London

Since I already did a post from Sheffield, I'm going to skip over that weekend (though it was a lot of fun!) and head straight on to London. I got up ridiculously early Friday morning and got on a train from Norwich to London. Luckily, the train is only 1 hr 56 min (exactly). Then I took the Tube to my hostel, and wandered down the wrong street trying to find it...so much for being able to find my way around!

Finally, I got to the hostel and hung out while I waited for Allie to repeat the exact same mistakes I made trying to find the place. Once we checked in and got settled, we headed out for the Tate Britain museum. I must be honest, my already limited concentration for art museums is pretty much shot by this point. So we mostly just wandered aimlessly and talked. I did get to see some work by William Blake (who, along with being an artist, is one of the Romantic poets I'm studying in my Romanticism class. However, I happen to not like his work very much) and some by George Stubbs, who apparently does not actually know what a horse looks like. Unfortunately, he's praised as one of the premier horse painters. Okay, so some of his stuff is good, but a lot of it is just odd. Once we finished up there, we headed over to the British Museum. It was open late, thankfully, and I got to see the artifacts from the Sutton Hoo burial mounds, which was pretty cool, to say the least! Allie and I got a little obsessed with the Anglo-Saxon and Viking stuff. We also went to look at the friezes from the Parthenon (because Allie was just there. I'm jealous!). We went to a few of the gift shops, but missed the kid's shop by a hair. The other ones were disappointing. We came back to the hostel, went to Tesco, and had dinner, then went to bed.

Saturday morning, we got up and headed out to Windsor Castle. This was also pretty cool. We got the audio tour and again, wandered aimlessly for a while. It was impressive. I've decided that I like the Georgian style of decorating. We came back, went to Oxford street (to find the John Lewis flagship--this is apparently a tradition with us), and then tried (again) to go to the kid's gift shop at the British Museum. Again, we failed. So we went to the Tate Modern. It broke my brain, people. I mean, I'm not much of one for modern art, anyway, though I do like Surrealism (to a point), but this...especially when we got to the minimalist bit. One room had a film where the filmmaker had put paint directly on the film and had deliberately scratched it, setting it to really energetic, almost ear-splitting music. The next room was painted black with white pinstripes on the walls. In the stripes were different shapes--a triangle, a trapeziod, a square. The third room had various sculptures on the wall made out of neon lights. I couldn't handle it. It gave me a headache, and I came out of those rooms only to stare blankly at Allie and say, "It broke me." It was crazy. There was also one woman who did a series where she took a job as a cleaner at a hotel in Venice for a few weeks, and dug through the guests' stuff and documented it. It was creepy. Anyway, we got back late that night, and went straight to bed.

Sunday, we walked though Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park to go to the Victoria and Albert museum, which houses decorative art. We went through an exhibit on fashion (and I have decided that almost everything from the eighties should be trashed. Except me. And select other people). There was also this bit with plaster casts of famous places/things. This was incredibly exciting, because there was a cast of the Ruthwell Cross, as well as casts from Rosslyn Chapel, Notre Dame, and tons of other places Allie and/or I had visited. It was basically a short stroll through my travels of the past six months.

After that, we walked down the street to the Natural History Museums. We got to see dinosaurs! Pretty much, I just geeked out for a while and babbled incoherently about DINOSAURS! Um...yeah. Sorry, Allie. You ought to be used to it by now. So anyway, that was fun. And they had the best gift shop of all. To Allie's disappointment, they did not have many plant fossils, and none of what she was looking for.

Shortly after that, we picked up our bags at the hostel and head our separate ways to go home. That's the last time I'll see Allie until the summer, at the earliest (hopefully). I can't say I'm not jealous that she gets to go home, but there's a lot I have left to do.