Day 42, 18 Feb: A Full Day of London

London. Day 42. A Full Day of London

This was also quite a long and eventful day, so the trope of divided sections will pass on into this entry:

I.              Slow-walking Down Oxford Street, then to Trafalgar Square

Waking up at 8:45 (we all planned to meet upstairs at 9), I slowly got ready and then joined the other three at the continental breakfast area. Jam and toast, cereal and milk, orange juice. There was a want for warmer food, but it was free so I can’t complain.

Royal Academy School

Cool Displays

            We all glided our way back to the Underground wyrms and popped up to the streets at Oxford Circus. From there, we simply walked down Oxford and New Bond Street, but the quantity of shopping stores and display windows continually kept us walking very, very slowly past them. At one point, we saw statues and the instant I saw the name “John Locke” under one, I cried out in wonder. There were twelve statues, three lining the first story, three overlooking the roof, both on the left and right sides of the grand entrance (in renovation with piles of wood and boxes). It turns out this was the Royal Academy School. Once back on a main street, we spotted a Cool Britannia store and took up our tourist role with pride. We bought mainly elegant postcards. Marika also made a point to buy this small stuffed bear.

            Eventually we made it to Trafalgar Square, where we played with the lions and photographed the water fountains. There was a certain bliss in being here, the crowds made up this lively square and the sounds of water falling meshed with running children’s squeals of joy composed a park setting on concrete. The four of us climbed onto the monument beholding one of the four corner lions (all guarding the tall tower in the forefront of the square) and took pictures astride it.

LIONS!

Shepherd's Pie!

            Soon we found a place to eat called The Stock Pot, and I just had to try the Shepherd’s Pie finally. It was a little expensive (£7.50), but similar to the amazing Fish and Chips of Walberswick (from Day 35, last Saturday), it was an experience.

II.             The Sweetest Tourist Trap

The Wonderful World of...M&M's?

       Our next stop was to be Chinatown, but something diverted us from our path. It was a sign and a gigantic building: M&M’s World. None of us had ever heard of such a place, so we were soon taken into a four-level consumer world of everything from life-sized M&M’s figures to mock famous paintings and an Abbey Road rendition (with the four M&M’s characters). I made it a point to visit all four of the characters’ statues (there were also costumed and dancing characters as well) and take a picture beside each one. All four of us also danced in front of this sensor which told us what M&M color we were. I was orange, the nervous one (boo), and I remember Alex being the black color (the machine was being racist, of course). Oh, Marika was red. Anyway, there came a time when I looked at the wall of columns upon columns of M&M’s in  vastly superior colour spectrum than I had ever seen. I decided to grab a bag (No-no No. 1), I proceeded to mix the Royal Mix with the UK colour mix with some of every blue M&M on the wall (No-no No. 2), and I tied the bag and decided to buy it (No-no No. 3). I am considerably embarrassed that I found myself truly caught in a consumer’s ensnarement in which the one way out was to buy it: there was no scale except at the check-out counter. The price rate was £2.10 per 100 grams…mine weighed 0.6 kg (600 grams). “That will be £12.60 please.” After the momentary fall from frugal grace, I joined the others on our side-exit (the dancing M&M’s blocked the main staircase) and thankfully made it out of the tourist trap without any further economic wounds.

I still can't get over this...mistake.*ahem*

       We made it to Chinatown (Morgana’s suggestion), but unfortunately, it was much less impressive than M&M’s World was. It was literally one street lined with shops and restaurants. Nevertheless, we walked through and came out at Cambridge Circus where we saw the sign “Signing in the Rain” above a theatre entrance. I started signing the fragment of the main melody that I remembered and suddenly we all realized that it was raining. How perfect. We were literally singing in the rain.

           

             III.            The Archives of History

Alex made the suggestion that we do something indoors and the British Museum made the most sense. We stepped up into the vast tomb of world history, organized by countries and eras in rooms upon rooms. Starting with Ancient Egypt (and seeing the Rosetta Stone in person), we made it around to classical Greece and Rome, admiring headless and headed statues alike. The motif of almost all sculpted work was the cut-off nose—was it just the most pointed front feature of the human body? Almost without fail, all of them bore no nose. Soon we made our way to Europe, medieval to modern, and I discovered a room devoted to watches and clocks. There was one device that held a regular clock on top but below had a carved plane for a metal ball to roll across in very gradual manner—then at the farthest point, the weight of the ball caused the tilted plane to shift its incline the other way. That took exactly one minute. The device was ingenious.

            Overall, my time at the museum became significantly more fun when I stopped caring to look at everything in the room or try to oversaturate myself with all the artefacts (British spelling of “artifact”). I just turned a blank eye to the less interesting and magnified my glimpse at what I wanted to see. An astrolabe, for instance, was cooler than the tenth porcelain plate of a royal set, in my opinion.

"Cradle to Grave by Pharmacopoeia"

Shakespeare, --- , Aristotle, Apuleius In a Row

By the end, we decided to see the two exhibits that I had expressed interest in seeing: The Enlightenment; and the Living and Dying.  The bibliophile (book-lover) in me soared to an excitement of astronomical heights when I saw original or Enlightenment-edition copies of books I had read or heard about: I even saw Balzac’s Old Goriot which I had literally read for class two weeks before. Two separate collections of Shakespeare were on display; there was Cicero; there was Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (read it for a class on ancient rhetoric last semester back at my home university)—all three of these were right next to each other on one shelf. The magnitude of this exhibited archived book collection was utterly astounding. As for the Living and Dying exhibit, nothing struck my interest except for the centrepiece of the room: a long glass display of—pills. There were two meshed rolls of pills, each in a netted pouch, and each roll held 14,000 pills, the estimated number of prescribed pills in an average person’s lifetime from cradle to grave (hence the title of the work: “Cradle to Grave by Pharmacopoeia” by Freeman, Critchley, and Lee). It almost made me angry at our chemical dependence, but my reaction was softened by Alex’s practical remark that we do live an 85-year life span now, not a 40-year one like our ancestors centuries back. We four left the museum, after a quick stop at the gift shop, and found the rain had stopped.

From the View of the Boadicea Statue 

             IV.             London’s Centrepiece and Departure

Arising from the Westminster Underground station, we stared at Big Ben straight in the face and walked over to the grounds of Westminster Abbey as well. 

The View Across Westminster Bridge

We decided not to go on the London Eye that evening, but we amused ourselves with the two wax figures near the London Eye ticket office, until Alex’s friend Carrie showed up. We walked into a sushi bar with a conveyor belt of coloured plates and ate a deceptively expensive meal (each coloured plate represented a different price) that was nevertheless quite enjoyable. Despite being farthest away from the belt, I still got a chance to grab one of the plates before the end of the meal. It was gratifying.

The night ended with Carrie, me, and the three (Marika, Alex, and Morgana) all heading in different directions on the Underground. I made it on time to my train to Ipswich, which transferred by bus to Stowmarket, and from there, the journey continued to Norwich by train. At five after midnight, I arrived in Norwich and commuted by bus back to campus. Before going to bed, I made sure to email Katya to wish her a happy 10-month anniversary (since it was still the 18^th in California). Thus ended a two-day trip to London that I am so thankful to have taken—it really rose my spirits to feel the pulse of England’s capital once more.

The Remnants of the Trip