The ELEPHANT AND CASTLE In The Room

I couldn't think of a good pun for London itself, so you'll have to settle for the area of the city that my hostel was located in (Elephant and Castle). SO BE IT.

Aah, I knew I would like this city.

London! I spent Saturday to Friday in London. As I mentioned, upon arrival I learned that my booking had been mis-recorded, and I was transferred to the sister hostel ten minutes down the street. “It’s a better hostel, really – you won’t be disappointed,” they told me. Well, I got there and things seemed alright. Free-to-use washers and dryers, nice kitchen, plenty of space in the rooms. Minor complaint: you need a lighter to ignite the burners on the stove, and matches weren’t provided. So I used a regular cigarette lighter that I’d been lucky enough to find sitting on the sidewalk a week earlier. I have singed the hairs from my left hand as a result. Also, there was no actual reception – the only staff were cleaners. Major complaint that arose on day 2: I was making dinner and there was a guy passed out in a lawn chair on the terrace. As I finished cooking he stumbled into the kitchen, clearly under several illicit influences, and demanded my food. I let him have a couple bites, then tried to take it back, which resulted in him grabbing my arm and threatening to break my teeth. The staff member who was in the kitchen at the time laughed and said it was all an act. I…don’t believe that. I was pretty pissed off at how he handled it. Weirdly enough, when I saw the drug-addled guy a couple days later, he was stone sober and really friendly and seemed to have no memory of the altercation. Weird.

But the rest of London was really nice! Don’t worry!

When I woke up on my first full day, I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself. I was hoping that my London friend Sally would show me around, but I had arrived several days before I’d told her I would, meaning she was busy for those several days. No fault of hers, of course! Well, I left the hostel with the intention of going to the original hostel. This took me approximately an hour and a half. Navigation in London is HARD.

WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT MEAN. YOU ARE NOT HELPFUL FOR TRAVEL.

But I got there eventually! And the girl at the counter gave me a map of the city and highlighted a bunch of the important/interesting sights as well as the locations of the two hostels. This map was my life-blood. I managed to fold it up in such a way that the stuff most pertinent to me was on the outside, then got it down to roughly wallet size and stuck it where my wallet would usually go. Perfect!

Gosh, I don’t even remember which things I did on which days, so I’ll kind of talk about them indiscriminately. However, first I will say that I hardly used the tube/bus system while I was here. Would you believe that, for the six days I was in London, there was a strike of the tube employees for two of those days? Partially as a result of that, but mostly because I didn’t want to spend the money, I spent the week walking around like CRAZY. My feet are shouting at me.

Let’s think, what have I seen? OH! Also worth mentioning is that all the museums in London have free admission to the main collections, and sometimes free admission to the exhibitions too!

Roy Lichtenstein's comic-appropriation art is pretty neat. This is on two canvases that stretch like twelve feet by five feet.

Tate Modern: Very cool stuff. Housed in a defunct hydroelectric power station, if I understood the map correctly. Its free-admission things when I visited were centered around Surrealism, Cubism, Futurism, Pop Art, and some other stuff for which I don’t know the proper genres. I really like Roy Lichtenstein’s stuff, and I’m slowly becoming more and more a fan of Andy Warhol. Coolest stuff I saw there: there was a mini-exhibition devoted to works that take scale into account, and one room was entirely filled with a giant (maybe 20ft tall) table & chairs. Oh, and my personal favorite was an exploration of the relationship between nature and industry. I…don’t know if my explanation will be sufficient for this one, but I’ll try. So the guy got two logs that had been sawn down to have square sides instead of round, perhaps 15ft long, 2ft per side. Then, using carving equipment and carefully following the knots still visible in the sawn logs, he RE-exposed the shape of the tree’s core, complete with “branches” going out from the center to where the knots had been. So, it looks like two trees with no bark sprouting out of square wood blocks, but the blocks are actually the remnants of the original un-carved sawn logs, and they’re each one continuous piece of wood. Oh, and there was one other super-cool room. When you step into it, it looks like a work-in-progress, like you've stepped into the middle of an exhibition being created. There are dirty paintbrushes, pizza boxes, power drills, gloves, boots, orange peel, cigarettes, everything strewn about willy-nilly. However, upon closer inspection, every single thing in this room is carved from polystyrene and meticulously painted to look realistic. You seriously can't tell until you get within a foot of the objects.

The aforementioned "work-in-progress" room. You totally can't tell that everything there is painted plastic and completely non-functional. Not my picture.


The aforementioned "trees". Not my photo.

Tate British: Not too bad! Specializes in art produced by British artists, divided into 1700-1900 and 1900-present. There was a pretty cool “judgement day” series in the former, though I can’t recall the artist of that one. I’m…pretty bad at recalling artists. Oh, and there was a separate room devoted to sculpture that had some very cool stuff – my favorite was Pandora contemplating her eponymous box, about to open it.

Some Greek stuff. I don't know, damn it.

British Museum: I WANT EVERYTHING FOR SALE IN THIS GIFT SHOP. Good lord. Replicas of any historical piece you can think of: Rosetta Stone, Lewis chessmen, Mesopotamian cuneiform cylinders, Hermes’ foot, true-to-scale eye, ear, nose, or lips of Michaelangelo’s David. Curse my independent loves of replicas and archaeology. Anyway, this was by far my favorite museum in London. It was very cool to see the Rosetta Stone in person. They even had a life-size stone casting of it that you could touch! They also have the vast majority of the Parthenon’s surviving statuary – apparently the statues that are still in the actual Parthenon are all well-made copies. That was pretty cool, considering what I learned about Greek art from Cindy Sowers’ class last year. Notably: 95% of the “Greek” marble statues that people are familiar with are actually Roman copies, and the Greek originals have been lost to time. However, the statues from the Parthenon’s metope (the long triangular area above the columns) are all genuine Greek, and they are visibly more detailed and naturalistic. The Lewis Chessmen are also very neat; they’re a big pile of chessmen carved from walrus ivory, mixed together from several different sets but all of very similar aesthetic style. They were discovered buried in a chamber on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, but they appear to be of Norse make. Very ancient and very neat, stylistically. I took so many pictures here that most of them will be relegated to the separate London Photo Dump entry.

St. Paul’s Cathedral: Lovely to look at on the outside, and I’m sure it’s lovely on the inside, too, but I wasn’t about to pay £12 to tour the thing.

West End: I wandered through the theater district one day, and there were SO many shows that I wanted to see. If I had less self-control, I could have let them totally clean out my bank account and spend my entire week watching theatrical performances. Les Miserables, Avenue Q, Wicked, The Lion King, Stomp…I would have loved to watch any of these.

Picadilly Circus: This was actually…pretty disappointing. I don’t see what the hype is all about; it was like 1/8 of Times Square, and with less-interesting shops around it.

Beaks a-plenty.

National History Museum: This is divided into an “animals” section and a “geology” section. There was one day when I thought I had seen the entire museum, but it turned out I’d only seen the geology stuff, so I had to come back! The geology part had lots of things about volcanoes, earthquakes, formation of rocks, composition of the earth – and an extremely extensive exhibition on gemstones. I walked through a hall containing gemstones worth more money than I would earn in three lifetimes. It was a bit humbling, to think about it like that. Animal section: very nice collection of nearly-full dinosaur skeletons, and a buttload of taxidermied stuff. Including extinct animals! I want a pet thylacine. Now it’s too late. :(

Trafalgar Square: Pretty cool – Nelson’s Column, and the pigeons, and the National Gallery (which I didn’t explore), all make for a cool scene. But very very busy…

Westminster Abbey: See entry for St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November; the gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

Big Ben & Houses of Parliament: What is there to say about these guys? Very cool architecture. Awesome to see them up-close and in person, catch all the minute details and such. This...this sounds weird, but for some reason I am fascinated by the texture of these buildings. I feel like I want a tiny model of them just to see what they would feel like.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theater: OH MAN. Totally made up for not seeing a show in West End. Probably the coolest attraction I saw in London. On my first full day in London, I made myself lunch and then wandered down to the Globe, which is a very neat open-air theater (think Coliseum-shaped) that specializes in Shakespeare productions. It’s supposed to be his original theater (rebuilt once or twice over the centuries), if memory serves. Anyway, I went to the box office around lunchtime and asked about the advertised “700 £5 tickets for each performance!” Apparently those £5 tickets are for the standing section immediately surrounding the stage. I don’t care if I didn’t get to sit down for that, it’s super cool being right down next to the actors. I bought a ticket for As You Like It, which was the play showing that evening, on account of I didn’t want to plan too far ahead in advance. I had no idea what to expect, as I knew nothing about the play except that it was a comedy, and I’d never seen a Shakespearean comedy before. Guys: Shakespeare’s comedy is apparently still fucking hilarious. It was very well-presented, all the actors were good and clearly very much into their parts (well, the guy who gave the “all the world’s a stage…” soliloquy was a bit disappointing compared to the rest). There was a court jester character, The Fool, and the actor playing him gave me a very intense young-John-Cleese-vibe, and I’ve got no complaints about that. I also enjoyed the fact that nobody died at the end! After the play finished, I walked back to the hostel feeling as good as I can recall feeling in recent times. Totally an uplifting light-hearted thing.

Meta-photography with Sally on the South Bank.

On top of all this, I finally got to meet my internet friend/snail-mail pen-pal Sally! It was very cool (though kind of odd) to actually see her face-to-face and hear her voice and stuff. She…she has an English accent! I had no idea from our text-based interactions! The day after my birthday, we met up – with the expected hugs and “oh my gosh, we’re hanging out!” exclamations – and went out for dinner at Pizza Express, which is a surprisingly high-class joint for having a name like that, and I had one of the best pizzas I’d ever had. Hot salami, sweet/hot pickled peppers, and something else spicy. Quite a zinger, but well-balanced! Then we got (FREE!) ice cream from the very generous manager. Then we went to a nearby bar/pub on the Thames’ south bank which had good music choices and a surprisingly nice atmosphere. She got a Guinness, and I am a bit tired of stout by now, so I went for a Jameson on the rocks. I think Sally thought I was an alcoholic. C’est la vie!

Sally at Young's Bar.

The next day I kind of sat around my hostel getting my accommodations sorted out for the Scotland leg of my journey, and in the evening Sally unexpectedly got in touch with me again and invited me to have dinner with her and her family! Wow! Of course, this was literally minutes after the strike had officially ended, and the tube was a real shitshow, so it ended up taking me thrice as long as it should have to reach her house. By the way, having sent many, many letters and packages to her house over the past four-to-five years, it was also kind of surreal to actually visit it. In any case, I made it eventually – her family had already eaten, but Sally had waited for me, aww. So I got a delicious, home-made, authentic Vietnamese dinner! She said I "ate like a pro" - apparently some people have trouble with Vietnamese?

For the record, here is the current list of things that I’ve consumed on this trip that I have not liked in the past:

- Ketchup

- Seaweed (highly flavored by other things – still can’t handle it straight-up, like in sushi rolls)

- Scrambled eggs, Spanish omelet (similar to the seaweed - lots of other flavors around it)

- Lamb (I didn’t hate it, but used to be pretty “meh”, now I totally enjoy it)

- Cola

- Beer

- Squid! Thanks to Sally’s aunt’s Vietnamese cuisine. I did not expect to enjoy it, based on my general distaste for seafood, but it actually had no fishy taste whatsoever, so it was great, especially along with everything else!

Oh, and I was absolutely about to get a haircut on Fleet Street, but the barbershop was closed. Ah well. At least I got a Fleet Street meat pie! Delicious. How do they do it?!

Well, last night I slept – or rather, tried to sleep – on the bus from London to Edinburgh. Regardless, I’m in Scotland now!

OKAY so I have like eighty photos from London, and I don't want to have to add them all to Blogger (it's kind of an annoying process) so here is a link to my Photobucket account - you ought to be able to view them without signing in or anything!

http://s13.photobucket.com/albums/a259/MrPaco2/Abroad/?start=all

Please check it out! There is a lot of cool museum stuff that I photographed. And many of them are dedicated to friends who I thought would be particularly interested in one artifact or another!