More museum pics!

ENJOY.

Museums, Museums, Museums...

One of my favorite things to do here in London is visit the many, many museums the city has to offer. Not only are they free to enter (FREE—to see all these masterpieces! FREE!), they are amazing and you could easily spend all day in one gallery. So far, I’ve been to the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Tate Modern, and I haven’t even been to half of the others I want to visit (the Clink Museum, the War Museum, the London Museum, the British Tate). Each one of these places has blown my mind and I thought I would dedicate a blog to some of these places. Starting with the British Museum, which is so impressive. They have an extensive collection of art from around the world and I spent what little time I had exploring the Egyptian, Greek and Mexican galleries of this seven acre museum. Yes, seven acres of AMAZING stuff… My favorites from the Egyptian collection included mummies and many a sarcophagus. But the most exceptional of these treasures was, for me, the Rosetta Stone. That’s right homies, the actual Rosetta Stone, the one that revolutionized the way we understood and interpreted language and Egyptian scripts. I remember learning about this in sixth grade and I was just blown away in its presence. The Greek wing housed friezes from the Parthenon. This, too, was super impressive; the rooms that held these artifacts were so vast! The Mexican artifacts included Aztec and Miztec artifacts like codices and weaponry. Also, beautiful sculptures and artifacts made of jade, stone, and human teeth and bones. There were also several contemporary pieces that played with lights and ratios. A lot of these places don’t allow photographs, like the National Gallery, and it’s a shame because these places have some of the most famous pieces, including works by Monet (many water lilies and bridges), Manet, Van Gogh, and on and on and on. I took pictures of the exterior and Trafalgar Square, which is in front of the museum. If you ever come to London, start your museum crawl here. The V&A was my least favorite of the bunch but I did score some good pictures.

London Food, Cooking and Going to Market (again and again)...

I was talking to my sister on the phone yesterday (Hi, Bere) and she asked if I was losing weight since, surely, the food in London must be horrible. Well, despite ALL the rumors from home, the food here is actually delicious! Maybe it’s because I’ve stayed away from the gross shit like kidney and fish pie and reached for all the eatable stuff (sausage, lamb, beef) and authentic Italian food in our hood (oh yea, and fish and chips) that I feel like I’ve maintained my buxom figure. Not just that, but if you know me then you know I can cook up a fucking storm in the kitchen and, as long as I have produce, I won’t starve to death. We’ve been doing a lot of cooking at home, tonight I made a chicken noodle soup from scratch, but I’ve also treated the flat to mince meat (ground beef) nachos, chicken and potato taquitos(tortillas came from Shane, the Irish Mexican I wrote about before), chicken and veggie stir-fry and all kinds of other delicious (and fattening) foods. I’ve compiled a video and some pics from our last trip to the market. I wanted you guys to see how beautiful the fruits and veggies are here!

The Tower of London

Okay, I’m back in blog mode! Weeks late and with so much to talk about but back nonetheless! If I still have readers, I thank all two of you. I thought I would start with something I completely left out in my last post, which was our visit to the Tower of London. I didn’t really know much about this place, other than the fact that it was super old and that a lot of people—royalty included—lost their heads there. Queen Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, the little Princes (I remember them most from Shakespeare’s Richard III), Thomas Moore, the list goes on and on. It’s a World Heritage site and, for me, one of the coolest places to see in London. There is lots of history here; all you have to do is look around. They house the royal jewels here and the White Tower has tons and tons of weaponry exhibits and stuff about the King’s horses, info about British currency, all kinds of (boring) stuff. One of the towers (because there are several, don’t let the name fool you) was used as a holding cell for the most elite prisoners and the walls are filled with graffiti, etchings into wood that have survived hundreds of years. It’s surreal to see the name ‘Jane’ carved in beautiful script or the phrase “The more suffering on Earth for Christ in this life, the more glory with Him in the next,” whittled into the wall above the fireplace. From the Tower of London you can see some of the most beautiful views of the city, including Tower Bridge. I was walking around the place taking pictures of windows and doors and archways because I found myself fascinated by the architecture. It wasn’t until someone said to me, as I was taking a picture of a small room with a seat and a beautiful window, “crazy that they used that as a toilet, huh?” that I realized I may have been taking the photos a little too far. Oh, I almost forgot about the ravens. There are ravens at the tower, seven of them today that have been there (not these exact ravens, of course) since the 1600’s. Legend has it that a psychic of King Charles (I don’t remember which) had a vision that if the ravens ever left the Tower of London, then the city would fall. So, Charles demanded that there always be six ravens at the Tower. The seventh one is a back-up, just in case something happens to one of the important ones. These guys were a little frightening; they eat blood soaked biscuits on a daily! I saw one trying to grab food out of a “litter bin” (trash can) and I got pretty close to take a picture, close enough for the damn thing to squawk super loud at me. I wasn’t about to provide the blood for their biscuits...