Reading, Holland Park and the doors of Notting Hill

Ladies and Gentlemen, right here, right now, here goes a special edition of the Summertime blog, just for you in English... I promised to I write a post in English, because a lot of people from the summer school had a look at the pictures - which I'm very happy about, by the way :) So, our last story was about Monday and the museums, and just to make sure, that nothing drops out, I have to mention, that we had a lot of lectures and project work to do on Tuesday. I still don't want to bore my dearest readers with the details of the lecture on finance, or our current hard points in the business plan, I assume you are much more interested what happened between the lectures. So, in your interest, let's skip the nine-hour hard work on Tuesday, and let us have some stories about Wednesday.

We had a little trip in the middle of the week: we visited the University of Reading and ECMWF which is also located in this nice city and stands for European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. At the university we had several lectures on climate change and climate change modelling, including really freaky partial differential equations. This was only the beginning, but we didn't know this at that time. Maybe it was for better. :) After reminding everyone why they used to be scared of statistics exams, we went to ECMWF, which had an entrance that could also belong to a medium sized United Nations Headquarters, but the taxi clearly indicated that we were still closer to the Thames than to the East river.

Inside the building there are very impressive maps - just to make sure you don't forget you're still in a meteorology facility - and sometimes people stand in front of it, looking quite worried. They might just not know which way to take to the cafeteria, and neither did I :)

After a really nice lunch of lots of fruits and pork - second time for the month, really missing my mums’ cooking - we sat outside for a while, just enjoying the shiny sunlight. Perhaps the lady who had the class about the infrared waves at École Polytechnique wouldn't appreciate this expression in a presentation, but I insist, the weather was shiny that time :)

We had about 5 minutes to recover in the fresh air and then we had to go back to the lecture room, for more equations and more modelling, which started to be quite tiring for most of the people - not everybody could be an idiot like me, who was thinking about writing her thesis on climate modelling... It was really interesting for me after all, got a lot of brochures and articles as well. Now I know all I need to do is to convince the Meteorology Department to let me do it at home too…..

Returning to London wasn't that easy at peak hours, especially when we were quite close to Kensington, but I was really eager to get off the bus because I was gonna go to Notting Hill and some neighbouring parks to relax and take some photos. Therefore, I immediately jumped off the bus, when it stopped somewhere on Kensington High Street and after stockpiling a large amount of Tesco bagels, I bounced to Holland Park where I found lots of interesting things. Holland Park is one of the most expensive residential areas in London, even the extra-critical Simon Cowell has chosen to live here, when he's in London, according to the Wikipedia.

The park has several smaller gardens, the one on the above picture is the Holland Garden, which has glued pebbles in it pathways - it does seem weird I think - but my favourite one was Japanese Garden...


... which was a really, really nice place to sit down for a little while.

As I was sitting there, thinking about life and other fancy ideas I didn't consider the possibility of getting interrupted among these thoughts, but eventually there were some intruders who really caught my attention:


Someone had spilled a whole pack of almonds next to the bench I was sitting on, and these little fellas started circulating around me, which was quite impressive as they started to jump on my shoes as they were chasing each other. This one really didn't like the camera, he might have thought: "would you just leave me alone, so that I can finish these nuts?"

Later I picked up some of the almonds to see if they really were courageous enough to take them out of my hands, and here is the result:

The title says: 'The Case of Dorky Fat Squirrel and the Last Almond', and that squeaky voice talking to the squirrel is mine... After saying goodbye to the squirrels and the peacocks, I went to the other side of Holland Park, and waved goodbye to it.


Right next to this amazing park is the borough of Notting Hill, which really is a hill, unlike other parts of London. I was just strolling on the streets which looked really friendly and nice: most of the gates were open. There were many different doors, some had funny trees in front of them...


some were more modern, made of fashionable glass, wood and steel...


some were black and white siblings...


and some were just like the most English ones you could see.


I really liked these streets but it was getting darker, and I still wanted to see something near Kensington Palace, at least itself from outside, so I ended up in Kensington Palace Gardens, which was so interesting with all the different embassies, that I had to stop every now and then to have a quick look at these palaces. I mean, I used to live just behind the British Embassy Residence in Budapest for years when I was a small kid, and I still remember how much I wanted to check out the garden of the residence, especially the swimming pool :) when we were going for a walk. I have partly succeeded twice, as being a climate advocate for the British Council's Challenge Europe programme I was invited to the Queens' Birthday Party in the British Residence last June and this June, but I still have to work hard, because the pool was unfortunately closed on those occasions... Maybe one day I also can see some of these residences, they have such amazing gardens, I really love them, but I wouldn't live here, it's just too fancy, and anyway, I'm sure you're not allowed to play football on the grass which already makes them sink in my eyes as deep as they can, not mentioning the carbon footprint they have...

Walking home through Hyde Park was really nice, just managed to catch a good picture on the Royal Albert Hall dressed for the Proms before I had to run to catch the last open gate at 10 pm...