Happy New Year!

Sorry that this post has been a little delayed. We're each back to school this week; Matt's first semester continues for a few more weeks, while I have begun a new schedule of eight (!) classes.

Our New Year's celebration wasn't particularly exciting...I'd procrastinated a bit too much, and ended up spending most of the day/evening finishing up a paper for one of my fall semester classes. We tried to make it out to one of the big celebrations for New Year's (the Parisian equivalent of the Times Square party), but the metro train we were on was held up for several minutes. Rather than greet the New Year sitting on a crowded subway underground, we wandered out into the street -- just in time to hear cheering crowds and popping fireworks. Without planning for it, we'd ended up near some of the largest department stores, so we spent a fairly long time (until I was too cold to stay out anymore!) looking at their beautiful Christmas lights and window displays -- much more peaceful and far less crowded than our original plans; to my mind, perhaps even better if things had worked out as we'd expected!

Later that afternoon, we headed up to London for a few days. Because we'd each been to London before, we concentrated on filling in the thing we felt like we'd missed the first time: perhaps my favorite was the long afternoon we spent at the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum. This was the extensive underground complex from which the British fought World War II. Unfortunately, our pictures came out terribly -- as you can see in this "image" of the bedroom/office prepared for Churchill. :) (Apparently, he slept here fewer than five times during the entire war -- he actually observed most of the Nazi bombing raids of London from the roof of the War Department. )

We tried to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. The last time I attempted this, I was nearly crushed against the fence, and couldn't really see much of anything (I was kind of trapped behind a large stone pillar). This time, I figured we'd be smarter and stand several hundred feet back, so as to have a broader vantage point -- of course, many, many other people had the same idea, and we ultimately ended up behind the tops of too many heads to see very much.

An unobstructed view -- if you shoved a few hundred heads into the foreground, you could approximate the view we had of the Changing of the Guard. :-)

Our last night in London, in front of St. Paul's Cathedral.