Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Dock of the bay
Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Is it 11 hours or 13 … the time difference between New Zealand, and Oxford, England? We got to Oxford pretty late Friday night, and I’m still too jet-lagged for such complex mathematics.

This morning I’m resting my sleepy spirit with New Zealand memories, most especially of our peaceful week in Ferry Landing Lodge, overlooking this bay. This small B & B is top-rated in TripAdvisor because so many of Pam and Rob’s guests take the time to write rave reviews.

It’s not exactly the format for TripAdvisor, but Frank even wrote a sonnet for Pam and Rob’s guest book.

We took a transcontinental flight
And the transoceanic overnight
Then drove through scenic Coromandel,
To reach Ferry’s Landing, whose tale I tell.

It’s been our base for six fine days
We soaked up lots of UV rays
Hiked, swam, and slept as we pleased
Life is sweet with times like these.

Breakfast was fine and fresh and merry
At dinnertime we took the ferry
Bones got carved, glow-worms sighted
The snarls of workaday life got righted.

Thanks for everything, Pam and Rob
From the grateful Wilczek mob.

So does that or does it not qualify as a sonnet by a Nobel-Prize-winning poet? Once again, I’m just too jet-lagged to know.

Fellowship of the rings Part 1

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Beneath Shakespeare Cliff, all over Lonely Bay’s really quite lonely beach, lie broken and sea-smoothed bits of gastropod shell.

We’d seen such rough shell circles in New Zealand restaurants, used as napkin rings. That’s why we quickly had rings on our fingers (though no bells on toes.)

There’s something about New Zealand that makes people smile. How about this sign from coffeeshop Mariposa in Port Wells?

UNATTENDED CHILDREN
WILL BE GIVEN AN ESPRESSO
AND A FREE PUPPY.

We formed many hypotheses about Shakespeare Cliff. Mine was that William Shakespeare jumped off after some bad reviews. Frank says that it wasn’t William Shakespeare at all, just his boyfriend Cliff. So, which of them really wrote all those wonderful plays?

Nobel and Ig Nobel together at last

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Here you see Frank with New Zealand’s own James Watson–no, not the infamous James Watson biology Nobel but the deservedly honored (with a 2005 Ig Nobel Prize) author of a paper on Mr. Richard Buckley’s exploding trousers.

New Zealand is a lovely land full of surprises, whose only non-good surprise has been just how hard it is to get internet access even from hotels that advertise “broadband internet.”

Item: Palmerston North Coachman Hotel, where we paid for “broadband wifi” and then discovered that the signal didn’t reach as far as our room.

Item: Albany Executive Inn, just north of Auckland, which charges $4 for your first 20 Meg per day and $.15 more for every Meg on top of that level. Heck, 20 Meg hardly covers my uploads to Flickr!

Item: Jet Park Airport Hotel south of Auckland, which offers broadband in only “deluxe” rooms, and charges an extra $26 per day if you use it.

New Zealand is not alone in the problem, of course. Our worst “yes, we have internet” story was near Poitiers in France, in a lovely chateau (it was not our nickel) where the “internet” was one computer behind the front desk, the very computer where all the chateau’s daily business was done. But if you wanted to check email, the clerk would kindly let you sit in her chair a few minutes and try to access your email through her very slow telephone modem.

Tomorrow, however, we move on to even less internet. Our hotel on the Coromandel Peninsula has “internet” in the sense that you get 20 minutes each day to check up on your email. That’s 5 minutes per Wilczek, since all four of us will be together, something I’m incredibly happy about.

So if my blog goes a bit silent next week, don’t assume that sharks got me–I’ll have lots more to tell you about once we get back online.

James Clerk Maxwell and Alan Guth

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Who is that non-physicist craving a photo-op in between James Clerk Maxwell and Alan Guth?

Readers of this blog may recognize the scarf.

This moment of post-banquet serendipity took place inside the great dining hall of Trinity College, Cambridge. Frank and I arrived a bit late, missing the polite request that people not take photographs–quite understandable considering all the amazing things there that you’d need to photograph just to remember one half of them.

Beautiful cold English December day

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

I walked several miles yesterday through the lovely cold green of an English December, under its pale sunlit sky.

Frank is here to discuss early-universe cosmology with a lot of the same friends who were gathered here by Stephen Hawking 25 years ago, back when the idea of inflation was just a tiny pre-nugget of its present, er, expanded state.

That was in summertime, a lovely English summer, with our whole family housed by Robin and Polly Hill out in Rupert Brooke’s own Grantchester. I did feel some misgiving when we jet-lagged four on the doorstep were greeted with a dismayed “My god, they’ve got a baby!”

(The form I’d filled out for our housing requirement had a space asking for “number of children.” Foolishly, I filled that space in “1*”, adding by * footnote that (in December, and planning a six-months-later visit) I was eight 1/2 months pregnant.)

Anyway, things got much better quite soon after that.

There is no better cure for the mental whiplash of packing and moving and shlepping your worldly goods onto one more long plane ride than taking a long walk through peaceful cool sunlit weather.

In fact, I think that I need another walk now.

Stockholms Slott by night

Originally uploaded by bodilla77

… (at least in my life) starts with a golden crest and continues in engraved caps lock:

“THE FIRST MARSHAL OF THE COURT IS COMMANDED BY

HIS MAJESTY THE KING

TO INVITE

Professor and Mrs. … [redacted, next time could be you!]

to a Dinner

TO BE GIVEN BY

THEIR MAJESTIES THE KING AND QUEEN OF SWEDEN…”

and so on and so on.

Of course we’re incredibly honored and said “Yes please,” in our most formalistic style (though without any CAPS LOCK).

(Not least because December 11 is my birthday!)

But don’t you think it sounds just the littlest bit as though the First Marshall is wishing we’d all just stay home?

My fanciest dress-up

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Just a little anxiety going on here in Stockholm, where tomorrow is the huge Nobel Prize ceremony. And banquet.

Fortunately, I’m from New England so I still have all the lovely finery my sister RiRi helped me buy way back in 2004. (Our mother’s belief system, summed up in four lines: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.”)

In fact, 2007 would be a whole lot less nervous for both me and Frank except that Anna Björk of Swedish TV 4 has invited us both to show up on her Nobel TV show which runs all day long.

Tomorrow!

Frank is on in the morning and will pick up his tailcoat en route home from the studio. My little spot is right before the ceremony, which means that at least I’ll be wearing my fanciest dress, which you can see in the photo. (I got dress anxiety at the worst possible moment, when Frank was in Paris giving lectures, so I took some photos so that I could ask his advice.)

And the brilliant Alex at Clipp-er Salong (Vasagatan 19, they are wonderful) has promised to do my hair in some nice way.

I will not have my huge favorite Timex digital watch on, at least not if I can remember to take the thing off.

I had been imagining this year’s Nobel Prize parties would be less stressful because 1) I’ve done this once now and 2) Frank is not getting a prize this year. But I think being on TV is a bit more scary even than sitting next to Sweden’s handsome and charming Prince Carl Philip,

The scariest part is that Frank seems to have told Anna that he and I took dancing lessons back in the US–and now it seems our dancing together might get on TV too, though only much later on the Nobel evening.

I am certainly better at dancing, much better, than I was before we took very enjoyable dance lessons from Jeff Allen. I am certainly not Dancing With the Stars caliber either.

Eek, I just have to say. Eek.

Though I am looking forward to every bit of it, even as I tremble.

We just got email from our friend Piotr Haszczyn in Poland with a bunch of links to recent Polish news articles, whose contents (I hope) are guessable from the photos on them:

• Four photos of Frank in Babice School, meeting its children and staff: This looks like a serious article about Frank’s visit to his Polish grandmother’s home town and the really nice ceremony put on by Babice School.
• Photo of Frank with Betsy smiling, photo of Frank with Uncle Walter joking around, plus a title that plainly mentions pierogi: To make Americans happy, just feed them pierogi!
• Photo of Frank next to Nobel monument in NYC; photo of Frank’s Babice cousin expertly repairing some complicated machinery: Polish men look good in hats…and they are all very smart.

The internet and newspapers being what they are, those links may vanish–but our memories of a great party most surely will not.

Beautiful soup

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The beautiful red beet soup with mushroom dumplings is part of traditional Christmas in this part of Poland. In the background, you can see a plate of varied sausages, including kielbasa, which Frank’s Polish grandmother used to make.

Can you see that steam is rising from the hot soup? Mmm, making me hungry!

After the school festivities, Babice’s local hotel and restaurant treated us all to a Christmas dinner augmented by folk songs.

The hotel, whose food is delicious, is Hotel Plowiecki. The "l" in Płowiecki is a special Polish letter that has a slash through it; my keyboard won’t make it but I copied it off the Internet.

Frank’s family tree?

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Here, in beautiful Polish/Galician Babice, Frank is posed next to a tree that is next to the former homestead of his Polish ancestors.

Frank’s Polish grandmother, Francziska Zybura (her married name was Wilczek) was born in Galician Babice in 1902. After getting excellent marks in the local school, she left for the US in 1921.

I’m back now in Sweden but with severe Internet-lag, after four days in a charming Krakow guesthouse with wonderful beds but no way to upload my gorgeous photos. I will be posting the best of my Babice photos on Flickr over the next couple of days–for example, Frank’s Polish relatives, who look just like him and the photo of 13-year-old Frank his great-grandma sent home to Poland–not to mention the wonderful food there and amazing people we met.

The stories of who did what and how great it turned out can be found in the sequential captions of all those photos, so go there and read them!