When I began to learn Japanese, I was still living in the UK. One day my teacher and I came up with a game whereby we would give alternative names to countries. I don't remember all of them, but I think "America" became 弁護士国 ("Lawyer country"). France quite possibly became スト国 ("Strike country"). I definitely remember what we nicknamed the UK, though. 雨国. "Rainy country". As people from Lawyer country are prone to say, "Ain't that the (expletive) truth".

I studied Swedish (spoken in "Impossibly Tall and Handsome Country") for a while, and my teacher gave me a list (in Swedish, of course) of things she liked more about Japan and things she liked more about Sweden. One of them said "I do not miss Sweden's dark winters". I'd forgotten how dark Europe gets in the winter. Japan's winters can be cold, but it's still light until relatively late. In the UK (and Holland) it was getting dark by 4 and was flat-out pitch black at 5.

Anyway. During the occasional respite from the rain (and at times during the rain) the cameras got a bit of a workout. We were in three places: Suffolk, London and Brighton.

Suffolk first. The unpredictable British weather actually made for some pretty impressive sunbeam-through-the-clouds-hitting-the-sea shots. HDR courtesy of Photomatix.

The area of Suffolk we were visiting is not exactly known for being a happening place. It's pretty quiet. The first thing I saw which prompted me to get the camera out was this.

Walking around town, we chanced upon an open church. Although I'm basically agnostic, I like churches, and I really like shooting in them now that I have the D3S. 

There's a kind of woodland forest place in the area, and no sooner had we got there than we noticed this fellow sitting not three metres away from us. Robins are renowned for being brave, or at least not running away at the first sign of humankind. He sat there for a good minute or more and let me get some nice shots before he flew off. And he worked for free. Can't argue with that.

Fisherman braving the elements

Typical UK countryside (ish) scene, gulls and all

We also went to a museum-cum-former stately home which housed some impressive paintings. This is where the D3S really started showing off. It was extremely dark in this building, but non-flash photography was permitted. The D3S doesn't really need a flash unless you're shooting fashion, and I wasn't, so I put a cap on the Auto-ISO at something like 12,800 and fired away. That's 12,800 with a constant F2.8 lens, for the record.

After Suffolk, we had a day in London (well, an afternoon once we got through with the UK's erratic public transport...and "erratic" is me trying to be diplomatic). We basically had to choose one place and stay there, so we decided on Covent Garden, which is never boring. This man was on a very high unicycle, doing his routine.

He was pretty entertaining. 

The other thing that you often see in Covent Garden is something I also saw in Amsterdam. They're what I've taken to calling "Mime statues". They stand incredibly still until someone moves close to them, at which point they start moving in a way which is halfway between mime and robotics.

There will be one more entry on this travel theme, featuring Brighton (easily my favourite place in the UK and about the only bit of it I can say I miss) and all of what I call the "transit" pictures, i.e. everything taken in a plane/train or at an airport or station. It will be up in a few days.

Thanks for looking!