VII- England lay off the charm- we love you already!

The lads exploring the sprawling
Mill Road Cemetery near our flat

With the differing school schedules, this has been a very very long summer for us. Gettysburg area schools started back up last week and Gettysburg College kicked off the new semester this week making me feel rather out of step with the all the people back home. Even Leif and Klaus have admitted on several occasions that they are ready for summer to be over. Going so far as forgoing protest when I tell them that they must write a few sentences or do some extra math before they get to play on the tablet.
  The end is in sight however with school slated to resume next Wednesday. In my last post I prattled on about our bad luck with the school admissions process but we have traveled through the stages of grief and have settled comfortably on the idea of Abbey Meadows. To steel our resolve I took the boys to the local superstore and helped them pick out their uniforms (yep these items are sold in the grocery often in 2-packs) light blue polo, red sweatshirt, grey trousers, black dress shoes. They were much more excited about the uniforms than I could ever have imagined, loudly exclaiming how cool they were to all the shoppers nearby.
  I won't lie that there have been increasing moments exasperation with the kids as our summer lingers (In an unfortunate series of absentminded events Klaus locked us out the other day- this time there were no open windows to climb into and we had to play in the garden until Kurt got home). But there have been some significant adjustments in their interests that I am pretty pleased about. For instance they are currently both sitting on the living room floor drawing!!!. With all the distractions of their toys in G-burg I could only rarely convince them to draw or do crafts at home. Now our place is covered with their paper creations and writings. Obviously this warms my heart as I live for these activities and find so much human fulfillment in them. I'm also a realist though and will not push this farther than the boys are interested- I don't need them to be aspiring artists, I just want them to find some level of enjoyment in arts and crafts.
 Another fantastic development is their new found love of the Harry Potter series! I was hoping this would happen during our time here as a way to try to get them excited about their own new school experiences. We just crashed through The Chamber of Secrets and picked up a used copy of Prisoner of Azkaban at one of the charity shops. Klaus gets a little nervous in some of the more tense moments but we are normally able to soothe him by assuring him that Harry, Ron and Hermoine all make it through the series alive.
 

Last weekend's tourism took us back to the train station for the first time since we arrived to Klaus' full delight. We took a short ride to the nearby town of Ely, so named for its years as a major market for eels thanks to the quantity swimming around in the fens that surrounded the area. Our first destination, the grand Ely Cathedral, was actually paid for stone by stone in eels. It is a magnificent structure, steeped in history and astounding in its construction and artistry. Sometimes I feel like you almost have to be an American to really appreciate places like this- they are so surprisingly/seemingly impossibly ubiquitous in Europe that it would be nearly impossible for Europeans not to take them for granted. Ely Catherdral dazzled us completely and it is not even worth mention in our three-inch- thick England guidebook. The building is on the site of an early Anglo Saxon monastery started by St Etheldreda that was destroyed by Vikings and later rebuilt by Benedictine monks. There are several evident phases of construction the most prominent being Norman but much of the current decoration, including an unbelievable ceiling mural, is actually from the Victorian era.
  We took one of the free tours offered by the staff, this one centering on the old monastic buildings surrounding the Cathedral. One of the most fascinating spots was the old infirmary which exists now as an alley, its roof gone and its outer walls reversed to comprise the sides of other buildings. The arches of it, with their patterning that echos that of the Cathedral, are visible and embedded in the other buildings. Wish we were so frugal in our building methods now.
 We also were given a special tour of Prior Crauden's Chapel, a small private chapel with a famous clay mosaic floor depicting Adam and Eve in the garden which survived Cromwell's iconoclasm (unlike the Cathedral) because it was being used as a house at the time. 
  As could be predicted, all this history bored the lads (we had to ask Leif repeatedly not to audibly yawn) and seeing as we were all pretty hungry we headed off to one of Ely's famous tea houses, Peacocks. Kurt treated us all to an eye-popping official tea, each of us receiving our own elegantly stacked plates of crustless sandwiches, scones, and dessert. After their lackluster performance during the tour the boys were amazingly well-behaved during the tea, eating, reading, and chatting good-naturedly.   

 Unfortunately this good behavior did not extend to our next tour. Last Monday was a bank holiday here in England and so Kurt's boss/colleague, Ulrich offered to give us a tour of his college, Gonville and Caius (Pronounced 'Keez' because Kays was actually the founder's name though he preferred the latin version, Caius) which does not allow the public to tour it's beautiful grounds and buildings. So we were getting a private tour from someone Kurt wants to impress and our kids could not have been less interested, less respectful, or less responsive to all the threats we whispered to them. Luckily Ulrich and Melanie were too polite to notice and gave us a fantastic tour of the green spaces, lecture halls, combination (common) rooms and even the fellows' (faculty's) private dining room. The Keysers being German were often rolling their eyes about all the formality and rank-based rituals surrounding the operation of the college but you could tell there was also a bit of pride to know that they were deemed worth of the club. I would be the same way.

A Gonville and Caius lecture hall

The famous "Honors Gate" 

The oldest building of the college- the chapel