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Well, yesterday....
The bus ride was uneventful besides a lovely endless repeat of Led Zeppelin's Rain Song, but when we got there, we walked about in a huge crowd of obvious tourism and our deputies decided to pass up the line to the War Rooms and go eat in this tiny little cafe in Hyde Park for awhile before we did them. Once we did, they were less interesting than a lot of the other things we've seen (WWII is not my favorite period of history) but intriguing for their sheer labyrinthine secrecy factor. The Cabinet War Rooms were actually underground, and there was one transatlantic telephone in a room that only Churchill could use (nobody else knew what was in there and decided it was the only flushing toilet in the complex).
We came out of there and sat around in the grass waiting to go to the next place. The next place was Trafalgar square where we had a couple hours to wander, so Suz and I went in the National Gallery and perused the centuries. Oo. There was a bunch of stereotypical Renaissance art, Rembrandt and Hals and some cool Dutch guys, and one who tried to paint the transformation of Acteon (he saw Diana bathingand she turned him into a stag) but wasn't terribly good at anthro art so it looked like a pile of innards and he had to make that corner all dark so you couldn't tell what was going on. In the last half an hour or so, we cruised through the East wing 1800-1900, the Impressionists and modernish people, including Degas, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Renoir, and a bunch of other famous people who decided it didn't matter what it looked like, it was what they meant painting it and what you saw looking at it. So we've been to see it, and it was a lot more crowded than everywhere else. I wanted to go see the ticketed one about Passions (Winthrop collection, I think it said) because it had Pre-Raphaelites in it, but it was guided and would have taken longer than we had, and I didn't have the change for it.
So after Trafalgar Square, we tramped along the slightly colder streets (oh, did I mentino the weather when we got up that day was substantially more typical of England? I was sprinkling when I got up to take a shower, and gloweringly gloomily gray all day in London) to Covent Garden again (yay), where instead of eating immediately as apparently everyone else did (we had three hours, for goodness' sake) we wandered about. I remembered a really cool jumpy thing on one end of the Market, just like the one at NASA that I didn't go on, called Jumpzone. I'd really wanted to go on it the last time, but there was no time for the line (queue) and I had just eaten. This time, however, Nia obligingly took the contents of my pockets, my jacket, and my cds and sketchbook I'd been carrying, and gave me six pounds to stand in line with (I paid for dinner, so it was all right). It was a half-an-hour line, but we had to wait at least that long before eating, anyway, because of her medicine, so I got to fly in the air for 3 minutes and do back and forward flips and somersaults and play Icarus on elastic and a trampoline. I was quite happy. The guys who were running it (I think their accent is what happens when Swedes learn English in Britain and get pretty good at losing their Swedish accent), particularly the one who was watching my elastic, seemed impressed and told me I'd done a really good job. Nobody else that day had been doing twirly stuff (the last time, we'd watched in awe and jealousy as a particularly adept guy did triple-backflips... sketches were inspired). So I spent the next hour or so very dizzily and with sore inner thighs (there and across the stomach is where the straps attach) and sore upper arms from holding and manipulating the elastic. They're still a little sore.
But after I jumped, I wobbled wetly (it was past drizzling now, raelly raining) with Susan in two jackets, down to the street on which we'd had wonderful Indian food. We couldn't find it, and the Mongolian Barbecue didn't open for another hour, so we stopped in a little Thai place and I had some really good, subtly-jasmine-somthing-interesting-flavored chicken suteh and jasmine tea after Susan's was gone (I got another pot). Suz had egg fried rice that looked really good. I had a very hard time resisting another plate of chicken, but it was pretty expensive and we'd gone to Sainsbury's yesterday and stocked up on all kinds of cool food, so I figured I'd eat when we got home. We sat around in the nicely non-smoky (but not non-smoking) restaurant and played with the oil lamps on the table and drew winged things in our sketchbooks (we'd seen some pretty cool winged sculptures on our walks) until somebnody started smoking, and then decided to walk back to the meetingplace despite the large amount of time we still had before we had to be there.
It's interesting that we did, because there was a Sainsbury's right there, and we went in to pass the time and save our sketchbooks from the rain. Good thing, too. Did you know that a medium pot of raspberry/cranberry yoghurt only has about 8 grams of sugar? And did you also know that cordial in itself is not alcoholic, merely extremely concentrated and flavorful? Lime cordial looked interesting to me, and we got some (that was all; it came with the yoghurt to a pound four pence), and lo and behold one tiny sip is like a lime Warhead sour.It's wonderful. The deputies thought we'd rot our stomachs drinking it plain (we managed to finish about half a cup by the end of the night), but it was really good.
And Then. And Then. we walked to the Lyceum in West End. And saw the Lion King. Heh.
It was good. I must say, though, that the constructions and framings and puppet strings and operators were a lot more distracting the second time around. It was very entertaining to listen to Pumbaa tryig to disguise an Irish accent, and Timon a Scottish. Adult Simba didn't even bother, so it wasn't remarkable, but it was fun to compare the pronunciations of young Simba's non-attempt with Mufasa's pathetic attempts at American accents (Mufasa was South African). It was just as fun as the first time, though I don't think I was as engaged (except for opening number, which made me cry again, especially the big blackout boom at the end of Circle) so I could look more critically. I had a wonderful time, and the For Hire binoculars on our row were all upside down so we didn't have to pay to get them out. Oh, it was fun.
Bus on the way back was interesting; I'd been dozing through the raucous deputies' attempts at songs from the show (it was pathetic, they didn't even know the words to Hakuna Matata and it was all heavily accented), when I noticed Sophia, our deputy, didn't seem too happy. She didn't feel well and her head hurt, so I made Susan switch with me so I could sit on the aisle and reach her hand, and I think it may have been the most effective massage I've ever given. She felt much better within a minute of poking around in between her thumb and index finger, and was very surprised about it. I dozed the rest of the way to the Rain Song (Susan graciously passed her cdplayer on when she could no longer stay awakw), and did indeed eat a little once we got home, lemony chicken and the kind of ice cream that happens when you have whipping cream in a refrigerator whose temperature is set too low. I also made a popsicle out of diluted lime cordial in my toothbrush case, and we ate it this morning. It was superb.
Thus, I had a good day yesterday, and a good sleep last night. The bells went crazy this morning, but they do every morning, just a little more today. Now, I will finally mention the things I've been writing down to tell you since I first got here, in miscellaneous order. I think I'll make a new post to do so.
The bus ride was uneventful besides a lovely endless repeat of Led Zeppelin's Rain Song, but when we got there, we walked about in a huge crowd of obvious tourism and our deputies decided to pass up the line to the War Rooms and go eat in this tiny little cafe in Hyde Park for awhile before we did them. Once we did, they were less interesting than a lot of the other things we've seen (WWII is not my favorite period of history) but intriguing for their sheer labyrinthine secrecy factor. The Cabinet War Rooms were actually underground, and there was one transatlantic telephone in a room that only Churchill could use (nobody else knew what was in there and decided it was the only flushing toilet in the complex).
We came out of there and sat around in the grass waiting to go to the next place. The next place was Trafalgar square where we had a couple hours to wander, so Suz and I went in the National Gallery and perused the centuries. Oo. There was a bunch of stereotypical Renaissance art, Rembrandt and Hals and some cool Dutch guys, and one who tried to paint the transformation of Acteon (he saw Diana bathingand she turned him into a stag) but wasn't terribly good at anthro art so it looked like a pile of innards and he had to make that corner all dark so you couldn't tell what was going on. In the last half an hour or so, we cruised through the East wing 1800-1900, the Impressionists and modernish people, including Degas, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Renoir, and a bunch of other famous people who decided it didn't matter what it looked like, it was what they meant painting it and what you saw looking at it. So we've been to see it, and it was a lot more crowded than everywhere else. I wanted to go see the ticketed one about Passions (Winthrop collection, I think it said) because it had Pre-Raphaelites in it, but it was guided and would have taken longer than we had, and I didn't have the change for it.
So after Trafalgar Square, we tramped along the slightly colder streets (oh, did I mentino the weather when we got up that day was substantially more typical of England? I was sprinkling when I got up to take a shower, and gloweringly gloomily gray all day in London) to Covent Garden again (yay), where instead of eating immediately as apparently everyone else did (we had three hours, for goodness' sake) we wandered about. I remembered a really cool jumpy thing on one end of the Market, just like the one at NASA that I didn't go on, called Jumpzone. I'd really wanted to go on it the last time, but there was no time for the line (queue) and I had just eaten. This time, however, Nia obligingly took the contents of my pockets, my jacket, and my cds and sketchbook I'd been carrying, and gave me six pounds to stand in line with (I paid for dinner, so it was all right). It was a half-an-hour line, but we had to wait at least that long before eating, anyway, because of her medicine, so I got to fly in the air for 3 minutes and do back and forward flips and somersaults and play Icarus on elastic and a trampoline. I was quite happy. The guys who were running it (I think their accent is what happens when Swedes learn English in Britain and get pretty good at losing their Swedish accent), particularly the one who was watching my elastic, seemed impressed and told me I'd done a really good job. Nobody else that day had been doing twirly stuff (the last time, we'd watched in awe and jealousy as a particularly adept guy did triple-backflips... sketches were inspired). So I spent the next hour or so very dizzily and with sore inner thighs (there and across the stomach is where the straps attach) and sore upper arms from holding and manipulating the elastic. They're still a little sore.
But after I jumped, I wobbled wetly (it was past drizzling now, raelly raining) with Susan in two jackets, down to the street on which we'd had wonderful Indian food. We couldn't find it, and the Mongolian Barbecue didn't open for another hour, so we stopped in a little Thai place and I had some really good, subtly-jasmine-somthing-interesting-flavored chicken suteh and jasmine tea after Susan's was gone (I got another pot). Suz had egg fried rice that looked really good. I had a very hard time resisting another plate of chicken, but it was pretty expensive and we'd gone to Sainsbury's yesterday and stocked up on all kinds of cool food, so I figured I'd eat when we got home. We sat around in the nicely non-smoky (but not non-smoking) restaurant and played with the oil lamps on the table and drew winged things in our sketchbooks (we'd seen some pretty cool winged sculptures on our walks) until somebnody started smoking, and then decided to walk back to the meetingplace despite the large amount of time we still had before we had to be there.
It's interesting that we did, because there was a Sainsbury's right there, and we went in to pass the time and save our sketchbooks from the rain. Good thing, too. Did you know that a medium pot of raspberry/cranberry yoghurt only has about 8 grams of sugar? And did you also know that cordial in itself is not alcoholic, merely extremely concentrated and flavorful? Lime cordial looked interesting to me, and we got some (that was all; it came with the yoghurt to a pound four pence), and lo and behold one tiny sip is like a lime Warhead sour.It's wonderful. The deputies thought we'd rot our stomachs drinking it plain (we managed to finish about half a cup by the end of the night), but it was really good.
And Then. And Then. we walked to the Lyceum in West End. And saw the Lion King. Heh.
It was good. I must say, though, that the constructions and framings and puppet strings and operators were a lot more distracting the second time around. It was very entertaining to listen to Pumbaa tryig to disguise an Irish accent, and Timon a Scottish. Adult Simba didn't even bother, so it wasn't remarkable, but it was fun to compare the pronunciations of young Simba's non-attempt with Mufasa's pathetic attempts at American accents (Mufasa was South African). It was just as fun as the first time, though I don't think I was as engaged (except for opening number, which made me cry again, especially the big blackout boom at the end of Circle) so I could look more critically. I had a wonderful time, and the For Hire binoculars on our row were all upside down so we didn't have to pay to get them out. Oh, it was fun.
Bus on the way back was interesting; I'd been dozing through the raucous deputies' attempts at songs from the show (it was pathetic, they didn't even know the words to Hakuna Matata and it was all heavily accented), when I noticed Sophia, our deputy, didn't seem too happy. She didn't feel well and her head hurt, so I made Susan switch with me so I could sit on the aisle and reach her hand, and I think it may have been the most effective massage I've ever given. She felt much better within a minute of poking around in between her thumb and index finger, and was very surprised about it. I dozed the rest of the way to the Rain Song (Susan graciously passed her cdplayer on when she could no longer stay awakw), and did indeed eat a little once we got home, lemony chicken and the kind of ice cream that happens when you have whipping cream in a refrigerator whose temperature is set too low. I also made a popsicle out of diluted lime cordial in my toothbrush case, and we ate it this morning. It was superb.
Thus, I had a good day yesterday, and a good sleep last night. The bells went crazy this morning, but they do every morning, just a little more today. Now, I will finally mention the things I've been writing down to tell you since I first got here, in miscellaneous order. I think I'll make a new post to do so.