| March 24, 2004 19:35 EST |
A question bristles in the back of my mind with
all the urgency of a cheap suit on unwashed skin. “Why, oh why, bother flying if you’re not flying on Virgin Atlantic?” Following our courteous and efficient admittance onto this aircraft, we were greeted by some VA staff. They looked the part, with their carefully monitored, street-cred level of unkemptness. Spiky hair and eyes suggesting that they were just coming off of last night’s hangover. Then there was the plane. As Coldplay was piped over the intercom, we were greeted by seats decked out in purples, oranges, and reds, patterns swirling like an Austin Powers set. Danger was undeniably our middle name. Upon each seat was set a small pack of presents (although I remind myself that these are hardly “presents” as we paid for the tickets). Each bag included an envelope for charitable donations, headphones, a toothbrush, earplugs, sleeping mask, pen, and (my favorite) an absolutely miniscule tube of toothpaste. I will keep this bag forever as it is perfect. If I threw in a credit card and a change of underwear, I could travel the world with just this bag. Each seat also comes with its own handheld TV monitor on which you can view one of about a dozen movies, the news, or play video games. Images of the train bombing in Spain are on my monitor now, which brings me back to earth a bit. Such a crazy, confusing world we live in. I’m pleased, however, with our choice to travel it nonetheless. |
| March 25, 2004 12:18 EST |
Things always look a bit more civilized after a
nap. Once we landed, we changed a bit of money (got steamrolled on
the exchange rate, I think the ratio is about two dollars to every one pound).
We took the Underground to Leicester
Square to get our hands on some cheap theater tickets. We bypassed
the shady “Bottom of the barrel, half off” discount places in favor of the
TKTS booth
that we know and love from NYC. Being fat, ugly Americans, we mistook
the front of a 10-person line for the back of it. As the line slowly
expanded, branching from the queue’s end opposite us, we realized our mistake
and quickly remedied it. I did let out a “oh gosh, is this the FRONT
of the line?”, to which the first few folks in line nodded vigorously.
Wei and I both felt rather foolish, but fixed our error, so no harm done.
It appears that these Brits in particular were too polite to point out our
error, but still human enough so that, with every passing moment of our
tenure at the front of the line, their rage bubbled a bit more to the surface. In any event, we got tickets to see “Anything Goes”. It was one of the few plays that was not gently skewered by Time Out. By this point, we were fairly out of our minds from being up all night on the plane. After a lunch of very good Chinese food (which, incidentally, happened to have a mysterious locked kitchen door that, once they found the key, functioned as a direct portal to China, judging from all of the Chinese people who spilled out of it), we slept for nearly 5 hours. Our hotel is a wonderful, clean place called the Morgan Hotel. It shares a roof with the currently closed shop of the British Museum. The museum itself is in our backyard. Perhaps tomorrow we’ll tackle that one. For now, though, we’re soaking up the ambiance of our room, with its odd LED bedside lights and heavily tassled Victorian-era curtains. It appears that the Brits feel they can get away with such errant style. Queer Eye would be livid, I’m sure. |
| March 26, 2004 3:00 EST |
I kind of like all of the European bathroom nuances
that I’ve discovered since I began my little stint of traveling. Like
our bathroom here has a little fan that remains on for a few minutes after
you turn out the bathroom light, presumably to reduce stinks or to clear
our any residual shower steam before the smoke detector mistakes it for something
that’d send us all to the curb in our knickers. There’s also the little
divot in the plexiglass countertop that allows the soapdish to drain into
the sink. Hooray, reducing soap scum! Or the shower dials where
one dial controls temperature and one controls water pressure. Or
the blow dryer that’s stationed outside of the bathroom so you neither have
to look into a steamed-up mirror nor stand in puddles to dry your hair.
Then there was the little metal toilet paper holder in Paris that held the
roll in place as you tore off your desired length of paper. All so
simple and so brilliant. It’s a wonder that they don’t still rule the
world. Wei’s just getting out of the shower, then we’re off to a few sights. Last night we ate some delicious doner kebab (the trick appears to be the chilis) and went to see “Anything Goes”. It was great fun. Lots of huge tap-dancing production numbers and 1930’s American style. We really liked it, and amusingly, were seated next to the very man who we accidentally cut in line at the TKTS booth. I found the whole experience rather perfect because I got to apologize and laugh about it with him. Absolution. We crashed pretty early because of the tiredness and woke up for our hotel’s Full English Breakfast (trumpets should accompany that announcement). Eggs, sausage, bacon, toast, juice, and mush. When our host asked if we wanted “mush” I assumed he meant hash or mash, as in some type of potato substance, but one look at my plate indicated that he clearly meant mushrooms. They were very brown. Ok, Wei’s out, so we’re off. Much museumage today, I think. Must hydrate. |
| March 26, 2004 This is where Wei’s watch broke so he is using mine and I no longer have a concept of time. |
We’re in Trafalgar Square.
The sun is shining, the fountains are flowing, the pigeons are flying for
their lives, and the Italians are reinforcing all of my cultural stereotypes. |
| March 26, 2004 Later |
We’re in the National Gallery, which is
entirely less intimidating than the Louvre.
One follows a fairly direct course through these galleries instead of looping
through multiple linked rooms. My favorite painting so far is called, I
believe, “Interior”. I didn’t get a chance to write down the painter’s name,
but it depicted the inside of a fairly spartan room with a woman standing
in the foreground in very simple dress. The lighting was luminescent,
sort of like Vermeer.
Everything about the painting’s composition should have suggested a loneliness,
but the woman’s contented posture and the lighting made you remember the
difference between being alone and lonely. This place is wonderful because it’s free. |
| March 26, 2004 Even later |
We spent a little while in the National Gallery
before it was overrun by school field trips, at which point we ran across
the street to the National
Portrait Gallery. Wei and I predicted only a brief stop here as
we imagined it’d be chock full of stuffy paintings of royalty in absurd collars.
We were pleasantly surprised, though, to see that most of the collection included
contemporary portraits (using all sorts of media) of writers, painters, musicians.
Oddly, I think my favorite painting was a very simple portrait of Prince Charles.
On Charles’ face, you could still see the gridmarks that guided the initial
sketch beneath the paint. Wei and I were debating whether this was intentional,
and if so, what the painter was trying to say. Erin would be happy to
hear that there is also a series of 4 paintings, each depicting one of the
four members of Blur.
No Thom, though. I suppose he’s
too skittish to sit for portraiture. We’re currently enjoying a free lunchtime concert in the St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, which abuts Trafalgar Square. The musician is a Japanese pianist who was educated in Paris. She’s really small. We can’t see her from our seats. The place is packed. I have a feeling that Brits don’t eat lunch at their desks. We had lunch in this church’s crypt, where there’s a café and a place where you can make rubbings of bronze etchings for a few quid. The church itself is pretty unspectacular and resembles a government building from the outside, but I’m really liking the old wooden pews, the small, colorful panes of glass in the windows that are almost certainly full of lead. Our lunch was great. I had a sandwich with shaved cheddar, arugula, tomatoes, apple vinegarette, and spicy mustard. Wei had leek and ginger soup. We also had Orangina, and I tipped my mental hat to Julian and Marjorie. Julian, incidentally, seems to have made a cameo appearance in “Anything Goes” last night. Or maybe all Brits are like that…) Wei’s fact of the day: In their time, Mozart and Handel also played in this church. Jen’s fact of the day: Ultramarine is a stone that was used for mixing pigment base for many painters. In the days of Renoir and other such notables, it was more valuable than gold. |
| March 26, 2004 |
Such a familiar yet strange place. I remember
hearing from a few people that London is just like being in Boston. I suppose
that’s true if you can’t see beyond the Starbucks and the McDonald’s.
Once you peer more closely, though, there are some spectacular things here. Following our free concert, we wandered up the Strand, a row of shopping opportunities and restaurants, until we reached the Transportation Museum. This must sound like the most boring load of tripe, but it was honestly one of the most fun museums I have ever been to. It was a very hands-on, interactive set of stations that showed you London’s transportation history from the horse-drawn carriage to Minding the Gap. My description can’t possibly do it justice. Icelandic people would certainly refer to it as “multimedia”. It was fantastic fun and something I’d recommend to anyone traveling to London. Leaving the museum, we were greeted by Pachelbel’s canon, being played by a quartet in Covent Garden. It was one of those fun moments that seems so storybook that it verges on being laughable. We loved it, though, leaving cynicism for another day. Our next stop was probably the most peculiar thing we’ll do in London. We visited Pollock’s Toy Museum, which houses a vast and (ok, I’ll say it) bizarre and sometimes disturbing collection of antique toys from around the world. It was founded by Benjamin Pollack, the leading creator of toy theaters in Victorian London. Wei and I were the only people in the museum, allowing us quite a bit of “oh my god, look at this” time. Some of the more fascinating and occasionally horrifying pieces were the wax dolls, the Hitler puppet, and the unbelievably racist Golliwogs (please refer to London pictures). You really have to see this place, to smell its layers of dust and feel the floorboards give beneath your feet, to get the full idea (and to get an inkling of how many sleepless nights it’d cost Erin). How on earth we went up three flights of stairs, descended 4, and still exited from the same door that we came in is completely beyond me, but maybe this is something I wasn’t meant to understand. After the toy museum, we were kind of freaked out and speechless, so we did the only thing that two reasonable people could do. We went home, washed our feet, and took a nap. Luckily, the British Museum is open late on Friday evenings, so we were able to run around its immense rooms until 8:30. The building itself is cavernous, seemingly made entirely of marble with a foyer (and a library at its core) that skyrockets up six flights before ending in a glass ceiling. Since the museum is free, this entryway is recognized as the largest indoor public square in all of Europe. Some of the best pieces that we saw included the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon Marbles, and an exhibit on Living and Dying. 1. The Rosetta Stone was cool because of its incredible significance. Until it was found, scholars had no idea what Egyptian hieroglyphics stood for. Did they represent individual words? Syllable sounds? Or did they have no direct translation, instead representing the feelings of Egyptian spirituals? The Rosetta Stone solved all of that by duplicating the same textual content in three different languages (Greek, the Egyptian common language, and hieroglyphics). It was discovered by a member of the French Army during the Napoleonic invasions and was commandeered by the British when they overthrew Napoleon. 2. The Parthenon Marbles: These were statues and friezes taken directly from the Parthenon when the Brits were taking over the world. This is a perfect case of highway robbery, where the Brits took treasures from places they overran (some footage of soldiers in Iraq shows some striking similarities). Greece isn’t giving up, though. They have demanded that these marbles be returned, and whereas the UK typically just says “no”, the Greeks are using the spotlight created by the 2004 Olympics in Athens to get their demands heard by not only the UK, but the world. Perhaps they’ll embarrass the Brits into it yet. 3. The Living and Dying exhibit was a display of how different cultures deal with death, illness, and life. The most striking piece was a pair of fabric lengths into which were stitched small pockets containing one pill per pocket. If you’ve been to a fabric store, just imagine an entire length of fabric splayed out over a table covered in pills. It’s supposed to represent the number of pills prescribed to an average Brit over his or her lifetime. When this is flanked by images of mourners covered in mud in Papua, New Guinea, one starts to “get it”. After a short walk, we ended up at a fantastic Indian restaurant where we ate southern Indian cuisine; much different from the Northern and Punjabi fare that we normally eat in Boston. After a stop by a pub on the way home (actually, the pub where Karl Marx contemplated his manifesto back in the day), we went to sleep. |
| March 28, 2004 |
It’s already Sunday, our last day in London, and
I’ve a lot to recount from yesterday. Following our Full English Breakfast
(trumpets), we checked out of our B&B and headed for the Tube.
First stop: the changing
of the horse guards by Buckingham Palace.
This was the first bit of “ugh, tourists” I’ve witnessed. People were
crawling all over one another, shamelessly jockeying for position with little
regard for what 4-year old they were trampling. The ponies were very
majestic indeed, although nothing so regal as Shadowfax nor as
brave as Bill
could be found on the premises. Following this, we took a brief walk through the nearby gardens so that we could get a good view of Buckingham Palace from the footbridge spanning the park’s pond. Buckingham Palace is immense. Quite a residence for a monarchy that has no actual power. Wei and I decided that the monarchy is still kept in such style because Brits are too polite to let them know that the Prime Minister and Parliament are actually holding all the cards and making all the rules. They are allowed to go to parties and be in parades and other such pomp. Plus they get a huge staff of bodyguards stationed all over London just in case anyone tries to be mischievous, God Save the Queen. Next was one of the most surprisingly cool parts of London, the Cabinet War Rooms. The price of admission bought you an audio tour of the underground chambers from which Winston Churchill led the nation through WWII. Judging from the cramped quarters, the lack of sunlight, the non-flushing toilets, the alleged vermin infestation, and the lack of privacy that these rooms afforded, it seems very much like East Campus. From what I gathered, Mr. Churchill was the exact type of leader that the UK needed when the threat of occupation by Nazi Germany was imminent for the better part of 6 years. If I’d been in there at the time, I’d probably be employed as a secretary, trying to type various communiqués as Mr. Churchill dictated them through the clenched jaw of his cigar-chomping mouth. I’d have also gone quite mad from the darkness and the constant air-raid sirens. Map rooms, emergency phones, escape routes, cabinet meeting rooms, I can’t even imagine the strain. Following the Cabinet War Rooms, we mistook Westminster Hall (AKA Parliament) for Westminster Abbey, but were quickly corrected when we couldn’t penetrate the fortress and the bobby-cop brigade. Scampering across the street, though, we found the right queue and hopped in. Wei got out of line to take a picture of Big Ben while I was treated to a loud American Jewish man who wished aloud (to the dismay of all those in line) that if the Catholic church decides to go public, he wants to be on the IPO. He expounded on this notion by pointing out the length of the line and guessing how much the abby must rake in each day. Wei couldn’t return quickly enough. As for Westminster Abbey, I can’t honestly say that I found it beautiful or inspiring, or even very spiritual. I was very happy to have seen it, but it was a tomb, and quite creepy and odd. It is intense in that some of the most influential Brits in history are all taking their dirt nap under the same roof. It is also an incredible testament to the architects as it contains a multitude of little nooks in which small, personalized enclaves house the more important of the caskets. This place also contains the Coronation Chair. Every king or queen since Edward II has been crowned in this very chair (except those who weren’t actually crowned, of course). Perhaps my favorite part of the Abbey was the poet’s corner, bearing plaques for the likes of Shakespeare, TS Elliot, Tennyson, and others. No Virginia Woolf, alas. After Westminster, we tried to go to St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the external scaffolding, ongoing internal construction, and the unmoving queue made us realize that we didn’t care enough about this church to wait for it. So, we took off for our next hotel, the Grange City Hotel. It was located in what is referred to as “the City”, or the Square-Mile, by Londoners. The City is home to the financial district, which empties out during the weekends, allowing jokers like ourselves to afford a 265 pound room for a fraction of that cost. Excellent fun! It’s a 5-star hotel, which basically means that it is quite nice and has 24-hour room service. Our room is one of about four in the whole hotel with a balcony, which overlooks the Tower of London and the remains of a wall erected by the Romans when they ran the town. I’m pretty sure I saw Mary Poppins skipping along the rooftops with the chimney sweeps, but Wei didn’t confirm the sighting. The hotel also includes tea service in every room and a lap pool. Our room was fantastic for naps, which we indulged in soon after we checked in. The shower heads also had a setting with a high-powered mist that was so gentle yet with such good water pressure that I almost packed the shower head and took it home with me. That evening, we had some Indian food again and crossed the millennium foot bridge to the Tate Modern Gallery. This collection of modern art is housed in a refurbished industrial plant overlooking the Thames. The space itself is pretty fantastic, with its lofty ceilings, wooden floorboards, and exposed steel girders. Artists included Matisse, Picasso, Dali, and other notables, and the collection was peppered with the occasional schlock that is inevitable in modern art (blank canvas with a pile of dog droppings in front of it, meant to make some statement about life and art as poop). Perhaps my favorite aspects of the museum are largely thanks to its curator: 1. The pieces were organized by intuitive theme instead of by artist, time period, or style. For example, all pieces related to the human body were in Wing 1. All those devoted to an exploration of raw materials, room 4. It made navigating the art much more meaningful for me in that it allowed me to compare art on the level at which I take it in. 2. For many of the pieces, the normal explanatory plaque was accompanied by a plaque on which an individual outside of “the field” lent his or her insight about the piece. Titled “The Bigger Picture”, these plaques included commentary by neuroscientists, physicists, politicians, musicians, mathematicians, all providing a unique way of looking at the piece. This was really great and gave the art a bit more backbone and appeal than it would have had otherwise. It also made me feel good that art means something to all types of people, not just artists. |
| March 29, 2004 |
We are currently on our flight home, but I’ve an
entire day’s worth of activities to recount, if you can stand it. After a quick swim and a free breakfast of cereal, dried fruits and baked goods, Wei and I hit the road for Soho, where we planned to take a walking tour of this, the red light/gay/village epicenter of London. While we walked, the streets remained empty (presumably everyone was still in bed) but we were still able to explore the incredibly small and tucked away strip of “gentleman’s clubs” and porn shops. Oddly, its “tucked away”ness made it seem far more peculiar, seamy, and potentially dangerous than the wide-open sexuality of Pigalle in Paris. It felt akin to a dirty secret that might be better brought out into the open. When we emerged from these streets, we wandered a few blocks to see where Karl Marx lived and to take in the sights of the gayest streets in London. The Lonely Planet Guidebook dared us to identify which of the bars were straight and which were gay, a game that Wei and I gave up on quickly because it was way too difficult. After that, we crossed the Strand to the Somerset House, watched the dancing fountains, and decided that we couldn’t handle another museum. Our next stop was the Tower of London. This is just one of the places in which you can learn a portion of Britain’s grisly history, told by one of the Beefeaters, a member of the Queen’s bodyguard who, to earn the post, must be at least 45 years of age, have served at least 22 years in the British military, achieved at least the rank of Sergeant Major, and have been awarded a ribbon for at least 15 years of good conduct. The Beefeaters are quite proud of these qualifications and speak of them multiple times during the Tower's free guided tours. During our tour, we saw the green upon which high royalty were beheaded. There were only 6 of these beheadings; the rest of the doomed population were beheaded outside of the Tower on Tower Hill. Among the six special cases were two wives of King Henry, including Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded for not bearing King Henry a son. Crazy bastard. Legend has it that she was beheaded so swiftly by her French executioner that her bodyless head still spoke its final prayers for 90 seconds after decapitation. This apparently validated the second crime of which she was accused: witchcraft and heresy. Aside from the crown jewels (which were very big and shiny, most importantly the coronation spoon (??)) this place was nothing but a demonstration of some of the tragedy that can befall a place and a people when power is given blindly (namely to imbeciles who can achieve it solely via bloodline or by killing those of purer blood than they). It was very interesting, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few Brits who were quite ashamed of the goings-on in that place. Not to mention that the moat had to be drained at one point because it contained cholera. Ugh. Following the Tower, we found a place to eat by crossing the Tower Bridge (different than the London Bridge, where they actually put freshly executed heads on pikes as a warning to all those entering London, lest they commit an act of treason) and making our way through the wharf to the Garrison Publick House. This was a fantastic gastropub, serving up modern British fare in a hip, yardsale-type atmosphere. This was, in fact, the type of place that served haddock pie (which Wei enjoyed) while showing Donnie Darko in the basement. By far, our favorite find (at least in terms of eating) of the trip. A stroll back over the Tower Bridge brought us back home and concluded our final full day in London town. |