we cannot escape history
I’ve been abandoning my duties, haven’t I? Luckily, my life hasn’t been too dreadfully exciting between last month and this one, so don’t feel horribly left out. That doesn’t excuse me though; I hadn’t left London between Stratford and this past weekend, but I have been doing a few things around London. This city is so big that I could spend years here and still not see it all, and it’s nice to be somewhere with endless possibilities. The end of February and beginning of March I was bogged down with loads of essay writing (with varying levels of success in terms of grades), but I’ve managed to fit in a few interesting things in between there. My friend Brooke came to the UK for a couple weeks (heyyy Brooke) and stayed with her friend in Cambridge, and one of the times she came into London we met up and the three of us went to Harrod’s, the world’s most famous and probably most ridiculous department store.
It takes up basically an entire city block and has everything you could want, need, or dream of, mostly at prices that you would never be able to afford: there’s restaurants, a winery, a bakery/grocery store, furniture, sporting equipment, luggage, wedding dresses, designer clothes, toys, books, movies, electronics, musical instruments, 40,000 GBP necklaces, 150,000 GBP rugs…it’s all absolutely ridiculous and you can easily spend an entire day looking around, which is basically what happened.
A few days later, I went by myself to an art gallery called the Courtauld Gallery. It’s free on Mondays, which I took advantage of, and it’s been one of my favorite galleries so far actually. With most museums or art galleries, like the National Gallery, there’s such a large collection of works that after a while you just get overwhelmed and can’t handle or pay attention to any more. The Courtauld, however, is really small and you can easily see the whole thing in an hour and a half, but it still has some great pieces in it: Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Picasso, etc. It’s also in a really pretty building called the Somerset House, so it’s really nice to walk through.
probably my favorite Manet of the ones I’ve seen. It’s really amazing in person.
The next day, Manuel and I went to the Imperial War Museum. According to my London guidebook, it only takes about an hour and a half or so to go through, so we planned to go to St. Paul’s in the afternoon after the War Museum, but let me tell you it did not work out that way. We got there at about 11:30 and we were at the museum until it closed at 6, and we didn’t even see the whole thing. That place is huge, but it’s probably my favorite museum that I’ve been to here. The focus of the museum is on conflicts of the 20th Century, particularly both the World Wars, and it’s quite an extensive collection of artifacts and information from both of them. They also have sections on conflicts since 1945, one on espionage, one on the Holocaust, etc. It was really interesting to see everything from a British perspective as well. I don’t even know which pictures to post because I took so many, so I guess if you want to see more just let me know.
seeing a Sherman tank in person brought back so many memories of reading Citizen Soldiers senior year of high school. Mom, I hope you remember that book well since I read about half of it out loud to you.
T.E. Lawrence’s stuff, which was pretty awesome to see
The next week, Brooke came back into London from Cambridge, and we went to the British Museum. Speaking of overwhelming museums, that was another one. It basically has artifacts from everything to ever happen in human history, ever. It was pretty ridiculous seeing sculptures, artifacts, and human bodies that are 5,000+ years old. We walked through most of the rooms in the museum, but I think I only retained a tiny fraction of what I saw. That’s a place you could spend days in and not see the whole thing.
The Rosetta Stone!
Parthenon statues
Mummies!
Mummified cats!
Can you tell this was my favorite section of the museum?
This man has been dead for about 5,400 years. That’s 3,400 years before Christ. Blows. my. mind.
After the museum and food, we went to Buckingham Palace and Abbey Road, things everyone must see in London, and the front gate at Abbey Road was actually open this time so I took a nice stalker picture of the studio’s front desk.
The next day, Jack’s Mannequin was playing in London, and if anyone knows me they know I can’t turn that down, so I of course had a ticket. Despite the fact that their first album came out 3 1/2 years ago, this was Jack’s first show in the UK ever, and so it was most definitely sold out and crowded. It was so good to see them again, as it always is. I hung out up on the balcony by myself and rocked it. Since they hadn’t played here before, they played some old songs that they left out of their last tour or two in the US, so it was great seeing those again. Also, since this was the first time seeing Jack’s by myself in I think a couple of years, it was the first time that I knew Andrew recognized me and not just the group of people I was with who have seen him dozens of times more than I have. I don’t know why it was such a validating experience, but it’s nice to know that after so many shows he does recognize the people who support him a lot.
A couple days later, my friend Kari and I went to a venue called The Lexington to see an Australian band called Temper Trap that are pretty new. I had only heard a song or two by them before, but I enjoyed them, so I went since it was cheap and I’m always down for a concert. They were even better live than I was expecting them to be; they had a really good energy and they have great melodies, so it was a lot of fun. The other two bands were pretty mediocre but the venue handed out goody bags with candy, vinyl singles, keychains, etc in them. So it was a good night all in all as well; it’s nice to get out at night since everything in London shuts down so early.
This is getting really really long so I’ll do the rest of my March re-cap after I go get some food.
