Science museums of all types having been visited, along with various instantiations of history museums, there remained one type of museum that we hadn't yet managed to visit—the art museum. Admittedly, we'd stopped in briefly at the National Galleries shortly after we arrived, but we'd only stayed for perhaps half an hour, and been in perhaps four rooms, in particular those rooms that had seats. (Perhaps when we leave we can jointly author a book called The Benches of London.) Now Blaise is really a modern art person (and I'm really not, but I'm beginning to tolerate it somewhat better than I once did), and so, rather than returning to the National Galleries we headed to (the) Tate Modern.
It was, well, a modern art museum, housed in what used to be a power plant, which I have to admit was a pretty cool building. Also, it had drinking fountains that actually worked, though I don't think we used them. It lost lots of points with Blaise for lacking benches in the exhibit rooms, and then regained them for having a really cool view out over the Thames. There was a lovely piece lamenting the loss of the River Bièvre, and a large Mapplethorpe exhibit which we skipped, and a lot of other art that we didn't skip, including the Donald Judd sculpture that became even more famous when some parents let their kids climb all over it.
Afterwards, we wandered along the Thames for a while, stopping for an hour in a little park on our way to Mass at St. Patrick's, which turned out to be a little tiny church administered by the Franciscans. And then we headed for home, Blaise and the little kids getting off at Swiss Cottage and Sapphire and I riding on to Finchley Road where we bought food for dinner.
Monday, July 14, 2014
In which we see rocks and decorative arts
Remember, if you will, that in our two trips to the Natural History Museum (NHM) we still hadn't seen the entirety of its collections, even ignoring those that weren't on display and those that had admission fees, so on Friday we headed back to South Kensington station to go to the NHM and to the Victoria & Albert Museum (V & A) with whatever time was left. Halfway through the train ride I realized that my phone wasn't in my purse, and couldn't remember whether I had put it into my purse that morning (which would have been bad) or not (which would only have been annoying), and so for the rest of the ride I racked my brain to figure out how I would have managed to forget my phone, or, alternately, when someone would have had the opportunity to take my phone out of my purse without my noticing, given that the station and train hadn't been particularly busy, but without success. Fortunately, Blaise had his cell phone with him and my phone has Find My Friends switched on, and the NHM has free wifi, and so I decided that once we'd gotten to the museum I'd ask him to use his phone to try to locate mine, which meant admitting that I'd been scatterbrained enough to either forget my phone or get it stolen, neither of which reflected particularly well on me, but it seemed better than spending the entire day worrying about it.
And so, once we'd gotten to the museum and gone up to see the mineral collection, I asked Blaise to see if he could find my phone for me. An agonizing twenty minutes later, he finally managed to connect to the wifi (I never said it was good wifi) and located Cherry's iPad in our apartment, but not my phone. Of course, that didn't necessarily mean anything, but things weren't looking very good, and I knew that the entire day would be miserable for me if I had to spend the entire time worrying about where my phone had gotten to so I decided that the smart thing to do would be to go back to that apartment and look for my phone and then meet Blaise and the big kids (Cherry decided that she wanted to come with me) back at the museum. Before we left though, Blaise needed to use the restroom, so the kids and I walked though a bit more of the collection while we waited, and Ezio told me that he didn't think that Blaise should be mad at me if my phone got stolen because he (Papa) got his phone stolen in Madrid when he'd only had it for five months. After what seemed to be an interminable wait, Blaise returned from the bathroom with the news that, after several attempts, he had finally managed to get my phone to come up, in our apartment, and so we continued with our visit.
Now, imagine a room the size of a high school gymnasium or maybe a biggish church filled with display cases full of minerals of various types and sizes and colors and you'll have some sense of what the mineral collection at the museum looked like. And remember that this is really only part of their rock and mineral collection—much of it is housed in the red zone and we had already seen it. The cases were arranged by types: sulfates, sulfites, quartzes, zeolites, and on and on and on. Red, green, blue, purple, orange, yellow, iridescent and shiny metallic, cubes, octahedrons, tetrahedrons, anything you can imagine, almost, on display in the mineral room. And tucked away in the back, The Vault, repository of Martian meteorites, gigantic emeralds, and a collection of nearly 300 diamonds in every color they naturally take.
By then, we'd spent more than two hours in the mineral collection, so we headed downstairs to the picnic area for lunch, along with those school groups that also hadn't eaten at a reasonable hour, and then across the street to the V&A. We spent a couple of hours wandering through fabric and dishes and furniture and clothing from the last 500 years or so of British (and I suppose, more generally European) history while listening to alarms going off roughly every forty five seconds. Blaise proclaimed it a most excellent museum because the density of benches was very high. Cherry and Ezio liked the Clore Discovery areas where they could try on hoop skirts and Inverness capes and design monograms. And I'm glad that we can say that we went, but the twenty percent or so of the collection that we saw was ample. I have no desire whatsoever to go back.
And so, once we'd gotten to the museum and gone up to see the mineral collection, I asked Blaise to see if he could find my phone for me. An agonizing twenty minutes later, he finally managed to connect to the wifi (I never said it was good wifi) and located Cherry's iPad in our apartment, but not my phone. Of course, that didn't necessarily mean anything, but things weren't looking very good, and I knew that the entire day would be miserable for me if I had to spend the entire time worrying about where my phone had gotten to so I decided that the smart thing to do would be to go back to that apartment and look for my phone and then meet Blaise and the big kids (Cherry decided that she wanted to come with me) back at the museum. Before we left though, Blaise needed to use the restroom, so the kids and I walked though a bit more of the collection while we waited, and Ezio told me that he didn't think that Blaise should be mad at me if my phone got stolen because he (Papa) got his phone stolen in Madrid when he'd only had it for five months. After what seemed to be an interminable wait, Blaise returned from the bathroom with the news that, after several attempts, he had finally managed to get my phone to come up, in our apartment, and so we continued with our visit.
Now, imagine a room the size of a high school gymnasium or maybe a biggish church filled with display cases full of minerals of various types and sizes and colors and you'll have some sense of what the mineral collection at the museum looked like. And remember that this is really only part of their rock and mineral collection—much of it is housed in the red zone and we had already seen it. The cases were arranged by types: sulfates, sulfites, quartzes, zeolites, and on and on and on. Red, green, blue, purple, orange, yellow, iridescent and shiny metallic, cubes, octahedrons, tetrahedrons, anything you can imagine, almost, on display in the mineral room. And tucked away in the back, The Vault, repository of Martian meteorites, gigantic emeralds, and a collection of nearly 300 diamonds in every color they naturally take.
By then, we'd spent more than two hours in the mineral collection, so we headed downstairs to the picnic area for lunch, along with those school groups that also hadn't eaten at a reasonable hour, and then across the street to the V&A. We spent a couple of hours wandering through fabric and dishes and furniture and clothing from the last 500 years or so of British (and I suppose, more generally European) history while listening to alarms going off roughly every forty five seconds. Blaise proclaimed it a most excellent museum because the density of benches was very high. Cherry and Ezio liked the Clore Discovery areas where they could try on hoop skirts and Inverness capes and design monograms. And I'm glad that we can say that we went, but the twenty percent or so of the collection that we saw was ample. I have no desire whatsoever to go back.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
In which we discover that the Borough Market sells French Cheese
Of course, that wouldn't be a problem, were it not for the fact that it seems that none of the shops in the market seemed to sell British cheese, but I digress. We had three goals for Thursday:
1) Go to a British market,
2) Go to a cathedral (Church of England this time), and
3) Go to the Museum of London.
Our first stop was the Borough Market, which seems to be the oldest market in London, though it's changed somewhat in nature since its founding in the Middle Ages, which it probably would have sold more British cheese and less French cheese. At this point it seems to have reinvented itself as a French market that has a few stalls selling meat pies, which would have been more appealing were it not for the fact that we'll be spending the next year in France, and that England is well known for two food groups, one of which is cheese.
From there we wandered over to the Southwark Cathedral for a while, which is much older than the current instantiation of St Paul's Cathedral, and also much less pricy. It was founded as an Augustian priory in the early twelfth century before becoming a diocesan church upon the decision of Henry VIII to break with Rome and the accompanying shuttering of the monasteries.
From there, we headed to back to the Underground and over to the Museum of London, which tells the story of London, from Paleolithic times up to the present. We learned, for instance, that while London (Londonium) was founded by the Romans in the first century, it was abandoned in the fifth century because conflict on the continent required that they consolidate their forces. At that point, the city was left abandoned for four centuries, only being repopulated in the ninth century when its walls were used as protection from Viking raids.
We learned about the Black Death and its effect on London, and the nearly two centuries that it took for the population of the city to return to its pre-plague levels. We learned about the conversion of the country under Henry VIII and its effect on the land holding of the Church in London. We explored a debtors' prison cell (why imprisoning someone for debt (and thereby preventing him from working) is supposed to solve anything I will never understand) and the names carved into its walls. We walked through a 17th century pleasure garden and a Victorian shopping district and watched 1950's era children's programming. Apparently it was very interesting because my kids are now quoting Blaise Pandy rather than Airplane. I haven't yet decided whether this is an improvement.
And then, after a stop at the bathrooms, a wander back to the Underground station via a system of elevated sidewalks, and then back home.
From there we wandered over to the Southwark Cathedral for a while, which is much older than the current instantiation of St Paul's Cathedral, and also much less pricy. It was founded as an Augustian priory in the early twelfth century before becoming a diocesan church upon the decision of Henry VIII to break with Rome and the accompanying shuttering of the monasteries.
From there, we headed to back to the Underground and over to the Museum of London, which tells the story of London, from Paleolithic times up to the present. We learned, for instance, that while London (Londonium) was founded by the Romans in the first century, it was abandoned in the fifth century because conflict on the continent required that they consolidate their forces. At that point, the city was left abandoned for four centuries, only being repopulated in the ninth century when its walls were used as protection from Viking raids.
We learned about the Black Death and its effect on London, and the nearly two centuries that it took for the population of the city to return to its pre-plague levels. We learned about the conversion of the country under Henry VIII and its effect on the land holding of the Church in London. We explored a debtors' prison cell (why imprisoning someone for debt (and thereby preventing him from working) is supposed to solve anything I will never understand) and the names carved into its walls. We walked through a 17th century pleasure garden and a Victorian shopping district and watched 1950's era children's programming. Apparently it was very interesting because my kids are now quoting Blaise Pandy rather than Airplane. I haven't yet decided whether this is an improvement.
And then, after a stop at the bathrooms, a wander back to the Underground station via a system of elevated sidewalks, and then back home.
Friday, July 11, 2014
In which we see another third of the Natural History Museum
Perhaps you remember back a few days ago that I said that we'd only managed to see about a third of the collection at the Natural History Museum when we went the first time. And perhaps you remember that, unlike the British Museum, my kids thought the Natural History Museum was both fun and interesting. Well, it seemed a bit of a shame to only see a third of a cool museum, and so on Wednesday, we went back, one of the perks of spending two weeks in a city. (Being able to spend a day reading and playing video games on vacation is another perk.)
We headed for the blue zone to start out this time. The bulk of the blue zone is made up of taxidermied animals (most of them several decades old, since the museum is no longer collecting new specimens), skeletons of more ancient animals, and replicas of what they would likely have looked like, given the skeletons. Have you ever wondered what the ancestors of elephants looked like, several iterations before mammoths and mastodons roams the land? Pretty bizarre if you ask me, with giant tusks jutting out of both upper and lower jaws.
The blue zone also had a fairly interesting exhibit on human development, which seemed to have a strange fascination with childbirth. Not, mind you, with pregnancy, nor with infancy, but only with childbirth. I don't have an explanation either.
From there we headed to the orange zone, which has two main parts. The first is a big outdoor garden which attempts to show flora and fauna (ok, bugs, it isn't that big) from all over England, complete with little doors that we could open to see the layering of the soil on different parts of the island.
The cooler part though is called the cocoon, and it is a big scientific research area for the 300 or so scientists that the museum has in house. The top two floors, out of seven, provide an opportunity for people to learn a little bit more out what scientists do.
From there we headed back inside to the dinosaur exhibit, which may, as they claim, be wildly popular, but which is also rather lame. It starts out promisingly enough, with the standard skeletons of the giant dinosaurs before herding visitors up a narrow staircase to a sort of catwalk flanked by skeletons of smaller dinosaurs—gallimimus, compsognathus, ornithomimus—and then a ramp down past a horrid roaring animatronic T. rex. It all went downhill from there, at least figuratively. We we're happy to escape as quickly as possible.
We finished our visit with a trip to the treasure room—stuffed great awks, an original copy of The Origin of the Species, a dwarf elephant tooth—before heading for home.
In which we play a lot of video games and I read Little Women in its entirety
There actually isn't a whole lot more to say about Tuesday. Cherry and I were the only people to even leave the flat, and we only did so because the alternative was to eat pan-fried paperboard with salt for dinner.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
In which we hate the British Museum
Whenever anyone found out that we were going to London, they were always sure to tell us that we absolutely must go to the British Museum. After all, that was where they had the Elgin Marbles (for the big people) and mummies! for the not quite so big people, and it's the most visited tourist site in London and, therefore, must be really, really, really great, right?
To begin, Monday was the day that the Tour de France was in London, which meant lots of people, but also lots of road closures and public transportation disruptions and a suggestion on the tfl.gov.uk (Transport for London) website that the Green Park station, which we normally transit through, would be so insanely packed that they would actually have to actively manage the queue in order to make sure than nobody got trampled and everyone could get out if there were a fire. As that didn't sound very appealing, we decided that it would be a good day to go to the British Museum as that was best reached from our flat by a combination of Overground and bus.
After a bit of a tussle with the ticket machines to get day passes for Sapphire and Ezio, we were off to London's Euston station, and then by bus to Russell Park. (Which were, though I didn't realize it until later, very near the site of the 7/7 London bombings.) From there we walked to the British Museum.
I went in expecting to like it, and expecting the kids to like it fairly well also, and Blaise was really excited about seeing their Greek and Roman collection. After all, it's famous and has cool stuff, and everybody says you have to go there. It's also insanely packed, which meant that we saw glimpses of the Rosetta Stone from between the shoulders of taller (and ruder) people who shoved in front of us, and got pushed through the Marbles and the Assyrians. We had to choose between being close enough to the exhibits in those rooms to read the descriptions, or far enough back to see the art properly, because the crowds were not conducive to moving back and forth. The mummies were yet worse, because now the crowds of people were primarily kids, who seemed to be attempting to simulate Brownian motion, bumping off of people and cases and heading in appeared to be a randomly determined direction each time. After about an hour and a half of that, we decided that we'd had more than enough, and headed back to Russell Square for lunch, and then to the British Library.
Now, nobody told us that we absolutely must see the British Library while we were in London, and we didn't anticipate that our visit there would take more than fifteen or twenty minutes. We knew there was a copy of the Magna Carta, and that they had some old Bibles, but really, how long can it possibly take to look at a few books? An hour and a half later we had seen original scores by composers from Thomas Tallis to Mozart to Paul McCartney; dozens of illuminated Bibles and other sacred texts; diaries and sketches from Michelangelo; original copies of Beowulf and Shakespeare; and, of course, one of the four existing original copies of the Magna Carta. We'd also decided that Pope Innocent III was a bit of a jerk for issuing a papal bull that declared the original Magna Carta null.
An attempt to stop at the Wellcome Museum (a dedicated health sciences museum) failed because only the gift shop and cafe are open on Mondays, and so we headed for home, a bit earlier than expected.
To begin, Monday was the day that the Tour de France was in London, which meant lots of people, but also lots of road closures and public transportation disruptions and a suggestion on the tfl.gov.uk (Transport for London) website that the Green Park station, which we normally transit through, would be so insanely packed that they would actually have to actively manage the queue in order to make sure than nobody got trampled and everyone could get out if there were a fire. As that didn't sound very appealing, we decided that it would be a good day to go to the British Museum as that was best reached from our flat by a combination of Overground and bus.
After a bit of a tussle with the ticket machines to get day passes for Sapphire and Ezio, we were off to London's Euston station, and then by bus to Russell Park. (Which were, though I didn't realize it until later, very near the site of the 7/7 London bombings.) From there we walked to the British Museum.
I went in expecting to like it, and expecting the kids to like it fairly well also, and Blaise was really excited about seeing their Greek and Roman collection. After all, it's famous and has cool stuff, and everybody says you have to go there. It's also insanely packed, which meant that we saw glimpses of the Rosetta Stone from between the shoulders of taller (and ruder) people who shoved in front of us, and got pushed through the Marbles and the Assyrians. We had to choose between being close enough to the exhibits in those rooms to read the descriptions, or far enough back to see the art properly, because the crowds were not conducive to moving back and forth. The mummies were yet worse, because now the crowds of people were primarily kids, who seemed to be attempting to simulate Brownian motion, bumping off of people and cases and heading in appeared to be a randomly determined direction each time. After about an hour and a half of that, we decided that we'd had more than enough, and headed back to Russell Square for lunch, and then to the British Library.
Now, nobody told us that we absolutely must see the British Library while we were in London, and we didn't anticipate that our visit there would take more than fifteen or twenty minutes. We knew there was a copy of the Magna Carta, and that they had some old Bibles, but really, how long can it possibly take to look at a few books? An hour and a half later we had seen original scores by composers from Thomas Tallis to Mozart to Paul McCartney; dozens of illuminated Bibles and other sacred texts; diaries and sketches from Michelangelo; original copies of Beowulf and Shakespeare; and, of course, one of the four existing original copies of the Magna Carta. We'd also decided that Pope Innocent III was a bit of a jerk for issuing a papal bull that declared the original Magna Carta null.
An attempt to stop at the Wellcome Museum (a dedicated health sciences museum) failed because only the gift shop and cafe are open on Mondays, and so we headed for home, a bit earlier than expected.
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
In which we remember Diana
Sunday is Mass day, which is, due to a certain British monarch whose name will remain unmentioned, a bit harder than one might think if one were to just look at all the churches littering the city, most with proper saint names, and then, off in the corner or down at the bottom, the little CE that means Church of England, and not Catholic after all. But they aren't unheard of anymore, for the English are no longer in the habit of executing men for the offense of being Catholic priests. So we poked around the internet a bit, and found that, in addition to Westminster Abbey, which is Church of England, an absolutely necessary tourist stop (which we aren't planning to go to), and quite pricy unless you have a letter from your C of E vicar, there is also a Westminster Cathedral, which is Catholic, not on any tourist tour, and completely free.
So, having figured out where we were going to mass, we had to figure out how we were going to get there, which we discovered was going to be a bit tricky on Saturday evening when we discovered the signs at the underground saying that "our" station was going to be closed on Sunday morning so that they could work on the tunnels. Options:
So, having figured out where we were going to mass, we had to figure out how we were going to get there, which we discovered was going to be a bit tricky on Saturday evening when we discovered the signs at the underground saying that "our" station was going to be closed on Sunday morning so that they could work on the tunnels. Options:
- Figure out how to get to the Cathedral using some other means of transpiration, either buses or the overground, and make the 10:30 mass
- Accept that the major accomplishment of the day was going to be going to mass, and go to the noon mass, which would mean that we could catch the train after it started running again at 11:00
- Find a different church.
Well, we didn't really want to find a different church, though there are, in fact, lots of them, and a certain laziness meant that I didn't really want to figure out the other means of transportation, and so we ended up opting for the noon mass, and having a rather leisurely morning before heading to the Cathedral.
After mass, we found a bus to take us to Kensington Gardens, and walked on in to the Diana, Princess of Wales, Memorial Playground. I think the kids mostly had fun, though I confess that I'm not entirely certain. There was a big ship that they played on, or rather, the younger two played on, because Sapphire promptly found someone to talk to, and they sat atop the cabin and chattered away. And they spent some time trying to leap from the back of one wooden sheep to the next; Ezio finally announcing that, since he'd managed to get one foot onto the last sheep before touching the ground on two separate occasions, that was as good as getting two feet onto the sheep once, and so he considered himself to have met his goal. We filled up water bottles on the way out, again discovering after having drunk from them that the water at the playground was not recommended for drinking. (Since we haven't yet felt any ill effects from any of the unrecommended water that we've drunk, I'm beginning to suspect that this is some sort of a racket to increase the income of the little food and drink stands all over the place.) Then, buses all the way home, where Blaise and the younger kids went up to the apartment, and Sapphire and I hiked up to the Waitrose, which had added an extra constraint to our day by closing at 5:00 on Sunday afternoon (and not opening until 11:00 that morning).
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