Mersea girls and boys

We just got back from a lovely week visiting Adrian's family in southeast England on Mersea Island. You just gotta love England (when the weather is nice). I mean, there are the cute accents, the good Indian food (sigh), all that brick, those pubs ... and the mere fact that a city like London exists should give people of the world hope. But what gets me every time is all that darned history in such a small place. It could give a California girl a migraine. I mean, Adrian's college at Cambridge was founded in 1348, for God's sake! Speaking of, here's a picture of the dining hall at Caius where Ad used to eat meals:

I know, it looks just like the Berkeley cafeterias, doesn't it? So weird.

For Ava, the best part of England was spending time with her cousins, especially Vikki, Anna and Tom. (In the pic above, it's Vikki, 14, on the left and Anna, 10, under Ava.) I couldn't really tell if Ava loved the cousins themselves or the idea of cousins more because the whole time she kept finding way to work the word "cousins" into the conversations e.g:

Mom: "Ava, do you want fish and chips?"

Ava: "Actually, my cousins like pizza."

Regardless, it was great to have Ava and Julian spend time with the whole of Adrian's family, who came down to Mersea for his mum, Jenny's, 70th birthday. I love this picture of The Johnson Men (L to R: Adrian's brother Martin, his son Tom, 15, Julian and Adrian):

Aside from Mersea, we spent 1 day puttering around Cambridge checking out Adrian's old haunts, and met up with "Big Phil" and his wife Jen and their cuties Anna and Ben in the evening. The girls got on like a house on fire and if we stayed any longer I'm sure Ava would be wondering how she could make Anna another cousin. Here's us at the cute pub in Orwell, their village:

The day before we left Sonja and I took the train into London (ah, the smell of the Tube!) and did some more puttering around Covent Garden; checked out the National Portrait Gallery (I just don't get how Henry VIII was supposed to be so handsome. Just do NOT get it); saw Dirty Dancing the musical along with 1,243 other women, most of whom were on bachelorette parties (or "hen dos" as they say in England); had fabulous Indian food (sigh); bought English novels; and had lots of coffee. It was a perfect sister day.