London

I would like to begin by extending my congratulations to Becky (or as she now likes to be called, Dr.-Fatty-to-be). She just got into NYU for grad school, and will eventually be a doctor of theater education. But I digress.

London's been amazing; I only wish I had more time here, but I leave today for Bath (maybe) and then Oxford (definitely). I'm still deciding whether to do Bath, because while it's easy to get there from here, I'd have to take three trains and a bus from there to Oxford and I don't know that I want to do that with my backpack. So I'm deciding. Either way, I'm going to hit the Science Museum today before I leave London.

In my two full days here, I went to the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, the Tower of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tate Modern and two shows in the West End. The Tate Modern is really like no museum you've ever seen before... it was essentially designed to draw hoardes of non-museum-goers (that's right - I made up a word). It has windows everywhere, many overlooking the River Thames and many just looking down into rooms of people a floor below. So if you want a break from the art, you can sit anywhere and just watch other people looking at art. The museum was completed in the last few years, and has been credited with drawing a generation back to museums, I think. And the place was packed.

The first exhibit there was a room full of white boxes. It was incredibly strange. Apparently some woman made hundreds of white molds of cardboard boxes and then just stacked them into these massive walls to create a sort of maze. Here it's art, but I like to think about the fact that on the street corner, she'd be the crazy box lady. I still think she's the crazy box lady.

The exhibit I really liked was of Thomas Schutte, who made sculptures of sort of awkward and disfigured heads with varied looks on their faces, wrapped them strangely in scraps of his clothing and then tied them together in pairs. Then he took pictures of them from different angles, which were up on walls in the room (with some of the sculptures in the middle). They are supposed to represent corrupt politicians, in Germany I think, but I couldn't help but see the Bush Administration scheming against everyone.

Yup.

Well I've got to wrap this up soon, so I'll move on to the National Gallery, which was also amazing but in a traditional sort of way. There were rooms full of paintings depicting biblical scenes and also mythology, plus it had a few rooms of impressionists like Van Gogh and post-impressionists. They even had some paintings by Diego Velazquez, which was cool because I studied him in high school.

Tower of London: Took a tour given by a beefeater (apparently that nickname stems from the old days when they were some of the only people who could afford to eat beef, and people were very bitter about this), and he talked mostly about death and execution. Lots of kings and royalty being beheaded and then placed on a stump. Now I don't believe in capital punishment, especially in the absence of due process, but the thought of slicing off the heads of certain people in modern times following their indictment amused me a little.

St. Paul's Cathedral: You can seriously stare at the ceiling for hours. And once you stop doing that you can climb up something like 500 winding stairs to the top (they have little benches to take breaks in the middle) and see London from way above everything. You can walk around it 360 degrees, but the other people up there were much happier to stop at the doorway and clutter up there.

British Museum: There's really nothing British in it, but there are lots of artifacts from ancient cultures, and pieces of what were once giant statues. There was a stone arm that was literally bigger than me; it's hard to imagine how big the entire statue was. They also have all these headless statues, because apparently the heads fell off over the course of hundreds of years... although I think it's fun to think that the ancient cultures enjoyed constructing these massive statues with no heads, like they spent so much time on the bodies that they just figured, 'Eh, I'm gonna stop now,' right after the neck.

Shows: Stomp and Dancin' in the Streets. Neither had a plot but you can only get so much at the half-price ticket booth.

Well according to the timer on this computer I either have four minutes left of 39, so just in case it's four I better post this thing.