Paris, Part II: A Moveable Feast

Exhausted after a long day spent running around on only three hours of sleep, we slept in until about ten on Saturday morning. Compared to Friday, we took a slightly more relaxed approach, spending the day enjoying the atmosphere of the city more than visiting tourist sites.

We spent the large part of the afternoon in the Latin Quarter, the neighborhood to the south of the Cathedral of Notre Dame known for its shops and cafes. During the 1920’s, the neighborhood was a favorite in the expatriate writer community. With ease we spent a couple of hours wandering the narrow, cobblestone streets, stopping periodically in different bakeries and stores. At one point, I bought a cheap yet fantastic baguette for a snack, and soon after we shared a package of fine chocolate. Later, we spent at least half an hour in a bookshop literally overflowing with old books. Amanda found a leather bound copy of an early edition of A Farewell to Arms, her favorite novel, in French. Before leaving the quarter, we came across a New Orleans-like brass band playing in the street (They were not particularly good). Although I am sure that the area is much more tourist heavy than it was ninety years ago, it was nice to contextualize the descriptions of Paris that I have been reading about for my independent study, particularly in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, by seeing some of the exact areas referred to in those books.

During the afternoon, we also visited Les Invalides, a hospital and recovery home for soldiers built by King Louis XIV. Militaristic and fort-like on the outside, we did not pay to go inside of the building to the see the museum, instead choosing to just visit the courtyard and the church on the south end of the complex. A wall with a giant glass window in the center of the church divides it into two separate chapels, allowing the king and his non-aristocratic soldiers to attend mass at the same time in the same building without necessarily being in the presence of each other. Relative to the splendor of the palaces that the king built for himself, the soldiers chapel, though grand in scale like the rest of the complex, remained sparse and simple in its ornamentation.

Although Napoleon’s tomb now rests in the King’s chapel, we did not pay to go inside to see it, concluding that none of us felt nearly awed enough by Napoleon to want pay to see his tomb. The French perspective on Napoleon proved intriguing throughout the weekend. My history courses have usually portrayed Napoleon as a temporarily successful conqueror whose penchant for imperialism was relatively unpopular and, fortunately, stopped by the British. Despite this foreign perspective, though, the French seem to treat him as a hero who fought for French dominance, which, admittedly, he did. As I will discuss in a later post, this draws an interesting comparison to Berlin, where the Germans, though conscious of their own historic notorious leader, have repudiated the “insane politics” of their national past.

Following that visit, we walked along the Seine back toward the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Michelle and Amanda shopped for souvenirs with the vendors selling out of large green lockers attached to the railing above the river while I did some shopping of my own at the souvenir shops across the street. Afterwards, we stopped for pictures outside of Notre Dame before going in for the Saturday night mass.

At the Cathedral of Notre Dame

From Left to Right:

Me, Amanda, Michelle

We went into the cathedral to be sure of getting a seat before mass and sat in the pews during vespers. It was odd to sit during a service while tourists still wandered around the building. The prelude to the mass began with a sinister sounding organ that called to mind the dark tone of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Despite the darkness of the music, though, its fullness was a relief after weeks of subdued masses in London. Interestingly, although I do not speak French, I felt much more engaged during the mass than I have at Latin masses in London.

Like some of the masses in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the Notre Dame campus, this one followed an hour time limit while recording for replay. Bright, unnatural LED lighting and a television camera on a crane created a strange juxtaposition in the gothic building, the oldest cathedral I had visited at the time.

During mass, a couple of young people sat behind us, and Michelle and I recognized one of them as a member of the Irish Guard. We caught up with them after mass and confirmed that they were, in fact, also Notre Dame students, so we had a short conversation, necessarily remarked upon the coincides of meeting Notre Dame students in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and posed for a picture before going our separate ways for the evening.

Outside of the cathedral after mass, we met up with Anna once again and returned to the Latin Quarter for dinner. During our afternoon in the Quarter, we spent some time checking menus and prices, looking for a place to eat dinner. Outside one restaurant, a gentleman had stepped out of the door to give us business cards for the restaurant, promising a free glass of wine with our meal. When we returned in the evening, he greeted us warmly and quickly found us a table.

More so than the previous night, this restaurant specialized in traditionally “French” cuisine. We all ordered set meals like the night before, and I had vegetable soup and a beef kebab with excellent ice cream for dessert. Anna ordered escargot for her appetizer, and the picky eater in me can proudly say that I tried one of the snails. Covered in a heavy pesto sauce, I did not particularly enjoy the chewy texture, but I did not immediately gag, as I may have when I was younger.

After two leisurely hours, we departed to do some final sightseeing. First, we took the Metro to the site of the Bastille, but, as many of you know, revolutionaries demolished it brick by brick, so there was nothing in the area to really see. Hoping to at least find a plaque or other marker for the site, we asked a few people in the area for directions, but everybody that we asked seemed very confused by our interest.

Next, we returned to the Arc de Triomphe to take a few pictures in front of the landmark at night. Michelle, Amanda, and Anna humored me, allowing me to play with the camera settings until I finally took a good picture. I’ll let the results speak for themselves.

At the Arc de Triomphe

(Notice the Eiffel Tower in the Background)

From Left to Right:

Michelle, Me, Anna

We finished our night tour of the city with stops at the Opera House, the Ritz hotel, and the hill of the Sacré-Coeur. Exhausted, we returned to the hotel to rest before our train back in the morning.

Overall, I enjoyed Paris even more than I expected that I would. The relatively relaxed atmosphere provided a refreshing contrast to the hectic pace of London. Unlike the standard pub food common throughout London, the food in the restaurants and bakeries showed a sense of delicacy worthy of the word ‘cuisine’. Much of the city has retained the feeling of an era long past, where the cars feel like the only sign of industrialization among fine stone buildings, street cafes, and cobblestone streets.

Despite this level of comfort with the city, though, it did not feel like a place where I would want to live. Perhaps it was the simply the language difference or the way that all of the people in the city – from waiters to people asking for money in the street – showed a much more confrontational manner than I have grown used to in London, where everyone ignores everyone else all of the time. Regardless, though, it did not have the draw that I feel in some cities – particularly the Twin Cities and Washington, DC.

Clearly, though, the fact that I have written two full posts about the trip shows my fascination with and enjoyment of Paris. With the account of my first trip now complete, my next few posts will be about spring break, beginning with Cinque Terre, Pisa, and Florence in Northern Italy. Those stories should be up soon.

Until then,

Joel

Paris, Part I: City of Lights

I have been debating how to go about writing this post. My first thought was that I should relate my trip to Paris as a narrative in a sparse, Hemingway-like prose, but I quickly decided that to do so would be a particularly self-indulgent act. Consequently, I will just write it in a manner and style similar to what I have been doing all semester. That being said, I do hope that the Eiffel Tower picture at the beginning piques your interest in the rest of the post.

After a short night of sleep, Michelle Letourneau, Amanda Koziel, and I met in the courtyard below the flats at four on Friday morning. There, we also ran into Amanda’s flat mate Anna O’Meara, who was travelling to Paris alone to explore the city ahead of a weeklong stay during spring break.

Rather than fly, we booked tickets on the Eurostar train through the Chunnel, the cheaper of the two options at the time that we made our reservation. Fortunately, this meant that, rather than venturing out to one of the airports, we only needed to walk up to St. Pancras Station, located directly between Kings Cross Station, which I will be using for a trip up to Edinburgh later in the semester, and The British Library, where I have been researching for my independent study.

The entrance to St. Pancras consists of a giant, Victorian façade with red brick walls and steeple like towers on either end, the grandeur of which embodies the heyday of the railroad system. Inside, the international terminal is a much more recent addition, with clean lines and glass barriers creating the security checkpoint – which reminded me of pre-9/11 airport security – and immigration stations. Officers from the French border agency worked the stations and granted us entry before boarding the train for France (we encountered the same system in reverse in France on our return). We arrived with plenty of time and waited, passports stamped, in the international terminal before they began boarding our train, at which time we followed ramps up to the massive St. Pancras Station, which houses about a dozen tracks of trains, some as long as eighteen large cars, as ours was. Without delay, we found our car and our seats, in which we promptly fell asleep after our 5:25 AM departure.

I slept most of the way through the UK and only awoke when we exited the Chunnel. (For those of you who are curious, it is really nothing more than a standard, dark tunnel, as I learned on the way back. Not that I expected it, but there are no portholes to the sea, and the train does not travel through the water.) At first, all that I could see were some green fields covered by fog. In the hour or so worth of travel between the end of the tunnel and Paris, the sun broke the horizon and began to burn off the fog, revealing idyllic, rolling fields with periodic bunches of trees similar to some of the less flat parts of the Midwest.

We arrived at Gare du Nord station around 9:30 AM local time, where we walked straight from the platform, past the heavily armed military patrol (insert “I didn’t realize that France had an army with guns” joke here), and onto the street in front of the station for our first real glimpse of the city. There were a couple of cafes in the area, and the train station – constructed out of the cities ubiquitous yellow-white brick – towered over most of the rest of the buildings. When I saw the traffic on the street, I found it comforting to realize that the cars drive on the right side of the road in France.

After our early morning, we were all ready for some food, so we found the café closest to the station – just across the street to the west – and tentatively went inside. Unsure what to do, we seated ourselves at a table, picked up a breakfast menu, and waited, hoping that we hadn’t offended anyone. Fortunately, a waiter came to our table after a couple of minutes and greeted us very politely. It was certainly disconcerting to hear his “Bonjour” as he greeted us. This was my first time travelling to a country where I did not speak the language. By pointing to objects on the breakfast menu, though, we did manage to order successfully. Our waiter did not seem too frustrated when we asked him to repeat our options a couple of times, and we eventually figured out what he was trying to communicate to us. I suppose that he probably sees plenty of people who do not speak any French in a café so close to the international terminal.

Satisfied for the time being, we set out in search of our hotel, which we found quite easily. Only a block south and east of Gare du Nord, the Hotel D’Amiens is a small hotel on a street of similar small hotels. Relieved to find it so easily, but unsure of the check in time, we went into the lobby. The woman working at the desk greeted me very politely, and I returned her “Bonjour” before pausing for a moment and then, embarrassingly, adding, “I’m sorry but I don’t…”, and she finished, “…speak French”. She smiled and laughed with a hint of a sigh as she said this, and I was relieved to see that neither my inability to speak French nor my lack of an attempt at doing so had offended her.

Surprisingly, our room was open, so we went upstairs to drop our bags off. Online reviews described the rooms as “outdated”, and that is certainly an appropriate characterization. There was little more in the room than the bathroom and the three twin beds, but the room was cheap and private, so it served its purpose well. The only major negative aspect of the room, as we would learn the next morning, was the bathing apparatus, which consisted of a tub and a water hose with a nozzle. Unfortunately, there was no shower curtain or place on the wall to affix the hose, which contributed to a strange bathing experience in the tub.

Lightened of our loads, we returned to the train station where, after making our way through all of the people asking for money, we found the correct line to purchase two, day long unlimited subway passes, a very worthwhile investment. The Paris Metro system seems to fit in between the two extremes of the London and Washington, DC subway systems. Like London, the system feels old in the sense that the distances between the lines within the stations suggest that the lines developed over time rather than appearing together as part of a cohesive, city wide plan. At the same time, the method of communicating the direction of the travel on the trains and on the maps feels straightforward, using the terminus point in either direction like the DC metro system.

Our first trip on the Metro consisted of a quest in search of the Loree Oboe Company, the point of origin for Michelle’s oboe. Although our preliminary research gave us the correct neighborhood, none of us had bothered to write down the address and, expecting a store with a showroom at ground level, we felt like we were on the right track when we saw that every other store in the area sold some type of musical instrument. However, only after searching up and down the block and with the help of the clerks in one of the other music shops did we finally find the correct building. Unlike what we expected, though, we found a giant blue door and a buzzer marked “Loree”.

We rang the doorbell and entered through the subsequently unlocked door, where we found another gate, like in an apartment foyer, and a gloomy room with only natural lighting. Once again, we rang the ‘Loree’ bell and ventured in through an unlocked door. At the top of the stairs, we found a closed door marked ‘Loree’. While we paused to decide whether or not to go in, a gentleman came up the stairs and walked into the ‘Loree’ room, so we followed him in. Inside, the darkness gave way to a brightly lit office. A young woman met the man and asked us to wait a moment for her to return. When she returned, she welcomed us to the store, showed us a small room with merchandise, and gave us a short tour. In our short visit, Michelle successfully saw the home of her oboe while the three of us once again experienced warm hospitality from the French family that ran the company, a sentiment that we encountered again and again throughout the weekend.

After completing this personal quest for Michelle, our pursuit of the tourist attractions began in earnest across the city at the Arc de Triomphe. At the center of a large roundabout, we found the massive arch as soon as we walked up the stairs from the subway station. Rather than pay to cross under the traffic to the base of the arch, we decided to just cross the streets around the circle to see it from every possible angle.

At the Arc de Triomphe

The Arc de Triomphe sits atop a hill at the western end of a key east/west axis that runs to the Louvre in the east and farther west to the newer financial district. A famous, wide boulevard, the Champs-Élysées, runs along this axis immediately to the east of the Arc de Triomphe. Although today expensive retail outlets line both sides of the street, the walk to Franklin D. Roosevelt Circle calls to mind the generations of history that have marched along the same path. Napoleon commissioned the Arc de Triomphe to commemorate major French military victories and to provide a spectacular location for triumphant marches by victorious French troops. In the two centuries since his reign, the Champs-Élysées and the Arc have provided the backdrop for victorious marches by Prussia, Nazi, and American troops upon capturing the city. Sometimes the French even get to use it, although the most common images depict conquering Nazi’s and liberating Americans along the boulevard during World War II.

At Franklin D. Roosevelt Circle – a name that surprised me much less so than Michelle and Amanda – we turned south to, finally, walk along the river Seine, where we saw Gran Palais before returning to the axis of the Champs-Élysées to walk through the Jardin des Tuileries. Smaller in scale than a modern park, the garden gave us our best reminder yet of the fact that we were visiting a country once governed by the most extreme of absolute monarchs. Filled with fountains and lined by large hedges and bushes, it was not difficult to picture a few nobles strolling quietly in the now public gardens. As in much of the rest of Paris, the sky felt wide open due to the expansive nature of the open space in the garden. We stopped for lunch – I had a chocolate crepe with almonds – in sight of the Louvre at the end of the garden.

Once we figured out how to pay for lunch – we did not expect the waiter to be carrying change – we walked over to the courtyard of the Louvre, with its traditional grand palace and modern glass and steel pyramid. Having seen the many pictures of the pyramid at the old palace already, the presence of the incongruous structure did not surprise me. Thinking about it after the fact, I realize that I have never really known the Louvre without the pyramid, so, although it certainly does not match the palace building, it did not necessarily feel out of place to me.

Between the Old and the New at the Louvre

Rather than join the long line waiting to enter the museum, we decided to come back later in the evening to take advantage of the extended Friday night hours in order to avoid the crowd. Continuing on from the courtyard, we looked for a gelato shop near the museum, but, unable to find one, we returned to the Seine and decided to cross the south bank of the river. As we crossed, we saw thousands of locks clasped to the steel mesh on either railing of the bridge, each with two names and often a date. While most of the love-locks looked relatively new, we also saw many that had begun to rust after years exposed to the elements. Altogether, the bridge covered in locks made for a subtle reminder of Paris’ reputation as the city of love.

We soon came across the island in the middle of the Seine, home, on its east side, to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Before finding the Cathedral, though, we had an experience at a café that many people may have characterized as French arrogance and prejudice against Americans but which, in reality, clearly represented a mistake on our part. It began when Michelle and Amanda stopped to buy ice cream from the street service counter of a café in the corner of a building. Many people – writers, in particular – often romanticize the café culture in Paris, and the concept of a Parisian café – blending indoor with outdoor in an open air establishment with chairs lined up in rows, occasionally broken by tables, facing the street – is unlike any other version of a café that an inexperienced American can imagine.

Excited to finally enjoy on of these cafes, we sat down at a table adjacent to the stand where they bought their ice cream. It was unsettling to, essentially, sit at a table on the sidewalk while pedestrian traffic passed by, but, at the same time, I could also easily imagine the opportunity for social engagement among city residents who know which cafes their friends and acquaintances’ tend to frequent. After we had been sitting for a few minutes, though, a waiter came up with menus for us to consider. When we pointed to the ice cream to imply that we had been served, he immediately and slightly brusquely asked us to leave. As we walked away, we realized that, not only had they purchased the ice cream as a takeaway and, therefore, not paid to use a table but also that we had sat down on the side of the building with a different café than the one that sold them the ice cream.

As I suggested, where many people many have interpreted the brusque waiter as throwing the Americans out of the café, we immediately recognized that we were in the wrong and that, therefore, the waiter acted reasonably in asking us to leave. Slightly confused but thoughtful, rather than indignant, we walked east along the island in search of the Cathedral of Notre Dame while they finished their ice cream. Clearly visible on the south side of the island, we only spent a brief time at the cathedral – once again planning on returning later, in this case, the Saturday night mass – before finding a train station to take us to Luxembourg Gardens directly south of the cathedral. Following a minor mix up in a confusing station that saw us get on the wrong train, initially, we eventually reached the garden.

Like the other royal garden that we walked through earlier in the day, the now public Luxembourg Garden sits on a former private estate. Similar to the cafes, chairs and benches line the paths and central areas of the park. By the time that we walked through in the late afternoon, all of these seats were full of silent people watching the foot traffic in the garden, making the sound of feet crunching on the pervasive gravel, rather than grass, seem loud in the reflective park.

We wandered the park for a while before catching a subway train back to the Louvre, where we met up with Anna once again and, at her suggestion, departed for dinner in Montmartre. After exploring the area for a short time, we eventually found a restaurant offering a well-priced, set menu along a side street a few blocks from the Sacré-Coeur, near the top of the hill. Compared to our interactions with the wait staff in the morning and at lunch, it was a relief to have Anna along, since, unlike the rest of us, she speaks French.

Following a leisurely meal, we caught a train back to the Louvre, where our student ID cards were good for free admission. Visitors access the museum through passageways branching off from the central entrance beneath the pyramid, and it is inside this atrium that the pyramid makes more logical sense than it does on the exterior. Rather than feeling cramped and like the underground room that it is, the pyramid creates the feeling of a large, open space, artificial as it may be. I can imagine that, on a crowded afternoon, this makes the entrance feel much less claustrophobic than it would if they had simply added an underground chamber.

We went into the museum with the intention of seeing the Mona Lisa since, as we expected, there were very few people in the museum late at night. After initially heading to the wrong wing of the building, where we saw the state apartments of Napoleon III, we rushed back through the atrium beneath the pyramid and into the wing with most of the paintings. It was odd to know that many of the works that we were rushing past were beautiful productions by equally famous artists, but we had our goal in mind and hurried, afraid that they may close of access, as the museum was closing down for the evening.

Finally, we came to a room about the size of a small gymnasium. A large wall stood in the center of the room and, through the throng of fellow tourists, we could see the Mona Lisa, the only painting on that particular wall. Two guards, a rope, and a thick pane of glass protected the painting. I have heard it said that the small size of the portrait surprises many people and that the crowds waiting to see it can be unbearable, at times, so I had expected a small, cramped room with heavy security requiring visitors to file by almost single file. In reality, it not feel particularly small for a portrait – although it did feel small relative to the massive wall space allotted to it – and it surprised me just how accessible it was for viewing. We guessed correctly that the crowd would be relatively small late at night, and we quickly made our way to the front of the pack for a closer look and a chance to take pictures. Our main goal accomplished, we continued through the galleries of paintings until the museum closed. Although our stay was far too short for such a massive collection, we were glad to see the biggest attraction.

To finish the first day of our whirlwind tour of the city, we took the metro to the Eiffel Tower, which we had heard we absolutely needed to see at night. There are no stations directly adjacent to the tower, so we chose to get off at a stop just across the river to the north of the tower, and, as we turned the first corner after exiting the station, we came upon the lit tower down the hill in the distance. Rather than go any closer, we decided to just enjoy the view with the other tourists and the souvenir vendors from a plaza overlooking the tower. We concluded the day on a high note, taking pictures, including one from the beginning of this post, and enjoying the view of the golden tower in the distance.

At this point, I will split the post and share part of the weekend while I finish writing about Saturday in the city. I am sorry that I did not get this up sooner (the trip was two weeks ago, now), but I was only in London for four days after the trip before leaving again for a ten-day spring break. Over the course of the next two weeks, I will finish the Paris post and then include posts on Northern Italy, Germany, and Ireland.

Until then,

Joel

A Short Post Between Papers

Where did February go? I am utterly shocked that it is already March.

I am quite sorry that it has been nearly two weeks since I published my last post. In the week ending this Thursday, I have approximately seven thousand words worth of assignments to submit for various classes. That amounts to just over forty percent of the length of the current collected posts for this blog. As a result, I have had less time for exploring the city than in previous weeks and, as a result, less material to write about. However, there are a few things that I would like to be sure to share, with highlights including a tour of the Theatre Royale Drury Lane, a Saturday morning visit to Borough Market, and a trip to Lloyds of London with my economics class this past Monday.

On the weekend immediately after my last post, I did not take a Saturday trip out to an idyllic town with a castle. Instead, I kicked off a quiet weekend of working days and social nights, such as yet another Saturday night cooking dinner. My Mexican lasagna has become very popular.

Tuesday afternoon brought a second theater tour in as many weeks, this time at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in Covent Garden. Although the current building only dates to the early nineteenth century, it is the fourth theatre at the location since Charles II permitted the construction of a new theatre on the site in the years after the fall of Cromwell’s strict protectorate. The theaters on the site have hosted every conceivable type of entertainment and have a strong history of Shakespearean theater, although today the theater produces major musicals.

Two staff members led our class around the theatre, trading off throughout the tour to disappear and change costumes, allowing them to appear as several different ‘characters’. Despite these unnecessary theatrics, they did provide a thorough tour. Following a short introduction in the lobby, we walked upstairs and into the royal box, which, though decked in gold, did not live up to the extravagance of royal residences such as Windsor Castle. In particular, I thought that the painted marble columns seemed unusual in a royal box. We next moved into the balcony inside the theater itself. On either side of the room, the four levels of ornate boxes seemed as prominent as the stage itself, recalling a time when the aristocracy gathered in those boxes to perform as much as the actors on the stage. From the theater, we made our way through the prince’s box – a significantly less extravagant room built after a major fight between King George III and his son, the prince, in the lobby of the theater – and into the basement of the building, where we saw the massive steel beams and the combined hydraulic and electric systems used to move the stage from below ground. Backstage, we saw the standard work area behind the very deep stage as well as the door cut into the back wall to allow an elephant to enter the stage before concluding in the lobby where we began.

That evening, I attended yet another performance, this time south of the river at The Young Vic Theatre. From the exterior, the building seems more like a restaurant and bar than a theater, as a two-story restaurant with big glass windows looks onto the street, hiding the smaller theater in the back of the building. Their prices were fairly reasonable, so I bought a drink before the show, a very popular satire called Vernon God Little, which tells the story of the media circus surrounding a young man accused of aiding a school shooting perpetrated by his closest friend. At the time, I did not particularly enjoy the show – the acting was disappointing, as everyone seemed more interested in perfecting a Texas accent than in acting the part – although in retrospect it did certainly succeed at satirizing the media frenzy surrounding tragic event of that nature.

With my first paper due on Thursday, my week quieted down after that busy Tuesday. On Thursday night I cooked yet again, attempting to make hamburger stroganoff. Unfortunately the sauce never thickened (I realized too late that I should have just added more flour, which I did not think to do at the time), although it did, somehow, taste right.

Friday featured a full day of work and research at the British Library, so I rewarded myself on Saturday morning by finally visiting Borough market. Known for the quality and character of its shops, it lived up to much of the hype despite the fact that it was raining. Located next to Southwark Cathedral just south of the Thames, Borough Market consists of groupings of stalls underneath a railway bridge. The owner of each stall sells his or her particular specialty item, creating an environment where people are selling high quality breads, cheeses, jams, and sauces, among a wide variety of other items. Even better than the presence of all of this food, though, is the fact that every stall offers free samples – the ultimate draw for college students living on a tight budget.

When I had finished making the rounds on free samples, I bought a brownie that was really more fudge than brownie and then took the Tube over to the London Centre, where I spent the rest of the afternoon working. Late in the afternoon, some friends happened to stop in the library while I was working, so, content with my output for the day, I joined them for happy hour at Tiger-Tiger, a bar between Trafalgar and Piccadilly Circus, where we shared a Long Island Iced Tea pitcher five ways. Afterwards, they had tickets to a show, so I returned to the flats, and, later in the evening, finished a little bit more work.

I followed a Sunday full of yet more work, this time on a paper about Keynesian economics, with a Monday afternoon visit to the Lloyd’s of London insurance market with my economics class. Although I still cannot adequately explain what they do, in general, Lloyd’s provides a building and organizational structure in which brokers representing clients seeking insurance policies can meet with underwriters willing to accept such risks in exchange for premiums. As a result of this flexibility, an extremely high percentage of the total volume of insurance deals worldwide use Lloyd’s. In practice, this means that, as our guide told us, the saying goes that you can have (almost) anything – ranging form your oil tanker to your water skiing elephant but not including your government – at Lloyd’s. Arriving in small groups, we met a guide in the reception area. He took us upstairs to a conference room where he explained the history of Lloyd’s and the work that Lloyd’s does before giving us a tour of the building. In addition to seeing the underwriting floors, we also saw some of the major historic artifacts in the building, such as the Loss Book – which harkens back Lloyd’s origins as a market for marine insurance and records all total losses at sea – and the rostrum bell – once used as a signal of information about late arriving ships, now used to indicate major world events, such as the 9/11 attacks.

In addition to the remarkable business that goes on at Lloyd’s, the building is like few others in the world. Designed during the late 1970’s and built in the 1980’s, the building feels more like a building from the past decade than from either of those eras. Lloyd’s desired a building with wide open spaces for the vast underwriting desks and simple floor plans that easily convert between open floor and offices. Consequently, the architect chose to place many of the traditional internal systems – elevators, plumbing, air conditioning, etc. – on the exterior, leaving the building wide open on the inside. Concrete pillars form the core of the building, running all the way from the third floor up to the great glass windows at the roof, creating an enormous central atrium. Natural light floods this core of the building and runs across the wide-open underwriting floors. With nothing but floors, furniture, and light fixtures on the inside, the building feels incredibly open in its simplicity. Although the aesthetic of this interior simplicity does not carry through to the outside – with its bulging pipes and the building systems – the building nevertheless feels incredibly futuristic. We concluded our visit with a ride in the class elevators, which took us above the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral just down the road and gave us a beautiful, if short, view of the whole south side of London.

That, too, is where I will conclude this post. I have one more paper and one CORE band application to finish, and then I get to reward myself by going to Paris for the weekend.

I think it’s a good trade off, and I look forward to sharing the stories and pictures from that trip in my next post.

Until then,

Joel

Big, Two-Parted Post: Part II

Since this post continues upon an order set out at the beginning of my last post, I am just going to jump right in and begin with my Friday morning of tour of Mansion House. Located near the Bank of England, Mansion House is the official residence and office of the Lord Mayor of London. Originally built in the eighteenth century, today the building’s main use is as a host for the Lord Mayor’s large social events, in addition to including his office and a private apartment. One of the law professors had arranged a tour for the law students and, when not all of then could attend, invited undergraduates to fill the empty spaces. Fortunately, I was near a computer and secured a spot soon after she sent the email invitation.

Before I continue describing the visit, I would like to digress for a short explanation of the geographic and political circumstances that require me to differentiate between the Lord Mayor of the City of London and the Mayor of London. Modern London breaks down into thirty-two different boroughs, each of which equates to either a neighborhood or, in the areas farther from the Thames and on the outskirts of London, a former small village. Islington, for example, is the name of the borough that is home to our flats, and, at one time, it was a separate village to the north and east of a much smaller London. Westminster in the name of the borough that houses such famous sites as the Houses of Parliament and, not surprisingly, Westminster Abbey. The City of London is yet another such borough directly to the east of Westminster; famous landmarks include St. Paul’s Cathedral and the large financial district. Although I say this with only a limited experience in New York City, together, Westminster and The City of London seem to make up the London equivalent of Manhattan, as the two boroughs include many of the famous places at the top of the lists of typically “London” locations in addition to the city’s financial center.

The Lord Mayor of the City of London, then, serves in an appointed position that dates back hundreds of years. He only represents the borough of the City of London. Historically, the position developed as the members of the City’s trade guilds selected a leader from among themselves for a one-year term. Today, the position is largely ceremonial – although he does spend a great deal of time travelling internationally to advance the economic interests of the City of London – and requires a wealthy man, as he must pay for all of the banquets held at Mansion House throughout his one year term at his own expense. In contrast, the Mayor of London is a relatively new position – it has only existed since the year 2000 – that provides a leader across all of the boroughs. A directly elected position, this mayor ranks ahead of the leaders of the boroughs. Mansion house belongs to the Lord Mayor of the City of London.

From the outside, grey stone work and the street side portico with Corinthian columns allow Mansion House to blend in well with the surrounding financial buildings, such as the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. Although this street side display seems to indicate a main entrance, interior renovations have instead created a guest entrance along the western side of the building. Our group gathered outside of the wooden door marking this entrance. Once most of our group had arrived, one of the law professors excitedly used the real knocker on the door and, surprisingly, the porter soon opened the door to invite us inside.

After a short wait and a late arrival (all of the undergraduates arrived on time) the porter began our tour. We had entered through the entrance used by guests during official functions and, consequently, we saw the small security checkpoint and the large cloakroom, which sits upon visible stones that date to the original construction of the building in an area once used for servant gatherings. The waiting area outside of the cloakroom also included marble busts of a few of the former Mayors.

As we moved up the stairs into the main section of the house, we began to see the opulence of the building. Covering the walls of the staircase were a few of the approximately eighty paintings from their collection of Dutch and Flemish works. Together, the value of the collection is approximately one hundred million pounds. If you would like an estimate for that value in dollars, just multiply by 1.66. I must say, too, that the paintings certainly deserve the value placed upon them. With crisp lines and rich hues of blue and green, the intricate nature scenes have a clean beauty. The paintings appear throughout the house, and most them are either along the entry staircase or in one of the large side drawing rooms.

On our left as we came to the top of the stairs we looked in at an open grand hall with the mayor’s offices one either side and access to the former main entrance on the far end. We stood in an adjoining open hall with a high ceiling overhead. Hanging from the ceiling were enormous crystal chandeliers. Apparently, within England, only the chandeliers in Buckingham Palace eclipse them in scale and grandeur. Imagine an inverted, fully frosted and decorated six-foot wedding cake, but constructed with crystal and hanging from the ceiling.

We continued on through a side room used for smaller gatherings and meetings before walking through a door and entering the enormous Egyptian Room, the grand dining room, which bore no visual reference to its namesake. Columns ran from the floor to the gilded arched ceiling. Stained glass windows marked either end of the massive room. Replicas of the Lord Mayor’s mace and sword hung crossed in front of red velvet over the head table. Golden jugs comparable to the trophies that golfers receive when they win major championships sat spaced along the tables in anticipation of the evening’s banquet.

A final side room featured more of the paintings from the Dutch and Flemish collection in addition to a set of chairs made of a dark wood with red velvet cushions. Distinctive gold lions protruded from the arms of the chairs. Although I forget the number, the whole collection is worth some number of millions of pounds. Red ropes politely discouraged guests from using the chairs, although some, such as Prince Charles, do receive permission to sit in them, but, as the porter indicated, “he’s special.”

The final stop on our tour brought us into the most spectacular room in the entire building: the vault, which contains all of the gold and silver treasures belonging to Mansion House. We first entered the gold room; a smaller, less well-lit room in the back corner held the silver. One case held all of the ceremonial swords that the Lord Mayor uses, such as a black sword, last used for Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral, and a sword with a scabbard covered in pearls. Other cases held the Lord Mayor’s official sword, mace, and chain of S’s, all of which are so old and fragile that they remain in the vault at all times while the Lord Mayor uses replicas. Some cases held gifts from foreign dignitaries, a gilded model of a fort from Saudi Arabia comes to mind, while others held the parting gifts left by departing Lord Mayors in a now defunct tradition.

Friday night brought yet another adventure as I travelled across town with Cat, Hal, and Nick to meet up with Kyla, Lauren, and Michelle for dinner at an Italian restaurant followed by a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Surprisingly, the evening included my first ride on the Tube, which, overall, was not much of an adventure. Not surprisingly, all of the basic elements of using a subway system – scanning your payment card, standing on the right on the escalator, and making sure that you get on a train going in the correct direction on the right line – are exactly the same as the other subway that I have experience with, the Washington, D.C. Metro. At the same time, though, unlike the Metro – which is clearly a centrally planned system implemented over a short period of time that emphasizes an open feeling in stations and ease of use by inexperienced tourists – the Tube is clearly a conglomeration of lines built separately to the point that today they create a complex system that, while fitting for a sprawling city like London, can seem daunting to a first time rider. Once you get used to reading the markings regarding train direction, though, it’s really very easy.

Unfortunately, I do not remember the name of the restaurant where we ate, so I will just quickly say that it was Italian, near Hyde Park, and enjoyable but, clearly, not instantly memorable. Immediately after dinner we walked over to the museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A) dates to an exhibition during the middle of the nineteenth century that led the government to begin the collections and, ultimately, build the museum building. Inside, the museum’s collection feature decorative art – such as statues, furniture, and clothing, among other objects – from throughout the world dating back thousands of years, although most of the works date to the past thousand years. Also notable is a grand courtyard, which includes a small wading pool, in the middle of the building. At night, lights illuminate the carved parapets on the top of the walls that tower over the four sides of the enclosure.

Following the night out on Friday, Saturday morning began with a race. Michelle, Cat, Hal, Nick and I had decided to make a day trip down to Arundel, a small town about an hour and a half southwest of London by train, at the recommendation of both of the program’s rectors. However, since I am attempting to live on a budget and I do not mind walking long distances, I decided to walk to Victoria Station instead of taking an early bus with the others. I walked out of the flats at 8:07, eight minutes before the others had planned to meet, and arrived at Victoria station approximately forty-five minutes later, giving me a per mile pace of 14:31, meaning that I walked at about half the pace that could run the same distance. By the time that the others arrived, I had already figured out which train we needed to catch, which platform it was on, and which cars we needed to be in.

As it is farther from London than Windsor, Arundel offers much more a small town experience than the town that we visited the weekend before. From the train station just outside of town, you can see the massive castle complex and the Catholic cathedral that crown the hill at the center of the city. We joked about how, from so far away, it looked like it was “only a model”. Up close, though, it dominates the skyline.

"It's only a model..."

Arundel Castle from the town

Before making our way of the hill, though, we stopped for an early lunch at a place called Belinda’s 16^th Century Restaurant. When we arrived just before noon, they were just beginning to serve lunch. I ordered a red pepper and lentil soup that came with a hearty piece of warm bread, exactly the type of fulfilling meal that I was looking for. The restaurant was in the lower level of an old building and felt like a large coffee shop; based on the breakfast dishes at many of the tables, it seemed like a good place to stop for tea. After lunch, Cat, Michelle, and Nick went in search of dessert while Hal went to purchase a gift for his parents. I met up with Hal when he was done. During the confusing process of finding the others, Hal and I bought dessert of our own before reconvening with the rest of out friends at the top of the hill, where a very nice tourist kindly took a poorly framed, overexposed picture of our group in front of the castle.

Just up the road from the castle, we stopped in an old monastery church and courtyard before going into Arundel Cathedral. At first, the building seemed like it could date back to the years before the reformation, a surprise, since the government took possession of all Church lands at that time. As it turns out, although the building appears old from the outside – with all of the buttresses and stonework of a Gothic cathedral – it only dates to the middle of the nineteenth century. When first built, it merely served as a grand church for the area, only to receive the designation of cathedral as the diocese expanded years later.

After exploring the interior of the cathedral, we stopped at a pub across the street called the St. Mary’s Gate Inn for a pint in their courtyard on a beautiful afternoon. A sign on the building says that it was first built as a farm dwelling in 1525, but the interior of the pub did not show it, suggesting a recent renovation. I ordered a relatively hoppy beer and, in the process, learned that do not particularly enjoy hop-based beer compared to others that I have tried.

We all split up for the last hour or so before meeting our train. I began by continuing on a path along the road past the cathedral, but it quickly led out of town, so I turned around. Across the road from the cathedral, I entered a massive park directly north of the castle. At first, the path led along a wall and through a small thicket of trees. The tree line opened onto a vast field with rolling green hills and periodic thick bunches of trees. It looked exactly like the stereotypical idea of the English countryside as seen from the top of a hill.

Adding to the striking beauty of the scene was a lonely stone tower standing in the center of the nearest field. Although the stonework and decorations compared to the windows and arrow slits seen on any castle, its small size – just three circular, two-story towers arranged in a triangle and connected by walls of a similar heights – suggested that it may have been a guard tower related to the nearby castle. Stumbling upon such a unique structure located on an idyllic hill in the middle of an expansive countryside while wandering alone through a town that is approximately twice as old as my home country seemed to encapsulate many of the major aspects of the study abroad experience. Surprisingly, I was the only one in the area. Besides a few people who looked like local residents walking on the path through the park, I did not see anyone else nearby, and nobody else even stepped off of the path for a closer look, as I did.

Hiorne Tower

(I am particularly proud of this picture)

Research after the trip turned up very little information about the tower. Its name is Hiorne Tower after the architect who designed it an oversaw its construction during the eighteenth century, making it much younger than the nearby castle. Apparently, Hiorne built the tower in order to convince the Duke of Norfolk, the owner of the castle, to allow him to undertake extensive renovations in a similar style on the castle. However, Hiorne died before he could begin work on the castle itself and only completed the tower in the area.

We regrouped in town and walked back to the train station to return to London. At Victoria Station, we took a bus back to the flats (I had proven my point in the morning and did not feel the need to walk). We regrouped for dinner with Kyla and Lauren, who had spent the day at Oxford, as well as Nick Brandt, and I made a pasta with chicken, vegetables, and peanut butter sauce, which turned out alright, although I think that I both burned and made too much of the sauce, which seemed to overpower the vegetables. After dinner, we stayed in the flats for a night of thoroughly enjoyable conversation, including a long stretch with one of our rectors, Ric, when he stopped by during rounds.

On Sunday morning, I slept in and went to the noon mass at St. Anselm’s Parish near Covent Garden, where I ended up running into Nick Brandt. Apparently, St. Anselm’s noon mass is a sung Latin mass, although it did not have the grandeur of Westminster Cathedral’s choral Latin mass. Unfortunately, I quickly disengaged from the chant heavy mass. A couple of times during mass, I realized that the chants in an old and foreign language reminded me of the brief videos that I have seen of the call to prayer and of Arabic prayer services in Islam. On the one hand, this gave me a new perspective on the argument that the changes to the mass since Vatican II have disconnected the mass from its longstanding traditional roots. However, raised on a mass that allows me to understand the significance of the traditions in my own language, I now have a greater appreciation for that fact, a particularly relevant issue in light of the upcoming implementation of the new translation of the missal. Seeing the continuing popularity of the Latin mass here – most churches here seem to offer one every Sunday – also allows me understand articles such as the one that I saw in the news this week, which suggested that the Catholic church in England does not expect the same opposition to the new translation that is budding in American and Ireland.

Thank you for allowing me that short editorial. I will make a greater effort to avoid those in the future. On the way back from church, we walked past the Knights Templar Pub, where we saw their Valentines Day meal deal of two steaks and a bottle of wine for only sixteen pounds, so Nick arranged for a large group of people to go to take advantage of the deal on Monday night. About a dozen of us ended up going.

Tuesday night brought my theater class to the National Theatre for the second consecutive week. We began with a tour of the building, which, for the most part, consisted of seeing the three theaters and included only minimal backstage exploration beyond that. However, we did learn about some of the fly, platform, and lift systems that they use, allowing them to run up to three shows at once in each of their two largest venues.

After the tour, we saw Greenland in the proscenium theater. A new play, it focused on issues related to climate change by intertwining a series of stories confronting the issue in the modern world. The show’s production values were excellent, with spectacular visual effects – including the use of digital projections on the back wall – and strong acting from the ensemble cast. Unfortunately, the show suffered from poor writing. While it confronted its blunt issue – global warming is bad – very well, it lacked subtlety and did not go far enough into depth with the story lines. As a result, it has received very poor reviews, and the theater was only about half full.

Now that I have finally made it through all of the events that I mentioned at the beginning of my last post, I will conclude with the events of the day that passed while finishing this one.

Before going to the National Theatre on Tuesday, Michelle, Hal, Nick, and I stopped at the Royal Festival Hall next door, where we purchased tickets for the Wednesday night performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. To our surprise, we learned that they sell students tickets for only four pounds, practically a steal.

Wednesday night marked my first time seeing a professional orchestra, and it was a phenomenal experience. The concert hall in the Royal Festival Hall is an enormous, wide-open room with two tiers of stadium seating on the first level in addition to a balcony above the second tier. Boxes seats on the sides take the form of rectangles pulled diagonally out of the sidewalls. A distinctive royal box, marked by a woodcutting of the royal emblem, sits among the boxes on the right wall. Our seats were in the second row of the second tier on the lower level.

All of the musicians, particularly the strings, possessed a subtlety of technique that they demonstrated through sudden, drastic changes in dynamics and through imperceptible entrances. Visually, too, the orchestra provided a stunning show, since all of the string players must move their bows in time with the music, creating the effect of a living, breathing music creation system. The evening’s repertoire featured three pieces by French composers, Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite and Berlioz’s La Morte de Cléopatra before the break and his Symphonie fantastique after. Ravel started the evening on a high note, no pun intended, but the highlight of the evening was certainly Symphonie fantastique at the end, particularly the fourth and fifth movements, which featured the strongest brass of the evening and ultimately concluded with an explosion of sound matched visually as the strings thrust their bows into the air to send the final note echoing in the chamber.

Well, it has taken me 5500 words spread across two posts, but you are finally caught up on everything – literally, everything – that I have been up to for the past week and a half. I commend those of you who make it through these posts despite my disorganization and my digressions. As I have said before, my goal is to create a thorough record of my semester, and I appreciate hearing from those of you who enjoy sharing in my experience.

I have a couple of busy weeks of class coming up, so I do not know when I will be able to post again. Perhaps it will force me to keep my next couple of posts shorter.

Until then,

Joel

Big, Two-Parted Post: Part I

It has been ten days since I last published a post, so please allow me to apologize for exceeding my target of no more than seven days between posts. However, in those ten days, I have watched parts of the Superbowl on British Television; taken a class trip to the Bank of England Museum; attended Frankenstein, one of the hottest tickets of the year thus far, at the National Theatre; visited another popular nearby pub, The Dovetail; written a paper for Philosophy of Law (spending time on papers also leaves me less time for writing blog posts…); toured Mansion House, the formal home of the Lord Mayor of the City of London; gone to see the Victoria and Albert Museum; travelled for an afternoon to the small town of Arundel; experimented cooking a new recipe for friends; attended yet another mass in Latin; celebrated Valentines Day with a large group of other single people; and returned to the National Theatre for a guided tour and to see Greenland, one of the least popular tickets among their current offerings. Yes, I did just use semicolons as “super commas” to write a sentence the length of a short paragraph. In fact, at 124 149 words (I thought of more things to write about), that may be the longest sentence that I have ever written.

Before I proceed chronologically through the ten days since the Superbowl, though, I would like to address three points of business. First, in my previous post, I neglected to give credit to Cat Samson, who made a comment that I turned into the title of that post. Second, I would like to apologize for the poor writing quality of the preceding post. Upon rereading the post, I discovered a particularly high number of egregious errors, so I will be sure to put more thought and consideration into this post in light of that rushed, poorly written one.

Finally, I would like to describe an additional adventure that I should have included in the preceding post, my trip to St. Paul’s Cathedral for Evensong on the Friday before the Superbowl. Evensong is a part of the daily cycle of prayers in the Anglican Church and celebrates the incarnation of Christ with, not surprisingly, a heavy emphasis on the use of song. The service included scriptural readings but did not incorporate any type of Eucharist/communion service, as, I gather, is common for prayer service in the Anglican Church.

Late on Friday afternoon, after spending the first part of the day continuing my research at the British Library, I joined Hal, David, Cat, Kyla, Lauren, and Nick for the service, as they had made plans to go because of David’s visit. St. Paul’s Cathedral sits upon the highest point in the City of London and is only about a mile south of the flats, so I had already grown accustomed to seeing its dirty, faded blue dome and its two prominent western bell towers rising above the rest of the city’s skyline since, by law, surrounding buildings must be short enough that the cathedral remains visible throughout much of London. Up close, the enormous white marble and blue roof cuts an imposing figure, rising to 365 feet at the top of the dome, 60 feet above the 305 feet of the dome of the similarly prominent Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota and nearly twice the 187 feet of the Golden Dome (including Mary) on Notre Dame’s campus.

The splendor of the interior lives up to the prominence of the exterior, with massive columns running along the sides of the main length of the cathedral up to the dome, where the wings branch out to the left and right before continuing on to the altar and choir area. After the first altar, an ornately carved wooden structure provides seats for the choir, matching the intricate woodcarving boarder inset in the stone around the altar area. Marble Corinthian columns align on either side of the altar leading from the dome to the back of the altar. Decorative gold appears throughout the building.

We arrived early for the service and took our seats near the front, underneath the dome. However, just after we sat down, the cathedral staff invited all of the early attendees to sit in the extra spaces in the choir seating – which consisted of two sets of four rows of benches facing each other in a style similar to the seating in the houses of Parliament – behind the altar.

The service began with a procession, the choir entering simultaneously with the robed religious personal. Unfamiliar with the garments of the Anglican Church, I could not distinguish between priests, committed religious, and lay participants. Like the choir at Westminster Cathedral, the choir included only males, with boys singing the soprano and alto parts. Although unusual, the boys are certainly well trained and excellent singers; I do not recall noticing a shrill note. As I mentioned above, the majority of the service, beyond the scripture readings, consisted of sung prayers celebrating the Incarnation of Christ.

Overall, though not something that I would attend regularly, I enjoyed the service and the approach of prayer through beautiful music. This visit also served as my first experience with an Anglican church. Many of the prayers felt like cousins to prayers that I am familiar with, but in an older English and, at times, with references to the queen.

Thank you for allowing me that long, but, in my opinion, important, digression. I will now return to chronologically discussing events that have occurred since I wrote my last post.

Immediately after I posted my last entry, I went out to watch the Superbowl. Initially, I planned to go down to a pub at the intersection of Fleet Street and Farringdon Road called The Albion, but, when I learned that they were charging a five pound cover for the night, I decided against it. Instead, I went up to the Exmouth Arms – an intimate pub just up the street from the flats in Exmouth Market – when one of my flat-mates called to tell me that they were not charging a cover. When I arrived, I found only my flat-mate, four other Notre Dame students, the proprietor, and two other customers. Apparently, the proprietor had expected far more students to come for the game than ultimately arrived. Making matters more awkward, the four other guys all left before the end of the first quarter. Although I enjoyed the conversation with one of the local customers, my flat-mate and I left during the second quarter to avoid keeping the disappointed proprietor open unnecessarily late.

Not surprisingly, television coverage of the game in Britain does not compare to the hype surrounding coverage of the game in the United States. Although the BBC showed the game and the halftime show, instead of showing the commercials that are half the fun of watching the game live, they showed a sports correspondent speaking with the former American football players that they hired for the evening to explain the game to a market the does not understand it. There were so few commercials that I certainly got the impression that advertisers recognized that nobody was really watching the game, anyways.

As I often do, I slept in on Monday. In the afternoon, I met my Economics class outside of the Bank Underground Station for our class trip to the Bank of England Museum across the street. Not surprisingly, the majority of the displays in the museum consisted of historical artifacts, including objects from the bank’s early days and preserved bank notes dating to the bank’s first use of paper currency. The most exciting display in the museum, though, consisted of a gold bar chained to an open case, allowing visitors to touch and lift the very dense and, consequently, heavy bar. Our visit concluded with a short lecture from a member of the museum staff regarding the history and functions of the bank. After finishing at the bank, I stopped at a pub with a couple of friends who had not yet stopped at a pub after class. I finally tried London Pride, a darker red ale, and enjoyed it, finding it bitter, but not overly heavy.

Tuesday night brought yet another visit to a theater performance, this time at the National Theatre to see Frankenstein. Although I will describe it in more detail when I discuss my tour of the building, the National Theatre building includes three theaters – an amphitheater, a proscenium arch, and a black box – and, on the outside, looks like an enormous Frank Lloyd Wright house constructed entirely out of concrete. Frankenstein is currently one of the most anticipated plays in London. Directed by Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire, the play provides a theatrical version of Mary Shelley’s novel rather than a theatrical version of the cliché Frankenstein of film. Already sold out through its entire run, the show is still in its preview stage, and we saw approximately the fourth of fifth public performance.

Unique to this production is a daily change in casting; the actors portraying Victor Frankenstein and the Creature play each role on alternate days. As a result, the play relies heavily upon these two actors, ultimately reaching a point where the other characters seem underdeveloped in comparison. In particular, the show focuses on the Creature, introducing his character to open the play and seemingly encouraging sympathy towards him for much of the show.

Unfortunately, beyond the excellent performance of the creature and the very good performance of Frankenstein, a variety of issues hobbled the production. The focus on the Creature at the beginning of the show led to rushed expositions surrounding the other main characters, including Frankenstein, later in the plot than usual. Also, although the production included spectacular sets, the extravagance of some of them seemed to distract from the story, an issue that may stem from Danny Boyle’s experience as a film, rather than theater, director. Overall, the production seemed to fall short of its high potential for excellence in a number of categories.

My remaining weeknights were relatively quiet and, for the most part, consisted of evenings spent working on Philosophy of Law Paper. However, I did venture out on Wednesday evening to go to a popular nearby pub called The Dovetail. The Dovetail’s appeal lies in variety, as it imports a wide selection of Belgian Beers. While many of my friends tried their strawberry beer, I went with one of their wheat beers. It had some type of strange seasoning – I think that the menu may have said coriander? – that gave an usual taste to the light wheat flavor. If I can remember its name when I go there in the future, I do not think that I will order it again.

I have written enough papers late at night that I can tell that I have reached the point where the quality of my writings decreases with each passing minute, so I will have to finish this post at a later date, perhaps on Wednesday afternoon between class and seeing the London Philharmonic perform (students tickets were only four pounds!).

Until then,

Joel

Tomorrow's Monday, Which Means It's Almost the Weekend

Believe it or not, I had a relatively quiet day this week, and, even on that day, Thursday, I spent the whole afternoon exploring the city. I think that I’ve said it before and to anybody who has asked, but the adventures literally never stop here. It’s almost like constantly being on vacation, but with classes that we attend a few days a week.

After a night out at the theater for class on Tuesday, it really did feel like the weekend for the rest of the week, so, in keeping with the midweek weekend theme, Cat, Nick, Kyla, and I went to see The Lion King on Wednesday night. The theater offered a student discount, so we paid for their least expensive ticket and, in return, received seats valued at three times that price in the first balcony. Overall, it was an entertaining show, but the performance felt stale and failed to live up to much of the hype that has surrounded the show for the past fifteen years. Although the opening sequence to “The Circle of Life” certainly showcased the production’s legendary costumes and stage settings – this production, unlike the touring productions, included a pride-rock staircase that twisted up and down in and out of the stage – even the opening spectacle, in a twist of irony, lacked life and vibrancy, an issue that plagued much of the first act. We attributed some of these issues to the actor playing the young Simba – a fourth understudy, we assumed that he worked the weeknight shows so that the best actor could save his limited weekly hours for the sell-out weekend shows – but, as I said, the entire cast seemed to play the roles without very much depth.

Fortunately, the second portion of the show revived much of our interest, thanks in large part to the actor and actress playing the older versions of Simba and Nala, respectively. The two carried the show much better than any of the characters in the first portion did, and they used their complex costumes to enhance their roles, rather than hiding behind them or simply using them to go through the motions. This increase in the caliber of acting combined with stronger instrumental music in the second portion of the show to go a long way towards redeeming this production of the show.

As usual, Thursday brought Global London far to early in the morning. After class, I decided to take advantage of the sunny, warm afternoon and go walking in the city. I repeated much of the walk along the east end of the Thames from last week, but this time it was sunny and not bitterly cold. I crossed Millennium Bridge and walked all the way down to Tower Bridge along the southern bank of the river. Instead of turning back, I crossed Tower Bridge and walked over to the Tower of London complex. Although the castle itself charges admission and had already closed for the day, I did see the plaza area and the exterior of the tower. On my way back to the flats, I walked a few blocks north of the river into the City’s banking district and found the square near the Bank of England, Lloyds of London, and the Royal Exchange. Tomorrow, I will be meeting my economics class there for our tour of the Bank of England.

St. Paul's Cathedral from Millennium Bridge

In the evening, I booked and flight and hostel for a trip to Poland in April. At this point, I will be travelling to Milan, Cinque Terre, Florence, Berlin, and Dublin for spring break; to Krakow in Poland in early April; to Edinburgh, potentially, the week before Easter; and to Rome for Easter. Although a light schedule by the standards of many students in the London Program, it is nevertheless a full schedule with many exciting opportunities that will take me into or through five different countries in Europe outside of the UK.

Friday afternoon brought another session at the British Library after I worked on a job application in the morning. In the evening, then, I went to Chinatown for dinner with Hal, Michelle, Cat, and David Bratton, who spent the weekend visiting London from his program in Toledo, Spain. Strings of lanterns covered the streets in preparation for this weekend’s Chinese New Year celebrations. We stopped at The Friendly Inn and, fortunately, found an open table on a busy Friday night. Since all of the chicken dishes were less expensive than all of the dishes involving other meats, we shared four different iterations of chicken at our table.

In order to introduce David to a true London pub, we went over to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese after dinner, where we met Lauren, Nick, and Kyla. We crammed into a booth on their first basement level and stayed for a drink before moving on to another pub just down the road from our flats. We stopped for a drink and were enjoying the lively yet very comfortable environment until we decided to leave, when we realized that, unfortunately, a pickpocket had stolen the cash from a member of our group, casting a shadow over an otherwise enjoyable evening.

Early on Saturday morning, I met Hal, Nick, David, and Kyla in the courtyard to walk all of the way across town to catch a train out to Windsor, where we visited Windsor Castle. Dating to the time of William the Conqueror, a number of English monarchs over the centuries constructed first defensive fortifications and later lavish palaces within the walls of the castle, often using vast sums of resources to do so. Today, Queen Elizabeth II still uses the palace, which has housed occupants for a longer period of time than any other in Europe.

The Round Tower at Windsor Castle

From the train station, we easily spotted the castle at the top of a large hill to our left. A couple of blocks from the station, we picked up a long path that wound up and around the side of the hill to the entrance of the castle. After we paid for our admission – which, thanks to validation, is now good for a whole year – we entered the castle walls and joined a free tour. Our guide showed us around the exterior areas and gave us historical information about the architectural decisions made by kings and queens throughout history. He left us at the entrance to the interior of the palace, where we saw Queen Mary’s Doll House, the entry chambers, the hall of the Order of the Garter, many of the private rooms used by monarchs of the past, and a portion of the residence used regularly by the Queen to this day. All of the rooms featured some combination of intricate woodcarvings, gold plating, massive original works of art, and heaps of historical artifacts used by monarchs throughout history. Historical artifacts from eight hundred years worth of powerful monarchs combine to create a beautiful collection and a very impressive display. I highly recommend a visit to the castle for those visiting London with any interest in history, particularly the history of Britain.

Our Group at Windsor Castle

From Left to Right:

Kyla, Hal, David, Nick, and Me

We followed up our day of travel with a quiet evening of dinner and a movie in the flats. I made Mexican Lasagna, with turned out alright, even with white instead of yellow cheddar cheese.

This morning, we went to Saints Peter and Paul Church near the flats for a quick mass. In the afternoon, Lauren and I went down to check out the New Years Celebrations in Chinatown. We hoped to find friends, but the crowd was large and we just went through Trafalgar and Chinatown on our own.

Me in Chinatown

During the Chinese New Year Celebration

Well, I am heading out for the evening to find a pub showing the Superbowl. I hope that I did justice to my week, particularly the impressive Windsor Castle, and I look forward to sharing more soon.


Until then,

Joel