I am in Rownhams, just outside Southampton, in the UK right now. Zack and I flew over here to see friends from Harvard (some of whom I haven't seen in quite a long time), but I've spent the past two days here staying with my aunt. It's my first visit in three years, and the first one in which I stay only briefly with my relatives here in Southampton.

The day I arrived I was scheduled to visit the moth collections at the Natural History Museum, so I took the Tube to Wandsworth, south of the Thames, where the Microlepidoptera and other collections are temporarily being housed. After a stiff cup of tea provided to me by the head curator, I went into the collections, which take up an area that seems as big as a football field (although it probably isn't quite that large) and spent a few hours looking at the material. That night I stayed with Leonid, who I hadn't seen since graduation, and the next day I more or less wasted thanks to jet lag. On Saturday Matt came out from Oxford, and we went past all these touristy parts of London that I had never seen, such as Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the National Galleries, and the National Potrait Gallery (the latter of which I highly recommend). We then took a train to Oxford, where Matt, Tim, and I caught up over several beers each. Sunday in Oxford passed similarly, although I did visit the Pitt Rivers Museum, a sort of dusty-attic collection of random ethnographic artifacts from all over the world (highly recommended by Dan, I now understand why. :) I sadly have to say that I don't like English bitters as much as I hoped I would, and they seem to be the majority of beers available in pubs here.

I came down to Southampton on Monday, after a screw-up due to a broken display in the train station that delayed me by an hour and made me sorely miss Japanese trains. It's been more relaxing here because I'm in the suburbs and I've gotten the chance to sleep adequately and catch up with my aunts and one of my cousins. Today we drove through the New Forest, a huge area of moorland and hardwood forest that has been managed since the Norman period. It's inhabited by herds of shaggy ponies, that are rounded up once a year but otherwise left to wander freely. There were many in view today, although we didn't see any wild deer.

I'm off to Paris tomorrow with Leonid, my first trip to the European continent. It remains to be seen how well I can speak French after forgetting so much of it in Japan...