who over 2000 years ago founded what was to become the nation of China.

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The winter sales in London

January 26th 2008 15:17

If not the realization of the ultimate dream, then it’s certainly a happy circumstance when the fashion-following traveller lands in Paris, Rome or London in the season of the Soldes, the Saldi or the Sales. And here I am in London just in time to catch the last week of the winter sales. What luck!

Harrods of London

Yesterday morning, as the weather was fine, the sky clear and the air mild enough for a pleasant walk but chilly enough to make little forays into warm shops a pleasant prospect, I trotted up to Oxford Street to hunt down some bargains. “50%, 60%, 75% off!” screamed the giant red letters on shop window after shop window. “Final days!” urged others. It was compelling, irresistible.

Soon I was part of a shopaholic sisterhood dashing from store to store and floor to floor. Side by side we rummaged with grim focus through mountains of tangled t shirts, and twisted cardigans with missing buttons. We scrabbled through shelves of low-rise, skinny, stretch jeans with 12 inch waists and six foot legs. We flipped through racks jammed with dresses, jackets and shirts in dreadful colours and impossible sizes. I was beginning to lose heart. Clearly, London women were either 7 feet and 7 stone or 7 feet and 20 stone with a penchant for synthetics in purple, silver and mustard. There was nothing here for me.

I shifted the search to menswear where the target market was evidently the super-sized chap with flamboyant taste. There were racks of XXL shirts in lurid stripes and tables piled with loud checkered caps. I gave up and headed to children’s wear and a room a-wash with steals in frilly hot pink. It was here, finally, that I scored the day’s great bargain hunting triumph. Beyond the racks of pink and frills, in dim and all but deserted boy’s wear, I fossicked patiently through shelves of jeans until I found one, the last, I think, in size 7-8.

As I marched home through the now dark streets with my sole bargain bouncing in a lonely bag at my side,I found myself pondering two fundamental sale-shopping truths. Firstly it pays to hit the sales early, before all the real bargains are snapped up (those dedicated shoppers who camp on the pavement the night before the sale starts certainly know a thing or two) and secondly, sale-shopping is not for the faint-hearted, it takes determination and lots of it.

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A rainy day in London's National Gallery

January 24th 2008 19:29

Art galleries and winter go together like summer and the beach – M.M.J.K. Sage and Muse

Just as hot summer sun and bright blue skies send me sprinting for the beach, so do short grey, drizzly winter days send me scuttling for the shelter of the Museum or the Art Gallery. So, when on Tuesday, the darkness peeled back on rain-streaked windows and a heavy sky which threatened more, I headed across the river to refuge among other, more benign landscapes in the National Gallery

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Covent Garden

January 23rd 2008 18:41

In its early days, Covent Garden was a rustic haven where the monks of Westminster Abbey tended their farms and orchards. In 1536, it was appropriated, like much of the land around London, by Henry XVIII and used as a hunting ground.

The Piazza at Covent Garden

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Unfinished Australian Summer

January 21st 2008 17:57

Once again I’ve left Australia. This time a few short days ago, I couldn’t wait to escape the heavy air, the burning sun, the relentless blue sky, the persistent flies, the dessicated gardens, the searing wind which rattlies the dry leaves and tears at the stiff bark on the gum trees, the long, long days and the stifling nights. Now under London’s grey skies, as I watch the colour of summer fade from my skin, I find myself looking back on it all with more than a little nostalgia. Snippets of a half-forgotten poem run on repeat through my head. I have a sentence - “I love a sunburnt country”. I have phrases – ‘droughts and flooding rains” “pitiless blue sky”and “jewel sea”. I have words - “hot”, “gold” and “fire”. They all bring with them haunting pictures, in bold, untempered blue, orange, red, brown, stark white and dusty green, of this last, unfinished summer down under.

The Yarra, the gums and the sky in Studley Park

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Studley Park Outback Melbourne

January 20th 2008 18:39

Trapped in Melbourne, longing for the wilderness? Stuck in the burbs, dreaming of billabongs? Confined to your office, pining for the bush? Shackled to your laptop, grappling with your inner Clancy? Don’t despair; the outback is closer than you think.

Looking across the Yarra

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Holiday at home in Melbourne

January 18th 2008 14:50

Every year, sometime after Christmas, it seems as if a rip-tide sweeps through Melbourne and drags half the population away to vacation at the lakes, the country or the coast. Still, many are left behind, high and dry, like flotsam and jetsam, to holiday at home in the eerily quiet and often sizzling city. What do they do and how do they survive, stranded in their parched urban and suburban deserts?

As it happens, Melbourne is a great place to holiday at home. There are plenty of interesting places to go, many of them a short car ride away, easily reachable on public transport or even within walking distance. There are plenty of fun things to do too

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The Penguin Parade at Phillip Island

January 12th 2008 01:49

Just before sunset, 365 days a year, tourists pack into a grandstand in the dunes at the Phillip Island Nature Park on Summerland Beach and turn their eyes to the ocean. As the light fades, little dark shapes begin to break the surface of the sea. More follow, then more - battling through the surf, against the pull of the tide, until they reach firm sand. Like a miniature army they march up the beach. The crowd surges from the grandstand and clatters along the wooden walkways through the dunes, following as the weary little soldiers make their way slowly through the hillocks of sand and sea grass to their shelters.

These are the famous fairy penguins of Phillip Island, now more commonly called the little penguins, as this is a closer translation of their scientific name, Eudyptula Minor. The little penguins are found only in the Southern Hemisphere and at 33 centimetres, they are the smallest of the world’s 17 species. Unlike their black-backed brethren, the little penguins’ dark feathers are a rich deep blue which camouflages them both above and below the ocean

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