London! So much London!

So I'm in London! Actually, my week in London is ending; I am catching the first (actually 2nd) train out of here tomorrow morning. to Leuchars (near St. Andrews) via Edinburgh. Still, London, it's been nice. London, in case you haven't heard, is an awesome city. Great transits, good weather (this week anyway), heaps of peoples... Whatnot. Decent food... Pretty noisy. These last two points are not so much positive. Though the former might just come from my unfamiliarity with the locales, and my lack of cereal. I miss cereal. Oh, but the Porridge!

I arrived in Heathrow on Friday morning, got a train to Paddington, met my sister and travelled to Liverpool St. Station, where I had the best porridge of my life so far. It was all oats and berries, with a bit of maple syrup. I may've just been hungering from the plane trip (Singapore Airlines, with their apparently relatively fine food, accidentally gave my order to my neighbor, thus leaving me to eat some weird seafoody dish. For breakfast. Not so great), but yeah, that porridge was damn great. I probably was just hungering from the plane trip, because I had it again a few days later (while perusing The Guardian. Ohhhh yeaaaaah), and it was a bit less extremely spectacular. But only a bit!

Other things I did in London? Well still on the subject of fooderies, I got a bit attached to this random French cafe in Hackney, with a name along the lines of l'au de la Bouche, which seemed to play nothing but Iron & Wine and Fleet Foxes, and served delicious tea, and toasted baguettes. There was also an excellent foodfilled market outside said cafe on Saturdays, of which I was able to witness two.

What I mainly did was wander. One fateful day, I and Julian walked from Hackney (where my sister lives, and I was staying) to Chelsea (on the other side of the city), via The Gerkin and The Globe. This is quite a long walk. Took us about 8 hours, including some random diversions and some sitting outside a pub by the Thames.


On the subject of The Globe, also very memorable was seeing a play there. Troilus & Cressida. An unusually hilarious tragedy, with a confusing ending. Some of the lead performances were uninspiring, but (some guy called) Matthew Kelly as Panderus completely made the play, by being absurdly hilarious. Also excellent were Thersites, Ajax, and an oddly gothy Achilles. Greeaaaat times. And all for only £5! Hurrah for standing-room tickets.

Same day, I explored the Tate Modern. I loves me some modern art. The huge Poetry & Dream gallery, being entirely devoted to my favourite variety of visual art, Surrealism (and reactions to Surrealism) was more than I could've ever hoped for. I muchly enjoyed the arts, and fell in love with all the people sitting around sketching what they saw, which somehow just felt like a completely awesome thing to be doing. Other galleries were less excellent but still enjoyable. Particularly the States Of Flux one, which apparently dealt with Cubism, Futurism, Pop Art, Russian Propaganda... Etc. There was actually a special Futurism exhibition on, but I wasn't willing to shell out the £10 or whatever to get in. :(

In less successful artventures, I saw the National Gallery and Portrait Gallery. The former mostly bored me: turns out my art-brain pretty much switches off for anything before 1900. The Impressionists were all right, and there were a few others that particularly caught my attention for one reason or another (such as this kid with a kid), but most everything else failed to cause a reaction in me.

The Portrait Gallery was a bit different... Insofar as they had some more modern stuff there. But they also had buckets of same-old-same-old pictures of Old Dudes. Plus, just in entering the Portrait Gallery, one couldn't help but feel somewhat stuck by the worshipping of celebrity that the place seemed to encourage. Portaits of random popstars and sportspeople, though nicely made, led me to think... "why does this dude get to have a portrait here..." Still, there was a competition exhibition of random dudes, which was pretty good, and much less celebrity-worshippy (unlike the Archibald, which is totally celebrity-worshippy). Still, my favourite thing in that particular venue was this room full of Fabiolas. Just hundreds of almost-identical, kitschy portraits of the same person, in the same pose, wall to wall. This reminded me of The Science Of Cosby, and the observation that if you ask for a portrait of Bill Cosby, you're fairly likely to get one looking like this:


Continuing the theme of my less than impressive ability to enjoy certain buildings full of stuff, I was extremely excited by the prospect of visiting The British Museum. Unfortunately, upon finding it, I wandered its halls for a while, stared unmovedly at bits of the Parthenon, looked for, found, and glanced at the Rosetta Stone, then decided I was totally bored, and left. This all took about 20 minutes. I might've just been distractedly hungry, but I rather suspect this might be part of my general inability to enjoy rooms full of Old Stuff.

This is pretty much all I did in London, besides boring stuff like buying a laptop and wandering the streets aimlessly (lies, that last thing was much fun). In fact, it was while wandering the streets aimlessly that I came across, down by the Thames, some kind of Thames Festival! Featuring loud music played by people in colourful clothing!


Also, assorted dancers with enormous dongs.


Both these pictures actually come from the rehersal which I wandered into, which is why they are bright and unpopulated. I saw a decent chunk of the actual festival, which was... More festive.

Oh, there was also my visits to bookstores! Waterstones, Foyle's, and a host of random second-hand outlets. Didn't find much to interest me there. But then, Forbidden Planet! A rather large cult and science fiction specialty store! Nice! I was pretty sure I would be able to finally live my dream of visiting a bookstore with more than two Roger Zelazny books! And here's what I found, an entire shelf-marker for him!:


Oh, wait, turns out that they still only had the same two books that every store in Sydney had. Dang. Anyway, I bought some Scott Pilgrim for some reason, then fled.

And thus ends my tales of adventure in London!
Next stop, St. Andrews.