Somusing

In June and July we lived in Pocklington, East Yorkshire. In the middle of town is All Saints Church, the only church we got to know that I haven't written about here yet. We could see its tower peeking up as we looked out our front door to the left: Here is a little history from a brochure at the church: Christianity was brought to Pocklington in the year AD 627 by Saint Paulinus, who had been sent from Rome to preach the Christian gosepl in the north of England. Tradition says that he baptised people in the beck which still runs along the north side of the churchyard. There has been a Christian community here ever since. Nothing is known of the first church building here, which may have been little more than a thatched wooden structure. A few fragments remain from a stone church building which existed around the time of the Norman Conquest in AD 1066. The [present building] was begun some time before AD 1200 and was completed by about AD 1450. (More details ar...

Last night was a great night for music. First I went to an incredible organ concert at St. James Basilica in Prague's Old Town. Then on the way home, I saw a couple of guys busking who were possibly the coolest buskers I've ever seen. I'll write about and post videos of the buskers first, so it's easier for y'all to skip the organ geek stuff at the end if you want to. It is so amazing and cool to be walking along and come across this: Yep, it's a didgeridoo! With some awesome percussion -- hang drum, bongos, and a rattling thing that the didgeridoo guy does sometimes (I have very little percussion vocabulary). That guy was getting some pretty great bass and other sounds out of the didgeridoo. They would have sounded right at home in a dance club. A little later, I brought the younger kids back with me, so in the next couple of videos, you get to hear their comments and maybe even some arguing! The first one is too short. The second one is a whole song a...

The kids and I visited York Minster this week. The present building was built between 1230 and 1472. It is the Anglican (Church of England) cathedral in York and is the seat of the Archbishop of York. I've heard that it's the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe but read that it's the second largest. I've also heard differing things about why it's called a minster. At any rate, it's beautiful and has a lot of very old, fantastic stained glass. Zed, Phin, and Seth paid the extra £5 each to climb the 276 narrow and steep winding stairs up to the tower, where they had a great view of the city. The rose window from the outside: Looking towards the front from the south side: Here's a short, interesting video about York Minster (although I think it overuses the fish-eye lens a bit): I went to Evensong at the minster twice last week, the first time with all the kids and the second time by myself. It's a beautiful worship service, alm...

I was really happy to discover a while ago that we'd be in Liverpool for the annual Liverpool Organ Day -- it seems like I usually find that all the good stuff is happening just after we leave a place, or it all happened just before we got there. But for once the timing was right! I took the bus (there's a bus stop right across the street from us) to Queen Square in downtown Liverpool and all the venues were within walking distance from there. Liverpool Organ Day consists of three organ recitals on the city's main organs. (For my organ geek friends, here's a run-down of the three programs, mostly correct.) The first one was at 11:15 at the Liverpool Cathedral , which is massive! I think Prague's St. Vitus would look delicate and small if you could somehow put them next to each other. Here's a picture: For the performance, they'd placed the console (one of two) down on the floor right in front of the audience, so we had a good view of the organist, ...

I have some photos of the inside of the Frauenkirche, but this video from the dedication of the organ has some great shots of it that show amazing pastel colors of the marble. There's also a shot from above the congregation, which is pretty cool. The organ sounds great, too, but for some reason the people in the audience look unimpressed.

A couple of pictures to prove that we're really in Dresden. Der Fürstenzug (the Procession of Princes): I feel like I have to prove to myself that we're really here, sometimes. Many parts of it look so different from when I lived here 20 years ago, and even the parts that look the same are disconcerting because there are people everywhere! Dresden was not a tourist town when I was a missionary here, and now it is. And Prager Straße was not a super busy shopping mecca, and now it is. I've been to three organ concerts since we got here -- two at the Catholic Hofkirche , where they have free 30-minute recitals on Wednesdays and Saturdays (I think these are the same recitals that I sometimes went to as a missionary), and one at the newly rebuilt Lutheran Frauenkirche , which was literally a pile of rubble when I was here. The rubble was just beginning to be organized and cataloged for the rebuilding when I left Germany in July of 1993. The rebuilt church is really be...