Breaking with Britain

As my train rolled back towards London I realized I didn’t really know much about English art (Feel free to gasp in horror). I can rattle off the names of famous Spaniards, Italians, Germans, and Dutchmen (I really am the coolest kid at every party), but I was at a loss when it came to my direct cultural ancestors. It was time to remedy the situation, so I pointed myself towards the Thames and the Tate Britain, the home to British art preceding the 20th century.

The imposing facade of the Tate Britain. You know you're in London because they're are more columns than they have in Greece.

One of the advantages here was I could briefly drop my bag. They suggested a two pound donation at the bag check. Someday I will come back with many more pounds in my pockets. But today I was running low and the bag check man got merely a sheepish smile of thanks.

The exhibit moved chronologically through art history, demonstrating how trends on the Continent affected the British Isles. The staples of British art are the portrait and the landscape. Britain had a wealthy middle to upper class and it cherished a good family portrait over the mantle.

The landscapes reveal the deep British love of the natural world. Parks today are maybe cynically seen as a kind of human domination over nature. I think the English garden gets at a deeper British desire not to dominate nature but to interact with it. There’s a reason wealthy gentlemen occupied their lazy days by playing naturalist. Catching butterflies and identifying mosses allowed a gentleman to get outside to explore the countryside. As Americans, lovers of open spaces and natural beauty, I think we own our British cultural ancestors our thanks. Even if it means looking at a lot of landscapes in oil paint.

In the 18th century British nobles, especially young men, started taking jaunts across the European continent. This gave them a taste for Classical and Renaissance art. Over the last couple of years I’ve become a happy advocate for the Grand Tour. It’s been a blast and listen to learn to ramble about art and culture.

A 19th century sculpture outside the Tate Britain that was...

Clearly inspired by this massive sculpture of Dirce on display in Naples. The Brits know how to take notes.

The Brits started fusing all these influences, creating compelling sculpture and luminous Pre-Raphaelite images that sought to throw out Renaissance and Mannerist ideals, creating “true” images that captured Nature as it is. They also started illustrating British mythological and legendary figures, seeking a rich ancient English culture that was as fascinating, but distinct from, the mythology of the Continent. J.R.R. Tolkien might have been influenced by such thinking when he wrote The Lord of the Rings, his version of English pre-history.

Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse. This is Pre-Raphaelite painting at its pre-est Raphaelite-est. Anne of Green Gables was a fan.

Then I wandered into the William Blake room. My first encounter with Blake came at the Cincinnati Zoo where they have his poem “The Tyger” on display in the Cat House. In seventh grade we belted an arrangement of this poem. Somehow I missed this man’s biography. I just thought he liked “Tygers.”

He was a painter, poet, and printer who is probably best known for this iconic image of God (or Urizen) as the divine clockmaker:

He was a proto-Romantic in the mid 1700s who held an intense, spiritually infused perspective on the world. He saw contemporary figures like Nelson, Pitt, and Newton as Biblical warriors in combat with chaos and evil, so he illustrated them as such. In a dim room above his print shop he exhibited a series of 17 paintings depicting Biblical scenes, historical scenes, and images from his own rabid imagination. Each image was accompanied by a poem or extended, rambling essay. At the time he was basically considered a nut. Now he’s a genius.

Nelson taking on the Biblican Leviathan (and Napoleon) while whereing his briefs.

The Tate exhibits many of these 17 pictures with better lighting and excerpts from his original descriptions. Wandering through that room was a chance to immerse myself in the mind of a creative personality who I hope to get to know a little better when I get closer to an English language bookstore or library.
My final goal for my day was a trip to the National Portrait Gallery. In my previous trips to the city I heard the name and ran the other way. Who wants to spend their afternoon looking at a bunch of blank faces? Well, either I’ve gotten wiser or just more boring (you don't need to weigh in on that). Now this sounds like a great way to while away some time in London and maybe brush up on my English history.

The walk from the Tate Modern leads along the Thames, past the Houses of Parliament and through Trafalgar Square. I passed monuments and hoards of tourists on my walk.

A memorial to the women of world war two who hung up their hats and gave the Nazis the old one, two.

I felt exhilaratingly independent following my feet. Please note that I enjoy the company of a travel partner, but there’s something to be said for an unanalyzed reaction to a new place. There was no effort to discuss where I was going or how I would get there. I could simply act without justification.

Nelson holding court over the double-decker busses and wandering tourists.

Unfortunately my glowing sense of independence was quashed when I got to the Gallery. They would only be open for another half-hour and they didn’t want new ogglers clogging the guards careful removal of patrons from each gallery. Oh well, there was walking to be done. Unfortunately storm clouds were gathering ominously as I walked through the theater district one more time.

Bent over a map I heard an American family debating the merits of a cheap theater ticket kiosk.

Dad: It says ‘official seller’ over the door, Honey.
Mom: Yes, but this place has too much…glitz. It’s supposed to be less…glitzy.
Me: Are you looking for the half-priced ticket booth?
Mom: (A little confused about this American-accented loner suddenly imposing himself on a domestic dispute) Yes we are.
Me: Well if you go back to that big square (waving towards Leicester Square) that’s a big, wood-paneled…kiosk. It’s called TKTS and I think they’ll have what your looking for.
Mom: Well, we walked by that, but the guidebook says there’s a clock tower, and we didn’t see a clock (subtext: You’re holding a damn map and all your luggage. You clearly have no idea where you are let alone where we are.)
Me: Oh, well, I know you’ll find half-priced tickets there. Good luck!

If they didn’t want my advice, let them wander through the storm. I toyed with asking what show they were going to see. Probably Grease or We Will Rock You. Yes, I judge people for such things. Let them get soggy. I had a train to catch. Oh, and there was a clock on the roof of the kiosk in the square. It even had a half-crazy homeless man staring up at it trying to get his watch to match the second hand.

One last ride through the underground and into St. Pancras where I blew my final pounds on a meat pie because Sweeney Todd is never far from my mind when I’m thinking about his city. I also made the key decision to grab a pre-packaged sandwich and a package of digestive biscuits (in classic British fashion, these mealy cookies taste better than they sound).

The best part of my return via the Chunnel was the security check before boarding that got me a French passport stamp. One of the tragedies of modern Europe is open borders have largely obliterated passport-stamp collecting. Any excuse to get more ink in my book is welcome.

Three hours and one time zone later, I was back in Brussels and hustling towards the long distance train tracks, hoping I wouldn’t have long to wait before going East towards Cologne. Turns out I did have some time.

Normally I’m on top of my train schedules, but I guess when I scheduled my return from Britain I just assumed there would be German-bound engine waiting for me. While I can’t praise German rail enough, their personal door-to-door service has a ways to go. Apparently the last train to head for Germany left at 7:20. I was somewhere under the English Channel when that thing took off for home. There had to be a way to escape Belgium via night train or regional rail, right? It wasn’t that late.

Maybe Belgians just see Brussels as a place you would never want to leave. The next train leaving for anywhere else in Europe wouldn’t depart until 6AM the next morning. I was stuck in Belgium, information that was presented on a confusing French and Dutch chart in a dark corner of the station. I weighed my options. I could stay in the station. I had friends who had done as much in Munich and Bern and had lived to tell the tale. Then I saw two thugs start to tussle and frantic security guards sprint down the terminal. Hmmm.

Then a gentlemen who hadn’t bathed in three months sat down next to me and hungrily eyed the laptop I had opened to double check train times. Yeah, not staying. It was also a Saturday night. Hostels would likely be booked. I only had a few cents on my cell phone anyway and only a few cents in my pocket. So I made a last-minute decision to get out of the train terminal. I would head for the airport terminal and never tell my mother until I safely survived a potentially stupid decision.

The final express train for the airport was leaving in a minute. Hobble-running up the stairs, I dove onto the last car as the tired ticket-checker gave the engineer the “all clear” whistle. For fifteen minutes we chugged through Brussels and finally pulled under the International Airport. I checked my morning schedule and rode the escalator into the departures terminal with bored business travelers who were catching the Red Eye for parts distant. I was just looking for a bench.

Behind the elevators I found a secluded ring of lightly padded seats for weary fliers. One row was already taken by a young couple who appeared to be backpacking Europe. She was lying across several seats with a sheet pulled up to her neck. He was on the floor in a sleeping bag, already snoring. Perfect.

I found a vacant spot, ate a few necessary digestive biscuits and lashed all my luggage to the bench. My original plan was to be secure in my bed in Bonn by this point but I had to break the oath I had made to myself that morning. I set my alarm for 6AM. I had a train to catch…

Stay tuned for the epic struggle to break across the Belgian/German border and finally return to my much-neglected fossils!

The Lost World

The London album again. The latter sections feature pictures of the models I describe in this post.

At 4:15 the next morning I was awake to see Tim and Michael safely hustled off to the airport. The second time I had seen this side of 5AM in 24 hours. Ugh. Hugs and well-wishes were exchanged. Privately I swore I would never wake up before 6AM for the rest of my tenure in Europe. Then I laid back down and forgot to set the alarm.

I naturally woke up four hours later. 8AM never felt so late. I had been hoping to meet a friend somewhere in the city, but after checking facebook, my e-mail, and phone, I decided I should go about my day without hoping for a reunion with someone I haven’t seen in 18 years (we were friends when my family lived in Japan). The problem was that I hadn’t really thought about my day. All of London was mine until 7PM when I would once again shoot under the English Channel and return to the Continent, but I didn't know where to head first.

I started flipping through a book Yoonhee had left for perusal called 1000 Things to Do in London. That seemed like a few more than I could wedge into 11 hours, but one image caught my eye. It looked something like this:

This is the Crystal Palace Iguanodon. In 1851 Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, an English sculptor, was commissioned to build the first life-sized reconstructions of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures from Earth’s history. He was advised in his designs by Sir Richard Owen, the first director of the Natural History Museum. Owen was a fiery personality who coined the word “Dinosauria” in 1842. He was also a prolific scientist, who specialized in describing new species living and extinct. He was also a famous opponent of Dawin’s ideas on Natural Selection as he saw this as too simplistic a mechanism to trigger the diversity of the natural world.

But his biography isn’t really important. His dinosaurs are. In 1851, the Victorian world was finally coming to grips with the idea that the world might be really old and much more mysterious than anyone suspected. These models would present fragmentary bone and rock as the living, breathing animals the fossils once supported.

The problem: most of the material was, let me reiterate this point, fragmentary. They wanted to build an Iguanodon, but had four fossils to go on: Two teeth, a long bone, and a cone-shaped horn. Well, the teeth looked iguana-like, so maybe the animal looked like a massive lizard? Owen then crossed the iguana idea with an elephant and voila. Giant dino statue. So what if that spike was supposed to be near the wrist instead of the nose. The things were gargantuan. Shock value can go a long way.

Owen and Waterhouse were so excited about their project that they hosted a New Years party in the nearly finished torso of one Iguanodon. Every paleontologist is familiar with this image, one we recreated back in November at an outdoor dinosaur park near Gosslar.


Seeing the brief description of the site in 1,000 drew me on. I was alone in London with no one to roll their eyes at me or wonder how many more cultural touchstones we could see in the 45 minutes it would take to get into the southern suburbs of the city. I was going to make a two dimensional childhood image pop into the third. The added bonus here was I would get to ride an English train.

I keep a running tab on the quality of each nation’s rail service. I can happily report that the British did not disappoint, though the Germans really do excel at quality rail transportation. I unhappy to report that the English have decided lockers are a national security threat. Instead of convenient lockers in every station for a couple of pounds, they have luggage check stations where you send your bag through an x-ray and can leave it with the attendent for 8 pounds a bag. That’s insane. I’ll schlep my backpack across town, thank you.

I stepped off the train at Crystal Palace Station onto a platform that looked like the set from Waiting for Godot. Things looked a little more cheery when I got to the park. A colorful mural pointed the way towards the three islands that are home to the recently renovated animals.

The display was lauded when it was first unveiled, but by the turn of the century the sculptures were ridiculed as laughably inaccurate representations of ancient beasts. Iguanodon was supposed to be on two feet, not four (they also though his tail should drag through the mud). Dicynodons looked nothing like turtles, and Megalosaurus had nothing to do with medieval dragons. Scorn for the hypotheses of their creators meant the park’s animals were not well maintained through the twentieth century. In 2002 the display was restored and everyone got a shiny new coat of paint.

As I got closer to the man-made lakes that house this primordial menagerie, I started to pass families out for a walk or moms out with their pram. The grass was luminously green, and the hedges well maintained. It was everything I imagine an English Garden should be. Plus there were “Dinosaurs!” as I heard a four-year-old squeal.

Yes, there were dinosaurs. The iconic quadropedal herbivores leered across the pond and I sat in rapture. In case you’ve forgotten (and I’ll forgive you this time) here’s what the skeleton of Iguanodon looked like:

And here’s a reconstruction of the animal.

So, Waterhouse and Owen were pretty far off their mark, but they never claimed to have created the perfect models. In fact, as more complete material was being discovered in the American West, Waterhouse was commissioned to create a Mesozoic tableaux in Central Park that would have state-of-the-art reconstructions. Unfortunately Boss Tweed cut his funding and New York was left without life-sized dinosaurs. Damn bosses.

What Owen and Waterhouse did achieve was a rabid public interest in ancient life. Big creatures like Giant Ground Sloths and Ichthyosaurus are ready mascots for science. You can’t help but look at a giant bone and wonder how the animals got so big, what it ate, or what the world was like when it was stomping around. These creatures seed a germ of curiosity that drives the best scientists to pursue their questions about the natural world. Owen made this park and his museum public spaces where people could encounter the latest discoveries and explore the evidence on their own, personal terms.

I walked past the grinning Megalosaurus, who was reconstructed with a single jaw fragment and a chunk of leg bone. They were a little off here, too.

Again, they never swore these were completely accurate. He sluggishly stalks a still poorly known armored dinosaur called Hylaeosaurus.

Next to the dinosaurs is an island surrounded by goose-necked and dolphin-beaked reptiles gliding through the water. You might recognize these guys from my posts on the famous fossils of Germany. If not, here are the fossils and the sculptures.



Not bad. Not bad at all. The amphibians and mammal-like reptiles around the corner would dramatically change appearance over the next century and a half. The mammals were much more accurate. They occupied their own island set across the pond from the reptiles. There are just more rocks on this Earth from the last 65 million years, so the skeletons tend to be more complete and Owen and company were able to connect ancient fossils to living relatives. The Giant Ground Sloth shows the sculptor spent some time with modern sloths

The giant deer Megaloceros was tough to screw up since it’s really a massive elk.

I walked two circuits around the park, reveling in the details the Victorian scientists were able to include in their models, musing on what these paleontological characters would think of the modern state of the science. Recently, paleontologists graduated form idyll speculation and description to active reconstructions of ancient ecosystems. We delve into the biology of the animals we study, no longer content to simply name them. Now we want to understand them and their family's evolutionary history. We long to understand how their presence affected the biosphere we call home.

Still glowing with the rush of historical and scientific convergence, I went back to the dreary platform and shot back into the city, unsure where I would wind up next. A hint: It might involve art.

Until then,

Cheerio

Photos of dinos.

High Culture in London-town

The photo album featuring lovely London. The explanation of the final images will be up tomorrow!

Thursday night we had to make a difficult decision. What time were we getting up to wait for tickets for Waiting for Godot (the redundancy was not lost on us)? Some of the calculus: The guy at the ticket window told us to get there between 7 and 7:30. It would only take five people taking that advice to edge us out of our seats. It was also going to be a Friday. More people were in town. More people would want to see this. Reluctantly I plugged 5:15 into my alarm so we would get to the theater by 6. Oh boy.

Roughly four hours after going to bed, my alarm went off. I dragged myself up. Tim was opting to pass on a shower. For me, a morning shower is my morning coffee. I don’t feel like the day can get rolling without it. I used the women’s showers instead of the men’s since I didn’t feel like going down a floor and across the building. I reasoned there wouldn’t be many people up at 5:20 anyway. This was a well-founded hunch which became even more well-founded imminently. I got cleaned off and felt ready to find a line.

As I popped in my contacts, Tim continued to snooze. I started making some unnecessary noise to rouse him a bit. It was getting close to 5:45, we needed to move. As I pondered what to do he rolled over. “You know it’s 4:45, right?” I did not.

Apparently my phone doesn’t update itself when you hop time zones. My phone was still functioning on Central European Time. I had another half hour to snooze. I didn't even think about how much sleep I had actually logged. Nothing like starting an early day even earlier. Around 5:50 GMT we blearily wandered into the Tube and followed our bread crumb trail back to the theater.

There was the giant poster of McKellen and Stewart. Would there be a line? A lone figure moved near the box office door. We had made it. We would see Godot. We power walked up and were greeted by a tired by cheerful thirty-something Asian woman. Her: “You’re here for Godot?” Me: “Yup.” “Well, we’ll be here a while.” “How many are you picking up?” “Four. And you?” “Three.” “Oh, there’s a third person who didn’t need to get up with the sun?” “Yeah, but Mike’s doing our laundry for us instead.” “That’s what he says. He’s probably going to sleep until you meet up.” “No, not Mike. He’s on top of this kind of stuff.”

Her boyfriend, Ollie, showed up and the next four hours were spent happily chatting with these English creative writers while playing Hearts and teaching them Euchre. An Irish woman and her adult daughter appeared around 7:30. Six of us in line, and all the tickets were claimed. People tacked onto our short line right up until 10, hoping for cancellations. The last 15 minutes dragged for hours compounded by an awkward conversation with a guy in line behind the Irish women who wanted an American opinion on Michael Jackson’s death. He then leapt to a Princess Diana comparison and finally just grinned and stared. We were also pestered by an American tourist who was trying to pay someone to repeat the exercise the next morning to get him and his wife seats. Ubiquitous relief when the box office finally opened its doors.

My view for four hours of the London Street. We got to watch the traffic become denser as the morning advanced.

I've fought pretty hard for some pretty difficult seats (see here and here for examples), but this was one of the most satisfying ticket-line experiences. The seats were cheap but very good making the effort completely justifiable. In New York they sell rush tickets by raffle, making it difficult to plan your evening if the raffle is at 4 and you may or may not actually see the show. Here we had taken all the necessary steps to make sure we had seats, and we had all day to explore the city without worrying about returning for vouchers or getting into the line two hours before showtime.
Mike was supposed to meet us at 10, our laundry freshly folded. At 10:15 he showed up, winded and apologetic. “My alarm didn’t actually wake me up.” Sophia nailed it. Yoonhee had relieved Mike of his duties while he frantically scrambled to meet us. We were pretty punchy at this point and really didn’t care all that much. We had three tickets for the front row of a once-in-a-lifetime performance. All for ten pounds.

Flush with our victory, we did exactly what I expect every London theater patron does after purchasing fantastic seats. We went to the Natural History Museum.

Okay, we did this via Buckingham Palace. We followed the stream of tourists from the Tube stop and found ourselves watching goose-stepping red-coats in fuzzy hats entering the palace gate. We were probably the only tourists in town who just stumbled into the changing of the guard instead of making it a high priority.
Keeping close tabs on our wallets, we extracted ourselves from the hoards and continued to Sir Richard Owen’s brainchild.
I think half of London’s school children went to the museum that day. The line snaked from the imposing, columned entrance, over a bridge and onto the sidewalk. This was especially disconcerting because there is no entry fee and no real explanation for the line. It did give us plenty of time to scrutinize the exterior which is detailed with pterodactyls and saber-toothed cat gargoyles. It reminds me of Orton Hall writ large.

When we finally got inside we dove to the left and into the Hall of Dinosaurs. This is my third visit to the exhibit and it felt like seeing an old friend again. The audio-animatronic dinosaurs have been shuffled, and the descriptions of the extinction event updated, but it still has the mysterious allure of the past as bones and reconstructions loom around myriad corners, a maze of paleontolgy.

The first dinosaur fossil ever recognized as the remains of an giant, extinct reptile. Thank you Gideon Mantel.

From the dinosaurs, into the mammals where a life-sized blue whale model reminds you how punny our species, or any species, is when compared to the ocean’s giants. We power walked past pachyderms and peccaries and finally dove into the Earth History section where they theoretically discussed energy (Tim’s specialty).
The entrance hall was cavernous, but didn't have much educational value. A model of the solar system painted across the wall made no attempt to show the scale of the planets or the distances between them. We rode an elevator into a copper-sheeted globe. I thought the globe might illustrate plate tectonics or the layers of the Earth, but no. It was an enormous modern art installation.

We were getting hungry and I had seen enough fossils and dead animals to sustain me for the rest of the trip. On to fish (technically a dead animal, but it's hard to eat a stuffed red panda) and chips. A couple of blocks from the museum we found a dark pub with all the staples: Fish and chips, bangers and mash, and savory pie of the day. We decided this would do for our English ethnic experience. Unfortunately we walked into yet another corporate business social. Everyone wore pressed dress shirts and conducted their social exchanges with a hesitency that belies spending time with people you see every day, but don’t really know that well.

We people-watched and eventually our beer and comfort food arrived. Mike and I went in for local, hand-pulled ales. We forgot the British aren’t ones for chilling their kegs until we took our first warm sip. Cheers.

British food gets knocked around a lot for lacking small things like flavor or character. I disagree with this assessment. British food is hearty stuff and the muscular food doesn’t need spices to make an impact and sate your hunger. The fish is meatier, the mashed potatoes are denser, and the sausage requires small bites or you won’t get it down. With a strong ale, there are few cuisines that leave me so exhausted or so full.

The exterior of the Plunder Museum.

With good British grub in our systems, it was time for a good British Museum. In 1753, the British Empire opened the door to what I affectionately term the Plunder Museum. The British Museum has artifacts from every civilization and time period that the Empire ever conquered or explored. You can spend a lot of time in there, so I lead a highlight tour to the Rosetta Stone, then into the Assyrian and Babylonian collections and finally to the Greeks. We spent some precious time with the Elgin Marbles, a significant portion of friezes taken off the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century.
Over lunch I tried to explain the significance of the marbles and the controversy surrounding the British lord’s extraction of the sculptures from Athens:

Tim: Did someone lose their marbles?
Me: Yeah, the Greeks.
Mike: What are they made out of?
Me: Marbles of marble.

I thought the joking was a sign I should stop the archeology lecture. After the marbles we visited the Asian artifacts where Mike was able to bust out his Chinese linguistic and historic skills to the delight of two Chinese women who we guided through the vast museum.


We glanced at a mummy on the way out and my head spun from our blazing trail through history. As we left, Tim smacked himself over the head:

Tim: Oh man, we forgot to see the marbles!
Me: No we saw them, you guys thought they were really pretty.
Mike: When?
Me: Um, the big room with all the Greek friezes?
Tim: Wait, what? We thought we were going to see marbles.

Hmm. Turns out I need to remember that most of this planet doesn’t have a working knowledge of the English-Greek tension over these 2500 year old sculptures.

We scurried back to Goodenough to snag a quick nap, then meet Yoonhee for dinner. After e-mail was checked and conversation subsided, Tim and I only ended up with about a half-hour of extra snoozing under our belts before grabbing Japanese food and setting off to see if our exhausting morning waiting for Waiting for Godot was really worth it.

As we filed into the theater, a sharply dressed Londoner called out, “Hey, Tim!” I wondered if this was a friend of Tim’s from school who just happened to be in London and seeing our show. Before I could reflect on the statistics involved in such a meeting, I realized this was Ollie, the guy we had played Hearts with that morning, only now he was showered, wearing contacts, and dressed for a Friday night out in London. His girlfriend, Sophia, was also dressed to the nines, her eyes carefully lined and her heels giving her an extra four inches.

Usually only your best friends know what you look like when you’re at your most scrubby and can really appreciate the difference a shower and new wardrobe can make. I felt even closer to my fellow Waiters. Of course, this feeling probably wasn’t reciprocated since Tim and I were wearing the same stuff we were modeling at 6AM. Plus we were rocking mussed, late-afternoon-nap hair.

It was time to take our seats. I could count the hairs in Ian McKellen’s beard. I could see every twitch of Stewart’s fingers. I could see every bead of sweat on Simon Callow’s brow. They were in our laps, and they were fantastic. When McKellen walked downstage to set his boots on the edge of the set, he could have fallen into Michael’s lap. During intermission we watched people reverentially approach the boots to poke them, then scramble away. Anyone who says the human connection to relics is bogus should watch how people deal with props touched by the famous and talented.

Most people hold this opinion of Waiting for Godot:

It’s just weird and confusing. But these performers were able to draw out the real drama Beckett built into his play. He didn’t see theater as a string of things happening. Instead he saw it as an exploration of relationships. Waiting for Godot is about Vladimir and Estragon, two guys who have spent a lot of time together, doing exactly what the title says. They don’t know why they’re waiting, but they’re pretty sure they should. They care for each other and tick each other off. Two travelers on the road stop by for some banter and existential musing, then the first act is over. The second act is more waiting. But again, with these performers, it was about how these couples function. How they make it through the day. How essential it is to have a companion.

After the show Mike and Tim were gracious enough to follow me to the stage door for autographs. My brother collects programs and I wanted one from this show to be part of his birthday present. The stage door was around the back of the theater and faced a quiet alley that was filled with flower boxes and the Filipino embassy.

Stewart was out first. He generously signed everything the small crowd presented him, thanking us for our adoring comments. Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup quickly followed. It would be another 45 minutes before Gandalf finally appeared. He tested everyone’s patience and stamina. Tim and I were working on a deficit to begin with, but we knew he had to leave at some point and we had already dumped this much time into the effort.

He didn’t disappoint. After he emerged he chatted amicably with everyone. One girl told him, “I can’t wait for The Hobbit to come out!” “Me neither.” Class act. Really they all were, carrying themselves with thespian dignity while also appearing entirely approachable. No wonder they get to play old men with power, charisma, and wisdom. They don’t really have to try.

With all four autographs in hand, it was time to find one more pub before the night was over. This was Michael and Tim’s last day in Europe and it wouldn’t do to just wander home from the theater and collapse into bed for a few hours before rising with the dawn to catch flights to parts East (Thailand for Mike) and West (Pittsburgh for Tim). We were exhausted, but needed one more toast. We found it near Goodenough College.

The place was all low wooden benches, tarnished mirrors, and ancient photographs. Just what we needed. We raised our glasses to an exhausting trail through Western Europe. Ten days. Four countries. A Dozen cities. Four battered feet. We earned our Euro-tripping stripes and it would be my pleasure to wander with them again. But first I need a nap.

Cheerio!
The London album again.

Capital Wandering

Here's the photo album of London. There are a lot of images and a lot of stories yet to tell!

Mike and Tim’s original itinerary was built around two goals: see me and Germany then go to England to see Jessica in Oxford (she’s a Rhodes Scholar doncha know), crash on her floor, then fly out. So, plane tickets were bought into Munich and out of London. Unfortunately we had really crappy timing and Jessica wasn’t going to be in England. Instead she would be in Brussels for research. No problem, we can go there too.

Well, work ended up taking a little more time than expected. The result was we found ourselves chugging under the English Channel with little to no preparation for our trip through one of the world’s great cities. I have been to London twice in recent memory, each time for more than a week, and both times in 2004. Weird, I know, but it meant I really wasn’t worried about checking off the great sights. This was about what Tim and Michael wanted to see…with one major exception.

I needed to see Waiting for Godot, the Absurdist Samuel Beckett play that was recently revived on the London West End. I would be excited by any production of this play which threatens its audience with confusion for a couple of theatrical hours, but this revival raised the bar. It starred Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as the waiters. If I didn’t see this, my brother would probably hop the Atlantic and punch me in the face.

After a nice chat about Cincinnati and paleontology with the customs agent in Belgium (the main perk being a new stamp in my passport) we were cruising along the western coast of Europe. Then for 17 stuffy minutes we rocketed under the channel, the shadow cast by millions of boats through history including William the Conqueror and the D-day invaders.

The best part of taking the Eurostar train was we just stepped off and were suddenly immersed in the city. At the station we were met by Yoonhee, a fellow Buckeye Alumna who’s been living in London for two years on a Marshall Scholarship. She let us crash on her floor, making our stay in the most expensive city in Europe a little easier. She lead a tour of her home: Goodenough College. They really churn out the overachievers at Goodenough, let me tell you. It’s actually named after the founder who may have risen through the ranks of society just to spite his surname.

My first priority was to get to the Theater Royal Haymarket to ask about tickets. We dropped our bags and dove into the West End. I really wasn’t thinking about being a good guide. I just wanted to get to the box office in case a large Albanian family made a last minute decision to attend a cousin’s birthday rather than see that weird play in London with Jean Luc Piccard and Gandalf. If they returned their tickets, I wanted to be there to snap them up.

No such luck. There were cheap seats with obstructed views or we could show up the next morning before 10AM when they sell 11 front row seats. Each person can by two tickets. In other words, if we wanted to see the hottest show in London, at least two of us needed to be among the first six people in line the next day. The guy at the box office suggested we get there between 7 and 7:30. He probably tells that to everyone. It would be an early morning.

We grabbed a picnic lunch at Pret a Manger and pow-wowed in Picadilly Circus. Michael wasn’t too stoked about this theater thing. I resisted the urge to react violently when he said, “Well I saw a big show (Phantom?) in New York. I’ve had the experience. Movies and TV are fine by me.” Sitting on my hands I also resisted the urge to launch into a lecture on the pleasures of live performance. Tim cut in, “I think we should do this. It would be good for us, Mike.” It was decided that the next morning Tim and I would go wait for tickets while Mike did laundry and met us for some museums.

Now it was landmark time. We dropped into the London Underground, the oldest subway system in the world, and rode for Westminster and the houses of parliament. We emerged from the cramped, stuffy tube at the foot of Big Ben. We didn’t notice it at first as we tried to cut through the swarms of tourists. Then we set our watches to Greenwich Mean Time.

I lead us past the prickly Houses of Parliament towards Westminster Abbey. Mike was briefly confused when we crossed the street. “Oh, I thought that (pointing at Parliament) was a church, too!” This wouldn’t be the first time I failed to fill in the details as a guide.

We crossed into St. Margret’s church next to the abbey. Margret’s is the home parish of the MP’s while the Abbey is where royalty is crowned. We walked through the small Gothic church and Tim expressed some disappointment. “I thought it would be a little bigger.” “What, St. Margret’s?” “No, the Abbey.” “Oh, um, that’s right here,” and I pointed up at the looming Gothic nave to our left.

“Oh, got it.”

Unfortunately it is twelve pounds to get into the Abbey and we decided to keep walking. It felt weird to give the tombs of Elizabeth I and Charles Darwin a pass, but we did have a city to explore and limited cash in our pockets. On to St. Paul’s. Christopher Wren’s masterpiece of Renaissance balance is the spiritual symbol of the city. The Nazis targeted the dome as they bombarded the resistant island. They figured a collapsed dome would dent British moral. But the Brits dug in, placing guards on the roof to throw bombs away from the building, and St. Paul’s stood strong with the pugnacious English.

We were ready to go into the cathedral. We were ready to climb the dome and whisper across the abyss thanks to perfect acoustics. We were ready to see Nelson’s gargantuan tomb. We were not ready to shell out another twelve pounds. “The Catholics let you in for free,” observed Michael. And the hike went on.

Using the newest addition to the Thames, we crossed the river on the Millennium Bridge. The pedestrian only structure cost £ 18 million. Then it vibrated weirdly in the wind and another £5 million was dumped into stabilizing it. The jokes near the beginning of the century flew thick and fast. Now it sits solidly over the river connecting St. Paul’s to the Tate Modern Art Gallery.

The Tate got a lot more people excited in 2000 than the bridge that leads to its doors when the converted power plant opened to enthusiasts of 20th and now 21st century art. I was surprised Mike and Tim were game to go in. I think the price of entry – free- was maybe a lure along with many enthusiastic recommendations. It probably did't hurt that fans of modern art tend to be very pretty people.

The museum is organized thematically rather than chronologically with abstractions like “Motion” and “Mood” uniting the galleries. We picked up audio guides since none of us are well versed in contemporary art. The most engaging stuff came from the surrealists and cubists, but a room of Francis Bacon portraits held my attention for a long time.

The artist worked through the middle of the twentieth century where he became famous for his portraits that had an eerie, and often macabre, way of distorting the sitter until they seemed to strain against their bodies in horror or revulsion. He usually painted loved ones, but he used photographs as his reference instead of live sitters so he could mutilate them on canvas without confronting their living faces or bodies. He was not a happy man, but he made some powerful art.

When the museum flushed us out (Please don’t rush me Frustrated Guard, I really wanted to take in all the details of those WWII Soviet propaganda posters), we started to walk along the bank of the Thames towards Tower Bridge and the Tower of London. All of London’s business community seemed to be hanging out bankside. Every pub was bursting with expensive suits and pantsuits. We were thinking about a drink, but didn’t fit the majority dress code.

Tower bridge is often confused with London Bridge, mostly because it strikes a much more impressive profile than it’s sing-song-y neighbor. It opened for crossing in the 1890s and sports a modern suspension design and drawbridge with Neo-Gothic towers so it blends in a little better with the medieval Tower of London next door. The Tower has held famous prisoners such as Anne Boleyn and counts the block where she lost her head and the collection of the Crown Jewels among its artifacts. But we didn’t check these out. Things were shutting down and we had one more iconic exterior to see before dinner.

We hopped underground and popped up in Holloway, a quiet suburb of London and home to Emirates Stadium, where the Arsenal Football Club works its high-profile magic. Michael was particularly enthusiastic about the excursion, saying it would be a great place to try some Indian food. The stadium was beautiful, but it seemed to be situated in a part of town far removed from any kind of food joint and our stomachs were getting impatient.

Michael hopped into a kiosk to ask about our options. We were in luck. On the next block, a Nepalese/Indian place had just opened its door. It was so new they didn’t have napkins yet. They also didn’t have seating. We ordered take-out (continuing to save our pence) and struck up a conversation with a young couple from the university nearby. They were shocked to see tourists so far afield and invited us to their apartment for some real plates and tableware. We politely declined, citing our packed schedule, but they did bring up the interesting question of where we would eat this stuff.

With curry and samosas in hand we returned to the kiosk where we received our tip, picked up English cider (I was almost carded, too. Why does that only seem to happen in London?) and headed back towards the stadium. We would picnic under the reflective gaze of the glass-swathed building and watch the sunset. Perfect.

With night approaching we returned to Westminster to see Big Ben and parliament lit at night. It was very different from the sweaty hubbub we had discovered earlier that morning. Small knots of tourists crossed the bridge and we had plenty of space to gaze over the Thames, glowing with the lights of Parliament and the London Eye.

It was time for an OSU Alumni moment. We arranged ourselves and flagged down a passing family. Michael explained we were trying to spell “Ohio” and the clock tower would make the “I.” The father was maybe a little confused, but took the shot. No good.

We needed another tourist. Again, failure. Okay, we would rearrange and use the London eye as one of our “O”s. The family we had snagged the first time was the only group in sight. Dad took the shot. This time things worked out a little better.

Frustrated Big Ben wasn’t working, we dropped onto the path along the river and patiently waited for a group of teenagers to stroll by. On the second attempt we were able to get this shot:

Now OSU has proof we’re still proud alums and they can’t revoke our diplomas.

But, it was time to call it a night. Tim and I had to get up the next morning to wait for Godot…

Cheerio!

The photo album again. The rest of the stories coming soon.