Education Broadens Your Horizons

Like travel, education definitely can broaden a person's horizons beyond the everyday. As I have been practicing digital photography for my upcoming class, I have twice walked around the lake behind our city hall building to take pictures of the scenery and wildlife. I have twice seen a family of moorhens and watched the male valiantly try to distract me from watching his little family. This heron obligingly posed to have his picture taken right next to the library. I have gotten out of the house and experienced nature as a result of my studies.

I have marched out into fields and marshes to collect insects for an entomology class, scooped up a dead rat from the road for zoology, and rejoiced upon slipping in a patch of algae I needed as a sample for botany. My sister and I love to visit cemeteries to look at the headstones. After our botany class, we realized that we were wandering through the cemetery in Micanopy (near Gainesville) studying not the tombstones, but the lichen growing on them. We have examined paintings by Bosch and Botticelli at the Prado Museum in Spain after studying them in class, and taken classes on the Holocaust after visiting Auschwitz in Poland. Education can lead to travel, and travel is always an education. The two go hand in hand. I can think of no better ways to expand one's life experience than these.

More Digital Photography

Today I went for a
walk to practice
taking pictures
of flowers with my new camera. I decided to be
very careful not to invade anyone's privacy by taking pictures of the front of their house or even of plants in their front yard. I would look for
pretty flowers hanging over fences or near the swale. It didn't take long to realize that people very seldom plant really beautiful flowers close to the street. However, I did get a few good shots and managed to take about fifty pictures. I can imagine how quickly I will be able to use up the 1000 photos the salesman promised me I could get onto my memory chip while walking around places like Oxford or Hampton Court. I think I had better buy a couple more before I leave.

This charming little fellow is a curly tailed lizard (yes, that's the name as well as the description). He and his relatives have moved into the neighborhood within the last few years and made themselves right at home. They seem to be flourishing. They get to be about six or eight inches long and very thick around the middle. They aren't afraid of people either. This one just sat and watched me aim and shoot and didn't even bat an eye.

The John Snow Pub

My sister recently finished reading a book called The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. This is the remarkable, but true, story of a cholera epidemic that swept through London in 1854 and the doctor who brought it to an end. Dr. John Snow studied the lives of approximately 600 disease victims and came to the conclusion that everyone infected had used the same Broad Street pump for their water, a pump that was in close proximity to a neighborhood privy. He was eventually able to persuade the Parish Council to take the handle off the pump. Once no one could drink from the infected well, the epidemic came to a rapid halt. Dr. Snow was one of the first doctors to study the epidemiology of a disease, and today there is a pub named in his honor on Broadwick Street (Broad Street was renamed in 1936 because there was another street with the same name). Across the street is a replica of the pump in question. One of my tasks once I get to London is to visit the site of this pub and take pictures for my sister. The good news is it appears to be within walking distance of our London quarters.

Digital Photography

This is the first photograph I printed from my new digital camera. This little burrowing owl posed for me for several minutes atop a signpost while I experimented with my zoom feature. When I didn't think I was getting the image as large as I wanted it, I said, "I guess I'm not very good at this yet." With that, he gave a weary owl sigh, rolled his beautiful green eyes, flew down towards me and began walking in my direction, as if to say, "Do I have to do everything?" These owls are protected, but their habitat is still disappearing at an alarming rate.

Primrose Hill

One of the things we're going to do in London is fly kites on Primrose Hill. I found this prospect rather intriguing, as I knew there had to be a reason why we would be doing this particular activity in this particular place. Apparently this is a very high and windy hill and, as such, is a good place to fly kites, but there had to be more to it. According to Wikipedia, a group called Appleton has a song with the lyrics, "Let's go fly a kite on Primrose Hill." Now I was getting somewhere. Searching our textbook, Once Upon a Time in Great Britain, revealed that Mary Poppins herself sought out Primrose Hill for kite flying; and Pongo and Missis, of 101 Dalmatians fame, barked forth their plea for assistance in finding their stolen puppies from its heights. The Martians camped here in War of the Worlds, and a murder was committed here in The Lodger.
There was a real life murder committed here, too, or at least that was where the body was discovered. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found on Primrose Hill, run through by his own sword, in 1678, but evidence indicated that the body had been moved there from another location. Godfrey was surrounded by a great deal of political intrigue and scheming involving an alleged plot by Catholic clerics to murder the king, so there were a number of suspects. Eventually three men were convicted of his murder and hanged on Primrose Hill, although the chief witness against them changed his story so many times nobody knew if it was true. Today the case is considered to be one of history's unsolved mysteries.
On a lighter note, many famous people have lived in the Primrose Hill area, including Helena Bonham Carter (Mrs. Lovett of the version of Sweeney Todd starring Johnny Depp) and Adam Ant.

The World is My Classroom

Just a few more weeks, and I'll be off to London and Paris for a course in Multimedia Production through Florida State University's International Program. What a way to learn! This blog is beginning as a way to share our adventures around these two capital cities and environs as we practice digital photography on such subjects as Stonehenge and the Eiffel Tower. I've already "met" a number of the other students through our course site and Facebook, and this should be a very interesting class. Our ages range from twenties to fifties, and we're all eager to pack as much adventure into our time in Europe as we possibly can. One of my goals is to explore some of the more unusual sights of London and Paris; hence the term "oblique." We've already been talking about checking out the Jack the Ripper Walking Tour and the Catacombs of Paris, as well as some of the more conventional tourist attractions. (When my sister and I visited Amsterdam a few years ago, we went off to check out the torture museum while the rest of our tour went to the diamond factory). As you may guess, learning how to create and write a blog is one of our assignments. How am I doing so far?