Performance Piece

While London is expensive, it does boast an array of free (!) activities and museums.  This is especially important because the student discount is negligible, often a pound off of a £20 admission fee.  Josh and I decided to make the most of it.  We didn't have time to go into all of the sites we wanted to see, so we would go into the free one and ogle the others from the outside.

Since we are very modern people, we started with modern art.  The Tate Modern is the most-visited modern art museum in the world and is built in the former Bankside Power Station.  While admission is free, some of the temporary exhibits inside are not, as we quickly discovered.  We started with a societal critique by an African artist, and accidentally ate lunch in part of the exhibit.  Don't worry - it was a series of picnic tables meant to be used; we just didn't realize that it was a continuation of the exhibit.  The same artist, when his exhibit opened, had a fleet of golden bikes that were "art" and would bring his collection into the everyday city bustle.  Sadly, they now sit behind glass in the museum.  We also made a point of seeing the Surrealist art, a collection that was certainly thought-provoking.  We loved some of the pieces, debated others, and were quite confused by many of the pieces - but such is art.

Next, we popped by a neighboring building, the Globe Theater, to try and catch a tour.  Sadly, the tours are only available in the mornings, as actors take over in the afternoon and stage Shakespearean plays.  Ticket sell out about eight weeks in advance, so definitely book early if you plan to go.  The morning tours, on the other hand, are available for walk-ins and are cheap (less than £10) by London standards.

Our third stop was Buckingham Palace.  While we weren't invited inside, we did join the throng of tourists taking pictures and managed to trade jokes with the guards.  I'm glad they choose people with a good sense of humor for these jobs.  Dealing with tourists all day must wear on their good spirits.  Especially people as silly as us.  

The palace is beautiful, as befits a building that has housed monarchs since 1837.  It has a whopping 775 rooms (given my recent housing search, I can appreciate this) and has 50,000 invited guests per year among its various parties.  I can't fathom how I could make it on that guest list, but it would be pretty amazing to attend one of the garden parties.  The people watching must be incredible.

Book ending our day with art, we stopped at both the National Gallery and the adjacent National Portrait Galleries.  

While we did neither collection justice, both museums fascinated us.  The National Gallery was beautiful and HUGE.  We skimmed the various galleries, enjoying in particular the Monet, Manet, pointillist, and other more modern paintings.  Then, with only a few minutes before closing, we stopped by the National Portrait Gallery.  This museum features drawings, caricatures, cartoons, and paintings of just about anybody who is anybody.  As we walked upstairs, we saw a series of studies of TS Elliot, as well as quite a few renderings of Churchill.  We had read that there was a self-portrait of Churchill in the museum, but discovered that this was false.  Instead, there was merely a self-portrait there that he liked best.

Before heading back to the flat, we made one more stop.  Josh, humoring me, agreed to attend choral evensong at St. Marten's in the Field.  It was a gorgeous service.  Short and filled with musical prayer, it brought me back to my own days in choir and made me miss them more than I could have imagined.  While the quartet singing the service was wonderful, the soprano had a particularly glorious voice.  Between the music, the saucy program notes about Twitter and TMI, and the wormhole-like cross picking up the dusk light, it was a memorable evening.

We metro-ed home, legs tired and heads full of remembered paintings.  And stomachs rumbling.  We had made plans to go out with James and his flatmates to a pub that evening, and we were reading for dinner.  His flatmates were lovelier than we had thought (which is saying something because they already seemed so wonderful), the food was quite good, and the walk was beautiful.  It was all inspirational: I found out that James is doing a two-week trek around the bottom half of Everest in December and am completely in awe of his twice-a-year adventures.  Perhaps I should become a contractor, too.

Spotted: Sausage stack.  Apparently a stack of everything non-vegan.  It's standard British pub fare, according to our authentic British guides.