Londonated!
Nov. 8th, 2004 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieIn the words of Ellen's sticker, I [heart] London.
This trip was a lot better than last time (which was wonderful as well, don't get me wrong) because a.) it was longer (four days instead of three), and b.) we didn't try to pack things in, and took more of a relaxed approach to seeing things, 'cause last time, whoa, we were exhausted. (Of course, we are going back two weekends in a row two weeks from now...)
Anyway. Thursday, Ellen and I got there around 1:30, and spent the afternoon lounging in the hotel and visiting the British Library, which was right up the road. We saw the Magna Carta, which was neat, if much shorter than I expected. There were various other fun things in there. especially the random samples from the national sound archives (Florence Nightingale, for instance, or Yeats and Seamus Heaney reading some of their poems).
The big thing that day, though, was that we had tickets for Phantom of the Opera. Ellen and I had dinner at a wonderful, if slightly pricey, Thai restaurant up the street from the theatre, which itself was wonderful, old and gorgeous.
So. Phantom. We had some of the worst seats in the house, way up on the third balcony, but that was okay for me as I'd already seen it and Ellen had Stewart's binoculars. Besides, it's all aout the music anyway. ;) And the story...which I read totally different from the other time I saw it, when I was fourteen and at the height of my teenage angst phase. Back then, it was all, "oh, wouldn't it have been nice if Christine and the Phantom could've ended up together, aw..." whereas now, it was more, "Run away, dude is PSYCHO!" Holy cow. The Phantom? Is totally the antisocial computer game addict who lives in his mother's basement and gets creepily obsessive about some girl. I mean, he had a staff that shot little fireballs. It was like they took a wrong turn at Doom or Quake. (And that staff has been the source of endless amusement for me. I almost had to leave the auditorium when he used it towards the end, I was trying so hard not to laugh out loud. It was just...little fireballs! Tiny ones! It was so a video game!) Also, I caught all the dirty bits that passed right over my teenaged head last time. Oh, my.
On a more literary bent--Christine is another incarnation of Faust. She so is. There's this guy in the floor who makes her sing good, then she gets caught in a contract she can't get out of, isn't allowed to love anyone...she's totally the Faust Book Faust, or maybe Marlowe's. Heh.
Finally, on a serious note, I really liked the actress who played Christine. She seemed to have more emotion than Sarah Brightman does on the soundtrack. *runs and hides from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
softstepshoes* In everything else, I think I'd give the first production of it I saw the edge, although that might be entirely to do with our seats. At any rate, it was still fabulous.
*
The next day, we went to the Victoria and Albert museum, and spent the entire day there, because holy man that's awesome. It's the kind of museum you bring a sandwich too and just wander around from opening until closing. It's huge and ornate and has a lot of staircases that don't go to all the floors, so you have to wander through galleries to get to various places on the six levels. I'm not sure what exactly the V&A bills itself as a museum of, but it was a lot of artifacts of life, basically--silver, pottery, wallpaper, furniture, clothing, toys...all kinds of stuff. We spent most of our time on the Britain 1760-1900 floor, because that was what we were supposed to see for class. Doesn't hurt that the Victorian era is my pet era. ;) We saw, among other things, a fantastically ingenious washbasin that had the effect of running water before running water was really around, a clock that looked like a Gothic church steeple, and a bunch of William Morris stuff. There were some peacock curtains that would look fabulous in the living room. Unfortunately, no shopping in the museum. (There was shopping at the gift shop, though! I ended up with a Peter Pan card game, which, if it turns out not to be fun to play, can just be taped up on my walls, 'cause the illustrations rock. I also got a little mini-advent calendar--no chocolate, but the various openings reveal another picture, and it was all Victorian and pretty and yay--and a postcard of the cover for "Quite Too Utterly Utter," an "aesthetic roundelay" that mocks Oscar Wilde, for which I adore it. Heh.) Oh, and the main entrance has a chandelier by Dale Chihuly, the same guy who did the one hanging in Storer! Aw, a Kenyon connection even in London. This one looks even more Medusa-like, and I'd hate to be the person working under it all day. Eeek.
The best part, though, was the "Discovery Room," where you could try on a corset and hoop skirt, which of course we all did. A random Asian girl came into the room while I was trying it on, and insisted on taking my picture a few times. Why did these ever go out of fashion? I want one now. Okay, I'd never be able to get through doors, but still. So cool. And the corset--loosened, of course, and none of that whalebone action--was actually quite comfortable--it gave me great posture, for once, and my back actually felt better than it usually does. So I think I'll have to buy an ensemble like that at some point in my life...
*
Friday night, we saw The History Boys for class, and that's all I'll say on that play. It wasn't as bad as Stuff Happens, but it was certainly not my favorite London memory.
*
Saturday morning was devoted to Trafalgar Square, touristy shopping, and wandering around Covent Garden. We tried to go on a backstage tour of the Royal Opera House, but apparently you have to book tickets in advance, which we will be doing for next time. Anyway, Trafalgar Square--we climbed the lions, sort of. It required substantial boosting from those on the ground, and then Ellen and I decided not to die and thus not to climb on the lions themselves, just pose at the edge. We wandered through one of those touristy shops, where I got twelve postcards for a pound that I'll have to mail to people, and a T-shirt with adorable cartoon representations of double-decker busses on it.
After not being able to get into the opera house, we wandered amongst the street performers outside the Covent Garden Market. There was a fabulous mechanical man with extendable arms and this cool noisemaker he used to "talk" with. Very impressive costume. I gave him all my spare change, then pennies from which he promptly tossed out onto the street. Ungrateful mechanical man. *pout*
Our other class-required play was Sweeney Todd, which has now become second only to Phantom in my list of musicals I adore. Whoa, that's awesome. Murderous barbers and blood and cannibalism, wheeee!
Er, yes. I think the main attraction is the juxtaposition of a musical about the true story of a London barber who goes into league with a lady who makes meat pies--he murders the customers, she bakes them up and sells them to people, becoming wildly popular because the pies are so tasty. Mmmm, priest, lawyer, doctor.
Okay, so it put us off Cornish pasties for a while...about twenty-four hours, to be exact, because we had some for dinner on Sunday. ;) Anyway, this production was "experimental," mostly in that the actors were also the pit orchestra. They all played at least one instrument in addition to singing and acting, and often played two or three. I don't know if that means they cut out any dance numbers in the original production or what, but it was very, very good. They had a great way of symbolizing a murder--the lights would go all red, one guy would blow a whistle, and one of them would pour some red liquid from one bucket to another. It wasn't as weird as it sounds, I promise. And I want to have the lighting designer's babies--they had a fairly small stage to work with, so what they did was have the floor and the back wall covered in slatted boards, and have light shining through to symbolize time of day, murders, etc. Mostly of the time it was this late afternoon-orange glow that lent a suitably evil feel to the whole thing without being distracting, and of course for murders it was red. It was really quite fabulous. The only bad aspect of the production was that all the actors looked out at the audience all the time--they didn't really interact with each other, which I thought wasn't such a smart choice, but it was a minor defect.
Ellen and Chandra went off to see Les Mis afterwards, while Whitney, Stewart and I wandered around trying to find dinner. We ended up back at Covent Garden, because we were right there anyway. We had an uninspiring, less-than-cheap dinner at some trendy bar/restaurant dealie after wandering around the Market--which is rather like a much more upscale version of Nashville's Arcade. Whitney got a scarf and some gloves from a vendor upstairs while Stewart and I stood at the railing overlooking the ground floor, where a three-piece classical group was playing Mozart and Ravel. It was very pleasant.
We were planning to see day-after-Guy Fawkes fireworks afterwards, but general exhaustion and lateness took over, and we crashed at the hotel.
*
Sunday morning, we went to the Spitalfields market (because we had so much money left to spend...right...), where I bought various presents for a lot of people--you'll know who you are when you get them--including myself. Specifically, I bought a gorgeous hair clip with purple jeweled butterflies on it. So pretty. I saw Threadneedle Street, too, which made me happy. So many amusing street and tube stop names in London...I especially like that one, Petticoat Lane, Piccadilly Circus, and Tooting Bec. Hee.
After an Indonesian lunch (found out what chicken satay is, and it's yummy) we went over to Oxford Circus because we'd heard about a department store that had done a Phantom of the Opera window display. We found it, and it was quite massive. No connection with the store; it was just for the movie coming out next month, apparently. Anyway, it was huge. There was also a street festival going on in Regent Street, which we wandered through. There were jugglers, musicians, unicyclists, etc. There were lights up and down the mile-long stretch of it, which we didn't get to see lit up because we were there in the mid-afternoon. Whitney and I were sitting outside a toy store when a street performer wearing a big fake nose and glasses and a clown outfit came up to us and called us anarchists, apparently because we were sitting on the sidewalk. Ellen, who was standing, was "civilized." Yeah, not sure about that, either. I think that guy needs to work on his act.
We were all exhausted after that and wanted to get some work done, so we bummed around in the sitting room of the hotel until it was time for our train--which was delayed remarkably little, considering the severity of the accident near Reading on Saturday and the fact that that train was going the same route mine was supposed to. I'm glad I didn't know much about that accident besides the fact that it had occurred until after I got back, or I would've been rather freaked out. What a horrible thing to happen...
Pictures from this trip, as well as the St. Ives trip last week, will be up soon. After I write this script for Wednesday's class, I am officially taking the week off to recouperate from the last two weeks and prepare for the utter craziness that will be next week and the week after. Ugh.
This trip was a lot better than last time (which was wonderful as well, don't get me wrong) because a.) it was longer (four days instead of three), and b.) we didn't try to pack things in, and took more of a relaxed approach to seeing things, 'cause last time, whoa, we were exhausted. (Of course, we are going back two weekends in a row two weeks from now...)
Anyway. Thursday, Ellen and I got there around 1:30, and spent the afternoon lounging in the hotel and visiting the British Library, which was right up the road. We saw the Magna Carta, which was neat, if much shorter than I expected. There were various other fun things in there. especially the random samples from the national sound archives (Florence Nightingale, for instance, or Yeats and Seamus Heaney reading some of their poems).
The big thing that day, though, was that we had tickets for Phantom of the Opera. Ellen and I had dinner at a wonderful, if slightly pricey, Thai restaurant up the street from the theatre, which itself was wonderful, old and gorgeous.
So. Phantom. We had some of the worst seats in the house, way up on the third balcony, but that was okay for me as I'd already seen it and Ellen had Stewart's binoculars. Besides, it's all aout the music anyway. ;) And the story...which I read totally different from the other time I saw it, when I was fourteen and at the height of my teenage angst phase. Back then, it was all, "oh, wouldn't it have been nice if Christine and the Phantom could've ended up together, aw..." whereas now, it was more, "Run away, dude is PSYCHO!" Holy cow. The Phantom? Is totally the antisocial computer game addict who lives in his mother's basement and gets creepily obsessive about some girl. I mean, he had a staff that shot little fireballs. It was like they took a wrong turn at Doom or Quake. (And that staff has been the source of endless amusement for me. I almost had to leave the auditorium when he used it towards the end, I was trying so hard not to laugh out loud. It was just...little fireballs! Tiny ones! It was so a video game!) Also, I caught all the dirty bits that passed right over my teenaged head last time. Oh, my.
On a more literary bent--Christine is another incarnation of Faust. She so is. There's this guy in the floor who makes her sing good, then she gets caught in a contract she can't get out of, isn't allowed to love anyone...she's totally the Faust Book Faust, or maybe Marlowe's. Heh.
Finally, on a serious note, I really liked the actress who played Christine. She seemed to have more emotion than Sarah Brightman does on the soundtrack. *runs and hides from
softstepshoes* In everything else, I think I'd give the first production of it I saw the edge, although that might be entirely to do with our seats. At any rate, it was still fabulous.*
The next day, we went to the Victoria and Albert museum, and spent the entire day there, because holy man that's awesome. It's the kind of museum you bring a sandwich too and just wander around from opening until closing. It's huge and ornate and has a lot of staircases that don't go to all the floors, so you have to wander through galleries to get to various places on the six levels. I'm not sure what exactly the V&A bills itself as a museum of, but it was a lot of artifacts of life, basically--silver, pottery, wallpaper, furniture, clothing, toys...all kinds of stuff. We spent most of our time on the Britain 1760-1900 floor, because that was what we were supposed to see for class. Doesn't hurt that the Victorian era is my pet era. ;) We saw, among other things, a fantastically ingenious washbasin that had the effect of running water before running water was really around, a clock that looked like a Gothic church steeple, and a bunch of William Morris stuff. There were some peacock curtains that would look fabulous in the living room. Unfortunately, no shopping in the museum. (There was shopping at the gift shop, though! I ended up with a Peter Pan card game, which, if it turns out not to be fun to play, can just be taped up on my walls, 'cause the illustrations rock. I also got a little mini-advent calendar--no chocolate, but the various openings reveal another picture, and it was all Victorian and pretty and yay--and a postcard of the cover for "Quite Too Utterly Utter," an "aesthetic roundelay" that mocks Oscar Wilde, for which I adore it. Heh.) Oh, and the main entrance has a chandelier by Dale Chihuly, the same guy who did the one hanging in Storer! Aw, a Kenyon connection even in London. This one looks even more Medusa-like, and I'd hate to be the person working under it all day. Eeek.
The best part, though, was the "Discovery Room," where you could try on a corset and hoop skirt, which of course we all did. A random Asian girl came into the room while I was trying it on, and insisted on taking my picture a few times. Why did these ever go out of fashion? I want one now. Okay, I'd never be able to get through doors, but still. So cool. And the corset--loosened, of course, and none of that whalebone action--was actually quite comfortable--it gave me great posture, for once, and my back actually felt better than it usually does. So I think I'll have to buy an ensemble like that at some point in my life...
*
Friday night, we saw The History Boys for class, and that's all I'll say on that play. It wasn't as bad as Stuff Happens, but it was certainly not my favorite London memory.
*
Saturday morning was devoted to Trafalgar Square, touristy shopping, and wandering around Covent Garden. We tried to go on a backstage tour of the Royal Opera House, but apparently you have to book tickets in advance, which we will be doing for next time. Anyway, Trafalgar Square--we climbed the lions, sort of. It required substantial boosting from those on the ground, and then Ellen and I decided not to die and thus not to climb on the lions themselves, just pose at the edge. We wandered through one of those touristy shops, where I got twelve postcards for a pound that I'll have to mail to people, and a T-shirt with adorable cartoon representations of double-decker busses on it.
After not being able to get into the opera house, we wandered amongst the street performers outside the Covent Garden Market. There was a fabulous mechanical man with extendable arms and this cool noisemaker he used to "talk" with. Very impressive costume. I gave him all my spare change, then pennies from which he promptly tossed out onto the street. Ungrateful mechanical man. *pout*
Our other class-required play was Sweeney Todd, which has now become second only to Phantom in my list of musicals I adore. Whoa, that's awesome. Murderous barbers and blood and cannibalism, wheeee!
Er, yes. I think the main attraction is the juxtaposition of a musical about the true story of a London barber who goes into league with a lady who makes meat pies--he murders the customers, she bakes them up and sells them to people, becoming wildly popular because the pies are so tasty. Mmmm, priest, lawyer, doctor.
Okay, so it put us off Cornish pasties for a while...about twenty-four hours, to be exact, because we had some for dinner on Sunday. ;) Anyway, this production was "experimental," mostly in that the actors were also the pit orchestra. They all played at least one instrument in addition to singing and acting, and often played two or three. I don't know if that means they cut out any dance numbers in the original production or what, but it was very, very good. They had a great way of symbolizing a murder--the lights would go all red, one guy would blow a whistle, and one of them would pour some red liquid from one bucket to another. It wasn't as weird as it sounds, I promise. And I want to have the lighting designer's babies--they had a fairly small stage to work with, so what they did was have the floor and the back wall covered in slatted boards, and have light shining through to symbolize time of day, murders, etc. Mostly of the time it was this late afternoon-orange glow that lent a suitably evil feel to the whole thing without being distracting, and of course for murders it was red. It was really quite fabulous. The only bad aspect of the production was that all the actors looked out at the audience all the time--they didn't really interact with each other, which I thought wasn't such a smart choice, but it was a minor defect.
Ellen and Chandra went off to see Les Mis afterwards, while Whitney, Stewart and I wandered around trying to find dinner. We ended up back at Covent Garden, because we were right there anyway. We had an uninspiring, less-than-cheap dinner at some trendy bar/restaurant dealie after wandering around the Market--which is rather like a much more upscale version of Nashville's Arcade. Whitney got a scarf and some gloves from a vendor upstairs while Stewart and I stood at the railing overlooking the ground floor, where a three-piece classical group was playing Mozart and Ravel. It was very pleasant.
We were planning to see day-after-Guy Fawkes fireworks afterwards, but general exhaustion and lateness took over, and we crashed at the hotel.
*
Sunday morning, we went to the Spitalfields market (because we had so much money left to spend...right...), where I bought various presents for a lot of people--you'll know who you are when you get them--including myself. Specifically, I bought a gorgeous hair clip with purple jeweled butterflies on it. So pretty. I saw Threadneedle Street, too, which made me happy. So many amusing street and tube stop names in London...I especially like that one, Petticoat Lane, Piccadilly Circus, and Tooting Bec. Hee.
After an Indonesian lunch (found out what chicken satay is, and it's yummy) we went over to Oxford Circus because we'd heard about a department store that had done a Phantom of the Opera window display. We found it, and it was quite massive. No connection with the store; it was just for the movie coming out next month, apparently. Anyway, it was huge. There was also a street festival going on in Regent Street, which we wandered through. There were jugglers, musicians, unicyclists, etc. There were lights up and down the mile-long stretch of it, which we didn't get to see lit up because we were there in the mid-afternoon. Whitney and I were sitting outside a toy store when a street performer wearing a big fake nose and glasses and a clown outfit came up to us and called us anarchists, apparently because we were sitting on the sidewalk. Ellen, who was standing, was "civilized." Yeah, not sure about that, either. I think that guy needs to work on his act.
We were all exhausted after that and wanted to get some work done, so we bummed around in the sitting room of the hotel until it was time for our train--which was delayed remarkably little, considering the severity of the accident near Reading on Saturday and the fact that that train was going the same route mine was supposed to. I'm glad I didn't know much about that accident besides the fact that it had occurred until after I got back, or I would've been rather freaked out. What a horrible thing to happen...
Pictures from this trip, as well as the St. Ives trip last week, will be up soon. After I write this script for Wednesday's class, I am officially taking the week off to recouperate from the last two weeks and prepare for the utter craziness that will be next week and the week after. Ugh.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 02:44 pm (UTC)