National Gallery. London. As we've said in numerous past posts and E-mails, we love it when people come to visit. No matter what we may usually do on weekends (homework, watch movies, stare out the window), we love getting the monotony broken by seeing a familiar face and spending some time catching up. This time around we had the pleasure of meeting up with Lee and her friend T.J. in London. Lee we of course know from Chi Alpha. Will remembers that Lee was in his first class at UVA: Advanced Calculus. T.J. had spent two years at Oxford recently and met Lee through their work for the Navy in South Carolina.
Lee + TJ in Covent Garden.We started off at Trafalgar Square and then enjoyed some of the best fish and chips in London at "
The Rock Sole Plaice." By enjoy, I mean that we sat outside and nearly froze to death in the high winds. There wasn't much seating inside, but, when you're visiting a moderately sketchy eatery, you like to see standing room only. In case you were wondering, yes, it was totally worth it.
What visit to London would be complete without a trip to the British Museum? We've been there innumerable times at this point, but it doesn't take much convincing to get us there and it is always worth seeing the world's treasures on display.
A little bit of Greece...
...and a little bit of Egypt.Not to be outdone by some of its younger peers, the British Museum is sponsoring an exhibition of modern sculpture in what can only be described as a "where's Waldo" format. Basically, there are pieces of modern art strewn across the British Museum in various exhibition halls. It is, for lack of a better word, appalling. The art is entirely out of place, context, time, and sense. For example, see the sculpture "Siren," below. As
this BBC news article describes, the artist believes that Kate Moss is "an Aphrodite of our time." The Greeks were certainly into
odd things, but we weren't really sure that they would have appreciated Kate Moss' "beautiful" Yoga pose amongst the Parthenon sculptures.
Will is confused.There also was an exhibition by Damian "
A Dead Shark is not Art" Hirst that consisted of a nine foot high bookshelf full of fluorescent colored painted human skulls. Not that we would wish anything evil on anyone, but whoever at the British Museum thought this was a good idea is more of an artist, less of an archaeologist, and should be sacked.
Continuing in the traditional (or non-traditional) London mould, we proceeded to
Fortnum & Mason to show Lee the most ridiculous grocery store in the world. Whilst in F&M's basement wine cellar, we got a brief education on wine from T.J. who is quite the oenophile. In case you are curious, 2000 was an excellent year for Bordeaux; hence why you may find 1997's, '98's, '99's, and '01's, but almost never a 2000. Did you know that? Also, don't be afraid to try 'Rioja;' wine from the Rioja winemaking region of Spain. It's a fast climber and sure to be world-class in the next 5-10 years.
Elaborate window display at Fortnum & Mason.For dinner we visited London's Chinatown which was, for all intents and purposes, China. It might as well be called "Questionable Restaurant Hygiene"-Town. For example, T.J.'s eagle eyes spotted how one restaurant was quick to boast that they had a 3-star hygiene rating from the British rating authorities. All well and good, until you notice that this was three stars out of five. This indicated one of two things:
1. All the other restaurants in Chinatown do not even have a three star rating
-or-
2. The owners of this restaurant have no ambition to do any better than 60%
Shouldn't one strive for excellence in everything one does? Not in Chinatown. Nevertheless, we picked a very good Japanese/Thai/Chinese restaurant where we got nearly more ramen than we could eat for £7 each. Not bad, at all. Plus, the place was packed. In fact, every restaurant (well almost every restaurant) in Chinatown had a line out the door and into the street of people waiting for tables. Evidently, we've finally found
the place for cheap eating in London.
To close the night off, we stopped into the
Charing Cross Hotel Bar at Charing Cross Station. The super-swanky hotel has a nice, if a tad expensive, bar that was a quiet spot to keep chatting and hanging out.
All in all, we've found that no two trips into London are ever the same, but we're always glad for the time we get to spend with friends. It's always hard to say good bye, but we look forward to the next opportunity that we get to go walkabout in London.
By the way...Before Lee and T.J. arrived, we walked around the
National Gallery at Trafalgar Square (top photo). The collection was really good; particularly the collection of impressionistic art. Having not been to the Musee d'Orsay we can't say how it compares, but it was certainly more interesting than say,
this National Gallery(nah, Washington's alright).
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