After finding our apartment--booked through AirBandB, though this time not over a yoga studio--we dropped our stuff and went out for a walk around the city. Our first stop was at the Handle House Museum, as it was in the general direction of our evening activities and was open a bit later than some of the other museums. Handle was born in Germany, but lived for about 30 years in London, where he did a fair amount of composing. The museum was small, but had a number of nice touches, including a actual harpsichordist practicing in Handle's practice room. We were informed by the docent that she would be playing in Bucharest the following weekend. Ah, the life of an international harpsichordist!
That evening, after a fantastic dinner at a Malaysian restaurant, we saw the comic who spurred our trip: Andy Zaltzman. And I even got in a heckle (frankly, he should have known better, he asked how much we paid for the tickets and I yelled out "too much"), which resulted in a short conversation with him from our seat during the show. After the show, he hung around and we shook his hand and chatted a bit...no hard feelings that we could tell!
On Saturday morning, we spent some time walking around the city, following a walk suggested in our Lonely Planet guide through the "Square Mile"--the oldest part of London, which was the location of the first Roman settlement. The walk started near St. Paul's Cathedral, who's font yard is the location of an Occupy encampment. An interesting item regarding this encampment: the cannon chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral had resigned late last fall because he refused to be involved in any actions to remove the protesters, saying that to evict protesters would lead to "violence in the name of the Church".
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| Occupy London encampment in front of St. Paul's |
We did take a step inside the cathedral, but the admission price was a bit steep, so we decided to enjoy the view from the outside. Our walk continued to the Monument to the Great Fire of London, which you can climb to the top of and see some great views of the city, including St. Paul's. The fire had started in a bakery--a royal bakery, nonetheless--close by to the location of the Monument. The view from the top was quite good--we had clear weather as you can see--though hazy.
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| The Monument to the Great Fire of London |
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| View of London toward St.Paul's from the top of the Monument |
The remainder of the walk took us through a number of market areas (unfortunately, not open at the time of our walk) and at the end we found ourselves in Whitechapel, home to Jack the Ripper's murders. For the afternoon, we headed over to the British Museum. When we were last in London a few years ago, we had really wanted to see the Lindow Man, a body found in a bog in England back in the mid-80s. Unfortunately at the time, his area of the museum was under renovations, so we were unable to see it. This time we were more fortunate, and made our way straight to the exhibit. And it was pretty cool--the body is about 2000 years.
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| Bog Man! |
We also visited the Elgin Marbles, which are part of a set of marbles that were formerly part of the Parthenon in Greece. They were taken (with permission of the Ottomans) from Athens by the British ambassador around the year 1800 and given to the British Museum for display. There has been an on-going debate between the UK and Greece on where these sculptures should be, with each side saying, "we deserve to have them". The British Museum has a little pamphlet describing their position, which is available for reading in the gallery where the marbles are displayed--I personally think their claims of displaying them in context with the history (supported by other plundered artifacts) of the rest of the world are a bit dubious, but due to Greece's current financial status, the return of the marbles does not seem likely in the near future.
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| Elgin Marbles |
We needed to kill a bit of time before our evening activity and dinner, so we stopped by the National Gallery, and looked through their collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. Highlights include the forth version of Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Manet's Execution of Maximilian, which had been cut up into pieces (partially by Manet, for unexplained reasons) and then reassembled later by Degas. For you Bostonians, I just found in searching for the link above, that another version of this painting is on display at the MFA.
For our evening entertainment, we saw Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, the longest running stage play, with over 24,500 performances. It was a good show--and a thing to see when in London. Due to tradition, I can't tell you who-done-it, but it is in the Wikipedia article I linked to above, so, for those of you who wish not to know--Spoiler Alert!
Jason was headed out on Sunday, while I was headed north in England for work. We decided to get dim sum for brunch in London's Chinatown--and it was rather fantastic. I had not eaten such good Chinese since I was last in Boston.
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