The British Sue
One of the coolest parts about spending a year in England is just how many friends have reached out. Suddenly, I’m talking to people I haven’t seen in years — either because they live in Europe or because they are visiting England in the next year. Some people I even thought I would never see again and now suddenly we can meet up to hang out.
Albina is one such friend. We met last summer taking Dr. Osswald’s Introduction to Composite Processing. It was a fun and quick paced summer class with a lot of homework. Together as a class we manufactured a paddle board. Beyond the course material, 2/3 of the class was from Nazarbayez University in Kazakhstan. Albina and Ulmeken sat in the front row with me.
This summer, Albina is doing summer research in Milton Keynes. She reached out to me and we took a day trip to London together.

We began our morning with a stroll through Hyde Park. It is much larger than I realized it was looking at the map.

I was super excited to see the lake and we had a good chat sitting on a bench looking at this view (after we took our picture).
After around 10 am, we walked back to the museum area of London and got in line for admission to the Natural History Museum. Fun fact — British people call lines ‘queues.’ We had both done our research and knew that we wanted to see the Natural History Museum. For those of you who don’t know — I have a sweet spot in my heart for Natural History Museums. The one in Albuquerque has a fake volcano that I simply loved walking through as a child. I would jump from island to island trying not to step on the clear flooring that covered ‘lava.’ The Field Museum in Chicago has some similar good memories. When you walk into the museum, you are confronted by Sue the T. rex. She is the largest, best-preserved, and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. Sharing her name, my friend Sue Collins enjoys wearing a red Sue shirt from the Field Museum. I purchased the same shirt when buying Sue a replacement a few years back and I still proudly wear it — thinking of Sue when I do!

Walking into the Natural History museum in London, Albina and I were confronted with the most intact Stegosaurus ever found! We spent about four hours traveling through the various ‘zones’ of the museum. It was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with my love of geology, earth history, volcanic movements, and sea life. The exhibits were all well done and my feet were definitely sore by the end of our visit. Looking through the exhibits, I could really see just how much earlier Britain started collecting these kinds of things than America. It is a real treasure trove of skeletons, animals, history, and wildlife. I was honored to visit!
Our day trip did not end with the Natural History museum. Albina and I walked around trying to decide what to eat for lunch. We found ourselves back in Hyde park by the pond and wound up sharing a pizza there. As we shared the pizza, I wound up pulling out various coins and showing Albina some of the idiosyncrasies of British coinage.

From left to right we have: the front and back of a two pound coin, the slightly smaller one pound coin — first the older version which will be phased out in October and then the newer version, fifty pence pieces — the top is the back view and then there are at least three different fronts I have seen, twenty pence pieces front and back, ten pence pieces, five pence pieces, tuppence, and pence. I find it amusing that the ten pence pieces are so much larger than the twenty pence pieces. I also love that there is a fifty pence piece with Peter Rabbit on it!!!
After lunch, we visited the space museum. Albina taught me that Yuri is a very popular name in Russia because of the first astronaut — Yuri Gagarin. We also learned about Valentina Tereshkova. She was the first woman to fly in space and remains the only woman to have a solo flight in space. She was given the woman of the century award by the International Women of the Year Association. It was really eye opening to see just how much Russia accomplished in space that we really didn’t cover in my classes.
The space museum is much smaller than the Natural history museum, but it did include an entire floor of planes!

Which of course, required us to pose for more pictures!
After the space museum, we took a walk to what I think were the Kensington Palace gardens.

Sitting near by we got a chance to talk through some important career decisions with each other before we grabbed dinner and headed home for the night. I don’t know when we’ll get to see each other again, but it was nice to know that we had so many common experiences with career paths. And it was wonderful to get such a beautiful day together for our memories! Super excited we could both make the time!