Honeymoon: Day Three in London

Wednesday, April 12, 2006. We got up fairly early, tossed down some soup & tea, washed up, then dashed out of the hotel to the easyInternetcafe near the Bond Street tube stop. I think we were checking out the status of our toptable.co.uk reservations.

It was upstairs of a Subways. Strange.

We then grabbed a Time Out London weekly guide at an HMV to see what was up for the rest of the week. This is another thing I recommend for London. It was worth the price (2.50 pounds) for the full coverage it had of the various events around the area, as well as information on lesser known corners of London.

We went to Frankie’s at the Criterion (near Picadilly Square) for lunch. We had dropped by the previous day to make reservations, so there was no wait. Actually, there would have been no wait anyway, but oh well. Between the two of us, we had pork belly (mostly tasty, but had a really strongly burnt area on the top that really made the dish unenjoyably bitter), bresaola (sp? it was completely different from what I was expecting based on what I’ve had in the past with a similar name), and penne primavera (flawlessly al dente, but nothing to get to excited about flavor-wise). It was ok, but underwhelming, given that it was rated well as a mid-rate restaurant. In overall pricing structure, it compared closely to Marcus Wareing at the Savoy Grill and to Gordon Ramsay’s Boxwood cafe, both of which were leaps and bounds better than this place. Alas. The decor was quite nice, however.

We crossed the *actual* Millenium Bridge to the Tate Modern after lunch. This view is from the Tate Modern side:

For some reason, I thought it would be a bit wider. Not a lot, but a bit. A word about the Thames is that it’s very narrow. It takes very little time — maybe 5 minutes at most — to cross it. So when you look at how far apart things are on the map for London, keep that in mind. Distances between any two closest Tube stations were anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes apart, and the terrain is pretty flat, so it’s pretty easy to walk. Not that walking didn’t totally kick our asses. We were popping Advils left and right, and half the nights, we took Tylenol PM. Oh noes! Addictions! Just kidding. “Day Seven in Paris” me says we are not addicted to painkillers.

The Tate Modern was interesting — some things, regardless of the fact that I had no context or history, just grabbed me right away with the illusion of action and/or use of color. I wish I had pictures or artist names to refer to, but I don’t, so it’s going to be really hard for me to try to figure out which ones they were. This is the one museum where I really regret not having ponied up for the audiotour. In London, most of the museums were quite accessible (National Gallery and British Museum, for example), but this was one a pretty big question mark for me. Seppo & A_B have had quite a discussion on this (will link later; me == lazy right now), which I largely agree with.

I’ve always felt that to some degree, anything that claimed to be art had to stand on its own merit, relying on an interaction between the consumer of the art and the art piece rather than having the artist need to make explanations to the consumer. I don’t like it when a director explains how the movie was supposed to be; the resulting creation is what it is regardless of what she/he intended. If you made a movie about two teens falling in love, you can’t claim you meant for it to be about time travel if there was no reference to time travel in the movie itself. So in some small way, I want modern art to be self-explanatory.

However, as a consumer of movies, I bring a lot of context to the movie-watching experience. I know what it means when there is a musical montage meant to show the passage of time. I know what it means when different lighting or color saturation or costuming is used to indicate a flashback. I know when the scene fades to black, it doesn’t indicate the light had gone out. If you showed a modern movie to someone who was just getting used to the very idea of “moving pictures”, they would not understand a large subset of cinematic shortcuts that I understand as a result of growing up in an environment & time where they are commonplace. I recognize now that it’s that type of context that I lack for appreciating art. And I think I want to understand more. Some works of art are so provocative and maddening precisely because they almost immediately seem “interesting”, yet without the vocabularly and knowledge of symbolism common to the art world, I feel that the deeper meaning hovers just beyond my grasp.

Anyway.

We were exhausted so we stopped for juice at the museum cafe.

Not the most interesting pic ever, but we weren’t allowed to take pics of most of the art there, so you get a pic of the cafe. 😀

By then, we had spent hours & hours walking around and were exhausted. We grabbed some early dinner sandwiches (Hoisin duck wrap, crayfish & rocket sandwich, chocolate “moose”, and caramel crunch cake) and drinks at Pret, then went to the The Comedy Store at… Picadilly Circus. I swear we should have just gotten a hotel in that area. 😀

We laughed for the full set of improv that evening, which was probably around 2 hours. I enjoyed absolutely every minute. The group had really snappy chemistry, so they were able to pick up and go when a piece was losing steam, which it rarely did. I have to say, the Brits know far more French on average than Americans, which should hardly be surprising, but I was surprised that they were able to have an entire improvised bit in French with which both the players and the audience seemed to be full onboard. Neat!

We stopped by the Food & News (a little “corner” store) near the hotel on the way in to our room to rest up from the long, enjoyable day.