I’m staying in today. I figured there was no point in waiting outside for hours just so I could see the back of someone’s head.
This way I get to watch the procession, see the Queen, and get some studying done on the Royal Mews. All while not showering or changing out of my PJs… Can’t do that in Trafalgar Square.
In case you’re watching it right now, I have spent a considerable amount of time in the neighbourhood that she’s travelling through. Obviously, you all know how much time I’ve been spending at the National Gallery – so there it is! 🙂
I know it must be tiring to wave all day, but I kind of wish that at least one member of the Royal Family would use the famous “Rann Fam Double Wave”. How awesome would that be?
As I was waiting for the bus this morning, there was a kid with his jeans tucked into his knee socks.
Not a good look people…
just…FYI.
Green Park - Trees (Photo credit: Hachimaki)
Also, while I was sitting in Green Park eating my lunch, a parade came marching down the street. Not the fun kind of parade, with all the crazy floats and everything. Instead is was the marching band kind of parade. I’ve tried to google what was going on, but I haven’t been able to find anything. They went down Piccadilly, around Trafalgar Square, and then I lost them. So if anybody finds out what was happening, please let me know.
I had every intention of going to the British Museum today, but that didn’t end up happening.
I got on the 118 bus, like I do every day, but when I was almost at my stop my bus was diverted, and then stopped completely and we were all told to get off. I managed to hop on another bus, but that one didn’t go too well either.
I ended up stuck on the Vauxhall Bridge for over a half an hour, because there was a protest march. I’m not sure what this protest was for: problems in Syria, education price increase, Olympics traffic… take your pick, really.
I tell ya, these Londoners know how to protest. After I convinced the bus driver to just let me out on the bridge… there’s a side walk, don’t worry… I tried to figure out where I was, and eventually discovered I wasn’t too far from Trafalgar Square.
A perspective corrected image of Trafalgar Square in London, England. Taken with a Canon 5D and 17-40mm f/4L lens. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I like that I’m starting to recognise things now. Makes me feel good about myself.
After being stuck on the bus for forever, I went for a really long walk. I’m not sure how it happened, but I ended up in Knightsbridge at one point.
By that point, the sun had gone down and the temperature had dropped significantly so I had to go home.
So, I haven’t been posting because I did absolutely nothing last week. It feels fairly ridiculous to post 6 consecutive days of “I sat on the couch and watched reruns of Friends all day.”
Brief recap of what did happen:
Friday night, Bella’s son in law was having his “album release” party. He had it at a club in Brixton called El-Penol. It’s a cool place, but I wasn’t really that interested in it. He did a good job, it’s just that… how can I put it… Do you remember that Julia Styles movie where she’s a ballet dancer who has to move to the ‘hood? Remember the scene where her new friends take her to the hiphop club? It was kind of like that.
Saturday, I don’t remember what happened. So it couldn’t have been that exciting.
Sunday was Bella’s going away party. She’s going to Jamaica for three weeks. A bunch of her family came over, there was tons of food, and I fell asleep at 9:30.
Old School Trafalgar Square, Image via Wikipedia.
Today it was business as usual. I took the bus up to Trafalgar Square and walked around a bit. I found two stationary stores right next to each other. One was sort of like Staples, and the other one looked like it was for twelve-year old girls. Lot’s of fluffy pink stuff.
I had a decent day, but Josh had a very bad one. He was not happy that Bella had a suitcase, or that Indya was putting it in the car. And while I was putting on my sneekers this morning, he just sat and stared at me before letting me have it. He’s like a cranky old man, and we’re disrupting his schedule.
I went to a gallery talk at the British Museum today. It was called “From the Renaissance to the Rococo”. It sounded really interesting in the description, but the actual talk was far from it. I walked up to Room 46, which is the “Europe 1400-1800” room. I was given this little headset thing. It looked and worked kind of like the audio guides that museums sometimes give you. The curator giving the talk wore a microphone. I wasn’t going to use it at first, since it kind of seemed like something for the seniors, but when the lady started talking it became necessary. She was not very loud at all, and whenever someone walked past us, their footsteps and occasional whispering completely drowned her out.
She was also pretty pretentious. Which is a lot coming from me.
Hey! Want to know how you can tell Mount Allison University is a pretentious school? When people from different countries ask you where you went to school, you say “Mount Allison… you’ve probably never heard of it.” See what I did there?
After the talk, which I actually skipped out on a little early, I took a walk down to the National Gallery. I think this is my favourite walk. I like seeing all the marquees for all the different theatres.
First stop was the restaurant for a bite to eat. I had the goat cheese and tomato tart with some sort of salad. It wasn’t bad, but as usual for London restaurants, not actually worth the price that it cost. I sat across from a French couple. The man had the cheese plate and a glass of red wine, clearly not concerned about stereotypes.
Then I explored the Spanish galleries. There were lots of dark colours and pictures of Jesus.
National Portrait Gallery, London. Image via Wikipedia
I had planned to spend a good chunk of the day at the National Portrait Gallery, but once I got there I remembered that this was the first day of their Lucian Freud exhibit and the place was packed!
I didn’t last too long. I decided to go for another walk. I found a bunch more theatres today. It’s also getting progressively harder to walk buy all the theatres and discount tickets booths and not grab myself a ticket. I’m not entirely sure if I trust the discount ticket booths yet. They all look kind of sketchy, so I think I’ll have to do some more research into them first.
I had something to eat at Harrod’s today. And I’m never going to do it again. I ordered some dumplings from their menu, and you know how usually when you order something off a Korean/Japanese/whatever menu and it comes with a bunch of stuff? Like rice? Rice is pretty standard, right? I didn’t get any rice. Or anything else for that matter. I literally got 3 tiny dumplings and that was it.
National Portrait Gallery (Photo credit: HerryLawford)
After that I went back to the National Portrait Gallery. It was later in the afternoon, so things had died down quite a bit. I spent a lot of time at their touch screen research desks. I was looking at the Royal family tree, and learning about all the different monarchs and the paintings that they have of them in the National Portrait Gallery – I’m doing my homework.
They were open late tonight and around 6.00 they had a DJ playing. And when I say DJ – I do mean of the Love, Actually wedding reception variety.
I left the gallery to find that it was snowing again! And Trafalgar Square is very pretty in the snow.
Once I got myself back to Streatham, I decided to once again test the “Sarah has an iron stomach” hypothesis, by eating at my local “Fish ‘N Chips & Chinese Food” place, the Sizzling Plaice – not a typo, I might add. I seriously might have to mail home the menu for proof, it was kind of crazy.
Anyway, I woke up this morning and headed off to the National Gallery. It was surprisingly sunny today. I say surprisingly, because it’s been dark out since it snowed.
Bella had her grandkids on Sunday and they were really excited about the snow. She took them to the park and the went tobogganing. It’s a good thing they did it then, because there’s no snow left now. I did see an article in the Evening Standard complaining that no matter how often London gets snow, they’re always so unprepared when it happens. It’s like… at a point… right?
The good news about the “cold snap” is that it seems to have driven away all the foxes.
The National Gallery was fun. I did one of their intro tours, which was completely different from the one I did last time. They recommend that if you have the time, you do the same tour more than once since the different guides all have their favourite paintings. I liked this tour better than the last one, our guide seemed really into what he was talking about.
This was one of the paintings we talked about:
An Allegory of Cupid and Venus, Bronzino c. 1545. Oil on wood. National Gallery London. Image via Wikipedia
Look closely…
The little girl in the green dress offering something to Venus is actually part dragon/demon thing from the waist down. The face in the top right corner is missing the back of his head. And then there’s the fun character on the left that doctor’s think might be a physical representation of syphilis. Then there’s the whole Cupid feeling up his mom thing.
Oh hey, UK fun fact of the day: Instead of asking “how are you?” Brits ask “are you ok?” Which I guess means pretty much the same thing, but I always kind of associate it with “what’s wrong?” Just me?
For lunch I walked up to the British Museum. According to Google Maps, this is a 16 minute walk. In Sarah Rann time – it’s about 7 minutes. I ate my lunch at one of the benches outside the museum, the whole time being watched by some very jealous pigeons. One of the pigeons I saw today got close enough that I could see that one of his toes was broken off, and another one was bent all the way back around. I felt kind of bad for him.
Good news, there are at least 2 Korean restaurants, 1 Korean grocery store, 1 pizzeria, and 1 Greek restaurant all within 2 minutes walk of the British Museum.
Handy museum fact of the day: the bathrooms all seem to be free (some public bathrooms cost money here) – and if you have to go, head to the back of the museum. People rarely bother to venture that far so the bathrooms are cleaner and there’s no line.
I started down at the Pimlico station and walked up to the Tate Britain. The Tate was kind of dull to be honest. There were no big “blockbuster” paintings. But they did have a contemporary art section, and those are always good for a laugh.
After that, I walked down the Thames (or up, I’m not sure), past the Parliament buildings and Westminster Abbey. I wanted to go into the Abbey, but Prince William had to ruin for me my getting married there and jacking up the admission prices.
Next was a stroll through St. Jame’s Park. The weather was cold, but sunny. And when I say cold, I do mean 0 degrees. There were far to many birds in the park for me today. I almost had a Fabio moment when one of the pigeons cut me off.
I walked past Trafalgar Square, but didn’t stay too long this time. The fountains were on, and as the temperature dropped while I was sitting there, they started to freeze.
The big sign in Trafalgar Square told me that there are only 175 days until the Olympics, so in honour of the games I stopped by the Parthenon rooms at the British Museum.
I was freezing cold by then from walking that far. I didn’t end up staying too long.
Here’s a map of the walk I took. According to Google Maps it’s about 3.2 miles, or just over 5 kilometres.
I’ve been lazy. I think I’ve actually found a new level of lazy.
Sunday I really didn’t do anything, Monday I went to the Wallace Collection in the afternoon. I talked to a lady at the Wallace Collection, and she told me that my work experience in museums seems to best fall under the “education” departments at most museums. Which is nice to know. I can narrow down my search a little bit more.
Once again on Tuesday, I did absolutely nothing.
Today, I slept in and then went to the British Museum in the afternoon. I walked through the “America’s” room and found the mask that Kathy is scared of. I also tried to find the South America section, but they didn’t have one. Which I thought was really weird.
Next was the Chinese and South Asian rooms. This guy was my favourite object of the day for sure:
Garuda, Tibet, British Museum, 1992.12-26.26
I wish I could have found a better picture of it so you could get the full impact. It looks kind of like something from Pokemon.
After I finished exploring the rooms that I hadn’t gotten to until today, I went for a walk. I walked around Soho, and found Picadilly Circus. I picked up an Evening Standard newspaper. London has two free newspapers every day. One in the morning, and the Evening Standard.
Image via Wikipedia
I walked to Trafalgar Square to read my newspaper and got a text message from my mum asking me what I was doing today. I’m not sure why she does that – she never likes my answer.
There’s a big “cold snap” in London that’s supposed to last another couple of days. They say it’s due to some winds from Siberia that are blowing in, or something. People here are having a really hard time with it. Some have even gone to the hospital with hypothermia.
It’s -6 degrees.
I swear that’s not a typo.
-6….. hypothermia.
After that I just went back to Streatham (pronounced Stretam). These people put way more letters into words than are necessary. Mrs. Millman – any insights? Because I’d love to hear an explanation for Gloucester (Gloster). Or how Selhurst somehow comes out sounding like Soho.
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll do something exciting. Although I’m not sure if the trains will work in this cold weather or if they’re like the school buses in Pictou County.
I started the day with some Oyster Card problems. That’s my travel card for London. The problem I’m having is that at the moment, my train tickets are paid for separately from my underground tickets. Even though I use my Oyster Card for both. I bought a 7 day travel card for Zones 1 and 2, but then I also have to top up my “pay as you go” balance to use the train. But I didn’t know that they were different until this morning when I tried to go on the train and my card didn’t work. It was very confusing.
Anyway, once that was figured out I headed over to the British Museum again. I took the tour on Gods and Goddesses in Roman Britain this morning and then I just kind of wondered around the museum.
I spent a lot of time looking at the Parthenon Marbles. These are the
Image via Wikipedia
pediment statues, friezes, and metopes from the Temple to Athena at the Athenian Acropolis in Greece. They show up in every Art History text book ever, and are actually pretty controversial in the museum world.
It has to do with ownership of historical artefacts. There are a lot of people who believe that artefacts, etc. should remain in the country from which they came; ie everything made in Ancient Greece should be returned to Greece. Then there are the other people who say, “wait a minute, if the job of the museum is to educate people, why would you limit what you can teach people, just because of geography. Not everyone will be able to travel to Greece, but they might be able to get to England, or Toronto…” The Parthenon marbles, along with the Rosetta Stone are two of the most controversial artefacts for this reason. The Greek and Egyptian governments and antiquities authorities are doing pretty much whatever they can to get these things back.
And another thing, can you image the logistical nightmare that would be returning EVERY Greek or Egyptian artefact in museums around the world to Greece or Egypt??? Holy crap.
After the British Museum I went for a walk down to Trafalgar Square to see the National Gallery. I went through Soho (It’s not just in New York), Chinatown, West End/ Theatre District area. I saw a bunch of theatres, and “Singing in the Rain” is playing here. I might have to go see that one.
In Trafalgar Square they have a countdown to the Olympics. It told me that there were exactly 219 days, 3 hours, 8 minutes, and 47 seconds until the start of the games.
After I explored the National Gallery a little bit – a more in depth trip will have to be another day – I walked around the city some more. I walked all the way down to Westminster Abbey, past Downing Street. I also saw the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.
That sounds like a crazy amount of walking, but London is far more condensed than I remember it being. It didn’t seem like that long a walk, but it definitely hurt my feet. Although, the hurt feet might have had more to do with the fact that, as it turns out, I was doing all this walking in shoes that were two different sizes. The left one is a 7 and the right one is an 8. I’m not really sure how that happened.
Day Jammies 