Here, I'm not entirely sure why this bothers me. Why should I care if they are visiting museums through viewfinders? Except for the small annoyance of always walking through someone's photo (or even worse, video), I have no reason to mind that they're going to have hours and hours of unwatchable video footage when they get home. Who will want to watch it? This, I think, is the source of my frustration.
The other highlight (and really, we were on a highlights-type tour of all of the museums) was the Elgin / Parthenon marbles. [Which are pieces from the Parthenon, not marbles in the children's game or generally round object style.] The sculptures were very concerned with tales of naked people on horseback fighting, and the accompanying text was very excited about explaining the use of perspective. The other interesting part of the curation was the description of how it's really a good thing that old Elgin took them away from Greece. You see, the Greeks were pretty irresponsible with the remaining marble pieces; so had the British not taken them, they might have been lost to the ages or damaged by the horrible pollution in Athens!
Although we were tempted to follow one of the tour guides who used umbrellas to signal to their groups (rather than shell out two pounds for a museum map), we managed instead to wander through a few other exhibits. Particularly the African art section, which featured benches as well as short videos about dancing as rehearsal for spiritual possession and brassworks.
By this point in the trip, we learned the value of taking time during the day not to be doing anything. To this end, we spent the afternoon in Regent's Park with a Tesco picnic. I chose the vegetarian sandwich variety pack for the sheer challenge of eating the three strange styles of sandwich filling -- egg mayonaise, onion and cheese, and 'workman' which seemed normal except for the strange brown pickle mix. I'm not sure which was my favorite, but they were all pretty special.
In the park, we observed some interesting child rearing techniques (such as leave your child far away and hide behind a tree until she comes running, and bounce your stroller violently to calm a crying baby), lots and lost of shirtless pale people, a wedding party, and some nice rose gardens.
After a few hours of lounging, we were ready to hit up some more attractions. Our fellow underground passengers who described the crowded ride to St. Paul's Cathedral as "hotter than Calcutta" and suggested treating it as a "sweat lodge" were pretty much right on the mark. Ah, the joy of the heat wave visit!
We were too late to actually go inside St. Paul's (which my Scottish friend claims is much nicer than Westminster Abbey); but we made our best effort to document its exterior beauty by lying in the street to take pictures of it. The reason for being in that neighborhood was that we were planning a visit to the Tate Modern, which was open late on Saturday.
Crossing the Millennium footbridge, we were treated to views of lots and lots of other bridges, suggesting that Rhiannon could count the trip as a business expense. At the very least, we paused for a few photos. Coupled with the photo of her by the Institute for Civil Engineers, I think she has a decent case.
The Tate Modern was really cool. The space, which used to be occupied by a power plant, is gigantic and only a small fraction is actively occupied by exhibits. Per our custom, we stuck to the free exhibits, which also happened to have nice bench areas with audio content. Other people, however, were extremely obsessed with the Kahlo show. Many stopped in the cafe to buy commemorative sweatshirts and pose for photos with the large picture of Frida.
After the museum, we had dinner at a nearby pizza place. Although it was part of the Pizza Express chain (not Pizza Hut, at least), it had an authentic view. Somehow we stayed late enough, or took to long to walk, and our Tube stop had closed. The sign directed us to go to a different entrance, but we were unable to find it, even with Rhiannon's laminated folding map.
This inability to locate an alternative Underground entrance launched us on a multi-hour adventure trying to navigate the very confusing night bus system. While we had hoped to experience the authentic double-decker bus ride, we had no idea what horrors our immediate future held. Many blocks away, we ran across a bus stop where we learned that we needed to walk quite a way to find the correct station for a bus that would go somewhat in the direction of our beds. Once there, we re-evaluated and waited for about forty minutes while the police chatted up some not-very-dangerous-looking hooligans. By the time the police had finished, our bus arrived and we were off to Victoria Station hoping that a bus would come to take us to Baker Street.
Alas, when we arrived at Victoria, there was no apparent bus to take us home, but one seemed to be going in the general direction such that we'd have a eight block walk from our stop which we assumed to be the end of the line. With that as inspiration, we boarded another bus and started our ride. Along the way, we saw hundreds [thousands?] of shirtless women and a few men wearing pink bras for the playtex moonwalk in support of some sort of breast-related cause [ed: lookup url]. We also saw something that seemed like our stop, but since the bus kept going we assumed that we read the sign incorrectly. As the bus seemed to go on for hours, through different countries, I fell asleep while Rhiannon consulted the maps.
When we passed an outlying Underground Station, she realized that we had indeed missed our stop. Conveniently, there was a Edgeware Road and Edgeware Street stop. We wanted the former and were en route to the latter, in the suburban wastelands. When we disembarked at the next available stop, things were looking pretty grim. And dark. It was nearly two in the morning as we walked to the nearest bus stop, which didn't have any maps or schedules to help us out. Although it would have felt more productive to walk, we decided that it was more practical to just sit and wait until a bus arrived to take us home to our super-uncomfortable beds.
After about fifteen minutes of staring down the street for any sign of a bus, we were amazed to greet one headed for the correct neighborhood. We climbed aboard to the second level and kept a close eye on the map as the vehicle made frightening turns along narrow streets, seeming always on the verge of trampling parked cars below.
When we finally arrived at the dorm it was three in the morning. Looking forward to a few hours of sleep before setting off on the next day's planless adventure, we eagerly returned to our rooms.
Luckily, our night was hardly over. Within a half an hour, the halls were pierced with a confusingly loud alarm. Rather than immediately fleeing the room, I decided to get dressed and collect some of my belongings before trudging down seventeen flights of stairs into the courtyard. No one, including the security personnel, seemed very flustered by the prospect of a burning building. We sat along with our fellow travelers in the cool night air for about fifteen minutes until the sirens stopped. True to form, no one from Marylebone followed any sort of procedure to let us inside. Instead, after a few tentative groups approached the door, we vacated the courtyard and returned to our rooms for a few hours of sleep and a revised wake up time.
On the way, a few of our fellow travelers were very interested in photographing the countryside. I hate to think of the people at home who will be subjected to the hundreds of pictures of sheep and fields when that guy gets around to doing the inevitable slideshow.
The bus ride was surprisingly shorter than expected, possibly because the driver threw us out at the earlier stop. Luckily, we were able to find the tourist information center, which mainly wanted us to go on an expensive ride to Experience Oxford. We ignored this suggestion and went instead to the inexpensive Museum of Oxford. The museum featured many objects that were exciting to school aged visitors (for proof, see the binder at the entrance), an abbreviated DVD about the town's history (full version available for purchase), exhibits about prehistoric children's shoes, an Oliver Cromwell death mask, a display about student life at Oxford (where students brought servants to fetch them breakfast), the story about a murder and the skeleton of one of the falsely [?] convicted men, as well many other fascinating things. There was even a section about Alice in Wonderland and brass rubbing stations. Other visitors to the museum were (freakishly) much more reverent and slow paced than we were.
After all of that history, we were hungry; so we had lunch at Big Tom (named for the bell in Christ Church Tower -- we wondered if Big Tom and Big Ben ever see each other at bell conventions), which wasn't among the famous pubs of Oxford included in the guidebooks. Nevertheless, we had a good lunch, although I was surprised that my cheese baguette included cold shredded cheese with a side of brown pickle sauce. I'm not sure what substance was actually pickled, but it was pretty O.K.. They also had lots of exciting sauces for our fries.
After lunch we sought out all of the colleges that didn't charge for admission. We thought about sneaking in, but the guards looked pretty ornery. So, we saw a large unexciting meadow, people playing croquet, several chapels, and lots of spires. With that out of the way, we paid a visit to the Ashmoelan museum. Centered around the souveniers of one of Charles's secretaries, the Egyptian collection was among the "not to be missed" parts of town. By the end, we agreed that it was slightly better (but less spooky) than the mummy exhibit at the old Kalamazoo Public LIbrary and Museum. We also took a look at the Ashmolean Ark room, which included yet another Oliver Cromwell death mask! Quite a lucky day, indeed. We also spent some quality time on the ample benches in the hall of statuary, but they weren't thoughtful enough to provide large print signs, minimizing the effectiveness of our lazy spectation strategy.
With that checked off our list, it seemed that we'd exhausted the possibilities of Oxford; so we found our bus and returned to London. There, we decided that after three days of pretty constant walking we could use a sitting down activity. In particular, a movie seemed like a good way to avoid the heat wave conditions. Bombon, el Perro, which I'd missed at SIFF due to customs problems, was heavily advertised and opening that night. So of course, we had to go. Unfortunately, we picked a theater that decided to kill the air conditioning (possibly to simulate the Argentinean setting).
We bought our tickets well in advance, giving us plenty of time to walk around not being hungry. We finally settled on a bar called Waxy's LIttle Sister (the name made more sense when we noticed that there was a Waxy's across the street) for a beer. They had an ingeniously complicated pulley system that could be used to order drinks, but we resorted to securing a sofa in the upstairs sofa lounge and just going downstairs to order.
We arrived back at the theater at what seemed to be an appropriate time for getting seats. However, we were way too early and it was still closed for cleaning. Once we were allowed inside, there was still a lot of time since they don't turn off the cheesy music until 20 minutes after the advertised start time. Even then, there were about fifty commercials warning us against the dangers of drinking two pints and one encouraging us to text Ewan McGregor to fight hunger. This, all before the regular previews.
The movie itself was fairly decent, although the plot was sort of random and the theater was too warm for the experience to be that enjoyable. On the way back to the underground, we walked though Picadilly Circus and were fortunate enough to cross paths with the Jesus Army. This was enough to call it a night.
- Music:bloc party - like eating glass
All of the guidebooks seemed to agree that no visitior to London should be allowed to leave without seeing the glory of Westminster Abbey. So, we broke our free attractions policy and handed over a few pounds to get inside this must-see attraction. However, we didn't pay for a tour or an audio guide. We wrongly assumed that we could just listen in on another tour at a few points of interest, but this was strictly discouraged. We also failed to befriend people with audio guides and weren't bold enough to steal handsets.
The major attraction of Westminster Abbey is the dead people. And there are lots of them! A big trend in death statuary seemed to be having a replica of the dead person lying above the grave. Clearly, the people didn't want to be lonely or to have cold feet; so most had some sort of animal at their feet. A few had inanimate objects, such as a small castle. The strangest was the person who had a smaller person at his feet. Even stranger, the little person was positioned to be staring up the larger person's robes for all of eternity. Perhaps there was a story for this, but making up our own humor about it seemed more fun and less expensive than finding out the truth. Luckily, there was a guy who was responsible for walking around the abbey and keeping all of the faces free of dust.
Another nice feature at Westminster Abbey was a device to help people look at the vaulted ceilings without tilting their heads toward the sky. It is called a mirror, and it was a popular attraction for many. Apparently sore necks are a big problem and the fan-vaulting is not to be missed. Thus, a large wood-framed mirror in cart form! This is the sort of thing that I should have expected in a country with socialized medicine -- an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Before leaving, we looked at a large collection of death masks and royal effigies, memorials to many famous writers, and avoided the temptation of spending all of our Pounds in the gift shop.
The day then transitioned into the "looking at buildings" phase. We saw Parlaiment and the large line to get inside to hear a session; so we kept walking. We did get to hear old Big Ben chiming at noon, which was good timing.
Then we walked along St. James Park to have a look at Buckingham Palace. According to the flag, the Queen was inside, but we didn't get a chance to say hello. Instead, we watched the guards marching back and forth and waving their guns around. They were really too far away to even make an effort at distracting them. When we'd had our fill of the palace, we walked back through the park, where we saw the famous Russian Pelicans swimming. We also saw the special green chairs that cost 4 pounds to rent for the afternoon.
At the end of the park, we found ourselves near Trafalgar Square; so why not pay a visit to old bloody socks himself? At the Nelson monument, we saw the famous aggressive pigeons and the famous lions that people enjoy climbing on for photographs. We also saw the National Gallery right across the plaza; so we couldn't resist its freeness.
Luckily, they have several computer stations that allow visitors to design a tour to make the experience with the art more efficient. We chose the "highlights" and "early masterpieces" tours and set off to see the artwork. By far, the highlights were the early masterpieces depicting the life of St. Francis. In particular, one showed him making a pact with a wolf. A notary witnesses the handshake between the proto-Saint and the wolf; he bloody limbs of one of the wolf's victims is shown in the background.
Over lunch, we returned to our friendly travel guides for advice about what to do next. The promise of a Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Science museum drew us to South Kensington right away. When we arrived, we learned that the attraction had been replaced by one concerning the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if it hadn't been ridiculously expensive, this might have been exciting. Instead, we looked at a bunch of American space artifacts -- very few Britons have actually made it into space, some junk only superficially related to modern technology, some games intended to tell us about how people are different (is your brain male or female? what's your personality? can your drive if your right and left are mixed up? some people's hobbies include writing letters to death row inmates! here's a seven toed cat!), as well as some games from/about the future. For instance, future video games will be projected on large white tables and will require you to move babies around a maze to steal toys before the robot nanny returns them to their holding pod.
Rather than spending more time being harassed about not going into the h2g2 exhibit or looking at a room full of engines, we escaped from the Science Museum. After all, the Museum of Natural History was right next door and they have animatronic dinosaurs! Three of them stood on top of display cases hissing with bloody mouths. I suspect that they had once been arranged to simulate a fight, but someone might have complained. There was also a Tyranosaurus Rex, which had a room to itself. It looked menacing while people took hundreds of pictures. In general, the curation of the exhibit was highly speculative -- never wanting to make any definite statements about the dinosaurs.
The final attraction was a large room featuring portraits of various rescued apes. This was the first time that we recognized the importance of benches in appropriate museum design. We were able to sit in the middle of the room and see all of the pictures. As an extra bonus, all of the sad stories about the lives of the apes were printed on convenient placards near the bench.
For our evening entertainment, we took the Tube to Oxford Circus and spent a couple hours walking around Soho and the West End trying to decide that we were hungry enough to stop to eat. This journey took us through the porn section of town and past the place where Ewan McGregor is one of the Guys and Dolls. We also saw many pubs were people stood outside to drink, possibly because it was too hot to sit inside. After getting sort of lost a couple times, we settled on a Thai place called busaba eathai, where the seating was community-style. It was sort of interesting and sort of weird to sit at a table with other eating strangers and not really interact with them. But the food was plentiful and good especially after all of our wandering.
At least one of our fellow line waiters found the situation "very disappointing." It's not clear what he expected. There were a whole lot of people wearing tour badges with handwritten names and I wondered if they would wear them for their entire trip. Later, we saw one of them ("Cindy Baker") and I can't remember if we recognized her by her appearance or by her badge. The other fun part about the passport control is that it seemed like they had experienced some recent problems with verbal (and/or physical assaults) at the checkpoints. Numerous signs warned us that any sort of unpleasantness would be rewarded with jail time or stiff fines.
Once we convinced the passport checkers that we were no threat to national security, we went to take a train to London. This was also my first chance to encounter the very sad dollar-pound conversion ratio.
Arriving in Victoria Station we wandered around trying to figure out what sort of Underground pass to buy. Eventually, we found a little office that existed to provide advice. When we told the attendant that we were going to be in town for little under a week, he advised us to buy a weekly pass. Which, I guess we knew, but going to the desk seemed more reassuring.
Soon, we were on the Tube to our temporary home: the residence halls at the University of Westminster, Marylebone. Even though we were a few minutes early, they allowed us to check in to the small rooms with comically uncomfortable beds. Every day at Marylebone was sort of an adventure because the guards seemed to change the entry and exit security procedures on an hourly basis. Some days we'd need to show keys to get in. Some days a gate would be open. Others required them to allow us through the turnstiles. Some floors required keys to access common areas, others didn't. Such an adventure!
After dropping our things off upstairs, Rhiannon and I reconvened in one of the few public spaces at the hall accessible to both of us -- a small table and bench outside the reception area -- and faced the reality that we didn't have anything resembling a plan. Thankfully, she brought several travel guides to boss us around. It was just the sort of tough love that we needed to get us going.
On the advice of our soon-to-be good pal Frommer, we boarded a sequence of trains to take us out to Greenwich. There, we saw the Cutty Sark, which used to be the fastest sailboat ever (or something). Now, however, it isn't going anywhere. It's stuck in a little pool of water near the Thames.
Having taken a look at the boat and decided that it wasn't worth paying to look inside, we began our tradition of seeking out free entertainment. Passing through the Visitor's Guide, we were tempted to go to the fan museum, but instead we walked over to the Maritime History Museum. This was a museum that seemed to collect all sorts of things superficially related to boating. The highlight was definitely the case with Admiral Nelson's last outfit: complete with bloody socks and preserved ponytail.
Once we'd overdosed on the sea, we walked across the park, past people playing fetch with gigantic dogs to see the place where time begins. That's right, the Royal Observatory is situated on a hillside in Greenwich. We could tell that we were in for something really exciting because the wind was swirling through the trees as we approached the hill. It was as if time was angrily rolling away from the Prime Meridian to take the world by storm. At the top of the steep hill, we found a little museum to time. Like the Maritime Museum, it required free tickets for entry. Inside, we saw lots and lots of clocks, telescopes, a large room designed by Christopher Wren, and one of the craziest timekeeping ideas of all time.
At some point in the past, timekeepers believed that they could help ships to synchronize their watches by cutting dogs with a special knife. When the knife was plunged into the magic powder, it would cause them to re-experience their pain. Thus, a fleet of dogs was cut and sent to sea. Back at home, the master timekeeper would plunge the knife into the special powder at exactly 12:00 GMT, which would cause the seafaring canines to yelp. I really wondered whether they had ever tested this hypothesis when the dogs were in the same town, because it seems just so ridiculous. To illustrate, they had an animated diorama, complete with regular dog barks.
At the entrance to the Observatory was the big attraction: a big silver sculpture marking the zero-degree longitude. Inside, there was even a laser beam to prove the point of its official importance. People from across the world line up to have their picture taken as they straddle the Meridian and make humorous faces and gestures. After all of this excitement, we took in the view from the top of the hill. There, I was assaulted by a very friendly squirrel who was somewhat disappointed that my food supply was limited to Clif bars.
When we returned to the train station after this full first day of museumgoing, it seemed like a good idea to walk under the Thames through an old-looking pedestrian tunnel system. It turns out that the tunnel is frequented mostly by people cycling at high speed or running with backpacks.
Having survived the tunnel crossing, we took the Underground back to the city and stopped at London Bridge. Here, we made one of our fastest food decisions. Walking toward the river again (skipping the London Dungeon), we stopped to eat at the Elusive Camel, where the upstairs was reserved for some sort of sortware-related motivation. We found a table downstairs, ordered, and tried to get caught up in the televised rugby. Since the match was between Australia and New Zealand, no one there (including us) had any natural affinity for either of the contestants; so catching rugby fever was difficult at best.
Following dinner, we walked to get a view of the bridges and were nearly overwhelmed by a pack of schoolgirls. Supervised by only a few adults, they scurried to the river bank, promptly assembled for picture taking, and then departed on command. We stayed a little bit longer and looked at a photography exhibit surrounding the very curvy city hall. For the record, City Hall is very enthusiastic about hosting the Olympics in 2012. If you agree, there is a number for you to text your support. How this will have an effect on the decision is not known, but text early and often!
Once we'd gotten a good look at the Tower and London Bridge, as well as the HMS Belfast, it was time to return to home sweet home. Given our difficulty at staying awake on the trains, we decided to call it a very early night. I think I managed to stay awake until 9.
- Music:dntel - this is the dream of evan and chan
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