Last weekend, I took a trip up to Vancouver to visit a friend. Today, some pretty water-and-mountains photos. Maybe another week I’ll post about the botanical gardens!
This sculpture is a “Digital Orca,” and the sign says it’s melding natural elements with technology. Everyone agrees it looks like it’s made out of Legos…
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“Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy…” – William Butler Yeats
Spring has begun this month, and with it, the Once Upon a Time Challenge on Stainless Steel Droppings (my launch post here)…and so I have fairyland on my mind. I’ve never climbed through a wardrobe, been abducted by the Green Wind, or fallen through a rabbit hole, so I can’t share photos from the various places those routes would take you 🙂 and cameras probably wouldn’t work anyway. But as regular readers know, I have gone rambling about Kensington Gardens, where Peter Pan flew to when he “ran away from home and lived a long, long time with the fairies.”
Part of the fun of the Gardens is that there are no plaques or ceramic fairies or touristy things to point out the different sites of interest. You have to take a quest, with J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird as your guide, and find the magic spots yourself.
Fortunately, the fairies seem not to object to cameras!
If you look closely, you can see one of the “paths which make themselves”–at night, of course, which is when everything really magical happens in the Gardens.
These are flowers along the aptly-named Flower Walk. Barrie tells us that fairies caught abroad by humans will pretend to be flowers. His advice on the best way to spot a fairy is to stare at a “flower” until it can’t help winking at you. (I don’t know what that would look like either!)
This is the branch of the Weeping Beech in the Flower Walk, where Peter Pan spent the night immediately after running away from home.
If you can’t find some fairy dust, and reliable directions on how to fly past the second star to the right, you can at least go see the island in the middle of the Serpentine. Peter spent some time living there too, until he built a boat and (eventually) learned how to fly.
The Gardens are not the most exotic or showy of fairylands, but they’re certainly the most accessible–and they are every bit as charming as J. M. Barrie.
If you feel like visiting fairylands, even in books, why not join up with the Once Upon a Time Challenge? And of course, you can also find more Saturday Snapshots on At Home with Books!
I have a bit of a thing for British signs. I have a bit of a thing for London in general, but part of the fun is all those signs that remind me, subtly or not, that I’m not in Kansas–er, California–anymore. Here are a few favorites.
These are ubiquitous and remarkably useful. I spent a lot of time striding around London, and it meant surprisingly lot to not need to pause at every street corner and remember which direction the cars might be coming from. Quick glance down to orient, quick glance up to make sure nothing’s barrelling down, and on you go. We should have these in this country.
I have a mad fondness for terribly polite signs. It may be a bit harsh to remove innocent bicycles, but at least they warn you politely first. And speaking of politeness…
And the wonderful thing about this is that it works. You can get on these enormously high escalators, and everyone is standing on the right and walking on the left. We definitely need to import these signs to the United States.
I don’t quite know why, but I’m slightly obsessed with this sign about ventilation on the Tube. Maybe it’s just that there’s a four-syllable word on a sign on public transit, when they could have just said “air.”
This is a movie theatre down the street from Sherlock Holmes…nothing particularly British about it, but just fun. 🙂
Do you have favorite signs you’ve seen, in London or elsewhere?
Have a wonderful weekend, and visit At Home with Books for more Saturday Snapshots!
In reading, I am still making my way through Les Miserables. Considering it’s a 900-page behemoth with small print, this may not surprise you! As a result, I still have Paris on the brain…and since Marius and Cosette just fell in love, let’s run with that theme.
I’d like to say I forgot the name of this bridge, but I don’t think I ever actually knew it. However, I did hear the tradition somewhere–couples put a lock on the bridge and throw the key into the Seine, as a sign of commitment…because the only way to open the lock and end the relationship is (theoretically) to jump into the river and find the key again. Obviously this is an immensely popular tradition.
I wanted a close-up, so I fiddled around with the locks to get a good angle on a couple with fun names…kind of makes me wonder who Pierre and Juliette are.
If you don’t like the lock option, people have carved up all the poor trees along the Seine too. The sheer number of hearts and initials is staggering…my environmental instincts freak out a bit, while the hopeless romantic in me just goes AWW!
Have a wonderful weekend! I’ll be forging along through Les Mis…
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I have finally starting reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo…and it’s putting me in a Paris mood!
Happy weekend!
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