I write in margins

In no other place than in Britain you realise that the sports is a cultural thing. What we follow in the TV, what newspapers cover and mostly, what Intersport is selling to us defines us as an athletes. You do not find skates, ice hockey stuff, floorball equipment, skiis or Finnish baseball in a highstreet sports' supermarket in the heart of England in Cambridge. You find rugby, land hockey, darts and pool/snooker (+swimming) in the premier floor. But there's a one sports which unites as all: Football :-) And as a <3 of a game. It's fantastic!

We arrived to Cambridge yesterday. Today I popped in a peculiar public transport system which combines the best of the buses and the rails: Guided Busway - or as the locals called it: Guarded Busrails The concrete tracks wide enough to buses to drive fast and safely without disturbance of the other traffic. Never seen such before • or knew that such even existed. No wonder. According to wikipedia the system was opened in August 2011. (Link and more info on the system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway ) With our trip to the village my daughter is living, we also experienced the floods over here. Gosh, it was lots of water around. This blogpost was written in The Anchor, a public house in Cambridge after a tearful depart from our daughter. In many places the flood almost reached the tracks.

...in a night in a busstop full of people knowing there won't be place for everyone waiting. Screaming, fighting, elbowing. We saw those all in a full busstop when a bus to the destination arrived. Boxing Day underground strike caused a traffic chaos beyond all imagination. And in that chaos, all the manners were forgotten. In a boxing day I spent around £150 to taxis. They were also hard to get, but easier than getting in to the busses. The video gives you a picture of the rush: These photos are from the earlier point when it was still possible to get in to the Regent Street/Oxford Street. Gradually the most populated Boxing Day rush in Britain combined with the underground strike pulled aggressions in the surface. After watching the full buses to go by the stop and people idiotically fighting the place in the ones which stopped, we headed to hunt the taxi.

The most famous sale in the world. Harrods' Xmas sale starting on the Boxing Day. I've seen many stories and clips on the sale and while in London on a very same day this sales-madness was definetly something to catch. Incidently, London underground was striking on a sales start day, but it seemed not to affect to the crowd in the front of the department store. The queue was long. Stretching over the facade of the Harrods. And when doors opened on 10 AM people were applauding and screaming began. In five minutes everyone was in (then the doors were closed again because the luxury & parfume departments were stackfull of shoppers. All that can be seen on a video above. The best sight? A young lady walking by me with five designer bags on her elbows just few minutes after the door had been opened. Me? I did not buy anything. It was for the show and it was worth of it. UPDATE 5PM. ITV news reports the Xmas sales been 22% higher than last year bringing £4Billio...

Don't expect anything fancy in London on a Christmas day. More or less everything is closed. Underground and bus lines are all cancelled. All underground lines and bus lines are closed. Also few taxis were driven. We didn't and therefore a larger apartment proved to be the best solution for holidays. Since only handful of the places are open and these are hard to find, you set price to the 1st class cooking facilities. After the lazy morning we headed to a walk around over the nearby Tower Bridge and back over the London Bridge. A decent walk and gorgeous site. Many people walking, mostly tourists. By the Queens Walk (south bank of Thames between the Tower Bridge and London Bridge) we found a waterhole which was open. Only couple pubs are open this day, so we went in. So, if you are a tourist in a Xmas day in London wanting decent food and drinks, head here. We noticed other spots open here as well. Hornimans at Hays is a big pub by the river. Two I.P.A.s and a cok...

The painting hanging on the wall of the country house has always intrigued me. Definetly it belongs to the mid 19th early 20th Century tradition of horse paintings. Horse art became a major genre in the British decorative painting in the 19th century. Themes by equestrian and hunting horses and scenes became very popular - and also owners of great horses wanted their animals painted. Also the first class French artists like Degas, Delacroix and Manet contributed to the scene. However the most visible - as a cultural phenomenon - were hundreds and hundreds of paintings by English artists like Ben Marshall, John Frederick Herring and many more which produced paintings as their main artistic theme. Often scenes of the horses were presented in Romantic landscapes. One sub-niché of this popular theme were to portrait horses and dogs together. It took of with the fox hunting scenes to the typical stall pictures which is presented in the picture in our wall. Dog and horse resting in t...