March 20 & 21: Two museums and a rainy day at Hyde Park
There are a lot of lions in London, considering there are no wild lions in London. Perhaps they should start erecting statues to pigeons.
This is me meeting the Rosetta Stone. She was lovely, but surrounded by paparazzi.
The British Museum is big. Like, really big. In high school when I studied Ancient History
I was told that the British Museum was, you know, pretty big. Nobody said that it was this big though. We spent 5 hours there (on probably the only
sunny day in London) and only looked at ¾ of the Ancient Egypt section and less
than half of the Ancient and Medieval Europe section. Needless to say, we didn’t budget enough time
for this. We need to do a whole lot of
shuffling so that we can go back and see the Greece and the Assyria and the
Mesopotamians and the Africa. They had
an exhibition on at the moment of Indigenous Australians, but we figured we’d
seen quite enough of that back home.
Apart from being really, really big and
filled with lots of stuff, has anyone ever told you how BIG the British Museum
is? The foyer? Big. The Harry
Potter-esque stone stairwell down to the toilets? Gigantic. The indoor picnic area? Huge. It’s just big. Everything’s so big. Lucky though, otherwise they wouldn’t be able
to casually put an Easter Island statue next to the café.
"This foyer is, like, really big."
Nicholas, rolling with his homie (Ramses II, I think)
After we’d finished marveling at the
Rosetta Stone and the gigantism of everything (I’m pretty sure it was never in
vogue to actually create a statue the same size as the model), we decided to
head down to Tate Modern because they’re open late on Fridays. We met up with some friends for ridiculously
overpriced fries and curdled soy milk before having a walk through a really
beautiful collection of works dealing with concepts of dreams and poetry. It was cool to see some Jospeh Beuys and Bill
Viola in person. Nick liked a lot of the
surrealist works. We saw the one Sidney
Nolan work (the Token Australian Artpiece) and it was all orange and angular
and mountainous and reminded us a bit of home.
London from the Tate across the Thames. There was a really professional guy taking photos from here, so we thought it must be a good spot to take pictures.
We were completely wrecked from having such
a long day but decided that since we’d come all that way, we’d look at another
show. We browsed through a Louise
Bourgeois retrospective, which Nicholas thought was silly, because it was a lot
of her later work. We made our way to a
Cubism and Minimalism exhibition and – again, we were utterly exhausted – were
reduced to giggling at the silliness of abstraction. With the exception of one Hans Haacke work
(am I biased? Maybe) the whole exhibit was on the silly side, even though I
spent a good 40 minutes reprimanding Nicholas for laughing at art.
Nick admiring some Max Ernst.
"Square Tubes? This work is called 'Square Tubes'? It should be called Vent. It's a vent."
This is the Royal Albert Hall. All the signs seemed to point to a cafe, but I wasn't interested in more packet chips with sandwiches, so we continued walking.
There was a gallery we stopped by, too, and
they were selling some Gerhard Richter prints, just casually. It was a bit mind-boggling. There were lots of dogs around, which were
more exciting than Richter, so we kept walking and I kept getting berated for
trying to pat all the wet, muddy dogs.
When we approached the Marble Arch, Nick
said, “Can you see the Marble Arch?”
I said, “Is it that big white arch?”
“Yes, it’s made of marble,” he said.
If London’s equivalent of Mx has an
Overheard section, we’re pretty unlucky.
A man in a suit, blowing on a bubble pipe
was making huge bubbles with a big metal wand.
We cleared our wallet of pennies and I chased bubbles with the other
children until I dropped my phone and had a bubble-blowing man waggle his
finger at me. It was embarrassing, so we
went for a small shop down Oxford St, then Regent St, then Bond St (effectively
moving our way around the Monopoly board) until we went out for dinner with
some friends Nick made on his Kilimanjaro climb.
Note: don’t go looking for a pub the night
that the football is on.
Also note: in Mayfair there’s a shop where
you can buy legitimate canopic jars.
They’re extremely expensive, but if you can afford to live in the blue
section of the Monopoly board, you can probably afford one.
Chasing bubbles and being able to pop them all (because I was a good foot taller than everybody else chasing bubbles)
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