Monday July 5, 2010
Determined to finally see the Museum of London, I got there in the morning, fighting with school children to learn about London’s history. When I just got done learning about how the Thames used to be 300 m wide instead of 100 m as it is now and how the badass warrior queen Boudica destroyed the city in revolt against the Roman’s suffocating rule over her Celtic people during the first century Common Era (I wonder if she had hot lesbo love with her own cute Gabrielle, too), my Spanish mobile starting ringing. Now that’s strange. Who would be calling me in London? When I picked up, Alison’s, my travel-buddy’s for the month of July and my RB Co-Prez (i.e.: partner in crime) for fall semester, what-what???, voice on the other end of the fuzzy line said, “Hey! Where are you?” I couldn’t believe it. Aw, shit. I totally got my dates mixed up. I thought we were going to Cambridge on Tuesday not Monday (when it was actually, of course, Monday). So there I was, standing in the middle of the Museum of London, Alison was waiting at the Victoria Coach Station as I had instructed her to do so, and our coach to Cambridge had left half an hour ago. Damn it! I should have suspected something was up when I received an e-mail from Alison mad early that morning saying she was leaving Paris. I didn’t even think twice about how she would be traveling for an insanely long time if she were to arrive on Monday morning instead of Tuesday morning. I rushed out to Victoria Station to reevaluate our situation. I had half the feeling to just rush to Cambridge then and there. But of course, I didn’t have my boarding tickets for the bus on me, and we probably couldn’t have used the nonrefundable tickets for new on-the-spot tickets anyways. Stepping back, we realized that if we were to go then (if I had not messed up on some mundane detail, like the date) or go immediately after wouldn’t have worked at all, since we never got the confirmation from Yena (the girl whom we were going to visit) that she would be there to pick us up from the coach station. We wouldn’t have anywhere to go in Cambridge once we got there. So we headed back to Canada Water to drop off Alison’s shit.
With half our day gone, we went to South Bank to do some sightseeing before meeting up with Luan for dindin after he got off of work from Barclay’s. After passing Southwark Cathedral (Europe is just full of cathedrals, ein’t it?) and cool river-side restaurants lining the cobblestone walk, we came upon Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, modernized, of course, with an attached building for the Globe Café and its accompanying gift shop. Why does everything have to be deromanticized like so? We didn’t pay to take the tour of the interior of the theatre, but settled to see the impressively old-looking whitewashed building from the outside. Too bad the actual building itself is a modern reconstruction of the original Elizabethan theatre. It didn’t have the charm of, “Shakespeare stood here as he directed his plays” or “Queen Elizabeth liked sitting here when she visited the theatre.”
Farther along the river the Thames (pronounced “Temz,” as I found out two days later, embarrassing!), lied the starkly big Tate Modern housed in the former Bankside Power Station, giving the museum a very industrial, Futurist look. The museum chose to keep the large turbine hall empty. It’s just a bigbiGBIG empty space. A modern art museum WOULD take the liberty to do that. I got suckered into buying a fabu headset for the two hours I had there while Alison chose to wander around South Bank some more (because she can’t do art museums, especially modern ones, shame). It was the most high-tech audio-guide this country-bumpkin has ever used, complete with a touch screen that allowed you to choose more elaborations on certain pieces, showed comparisons with works from other notable artists, and even pinpointed and circled parts of the painting on which the curator was discussing. The Tate Modern was exactly what I picture a modern art museum to look like, with rooms of varying sizes giving enormous space to random ambiguous pieces of art, hanging from the ceiling, mounted on the walls, propped against a corner, lying in the centre with some kind of purpose.
I loved Swiss artists Peter Fischii and David Weiss’s satire on found art objects in their installation Untited (Tate). Designed to give the illusion of reality, the two sculptors painstakingly handmade everyday objects out of polyurethane and other plastics to form things that imitated everyday objects but without those objects’ function. The joke is that these things that they so carefully imitated are actually mass-produced in reality, but they chose to not use found objects in their art like Duchamp, but rather, make their own imitation of reality. The room holding the display is sometimes overlooked by visitors because Fischii and Weiss created objects and set them about as if it the installation were a construction site. So people would mistake the room as an art exhibit in the process of being constructed. But upon closer inspection, I saw that the tires’ treads were chiseled in, the labels on the containers and bottles were all painted on rather than printed, the orange peels did not have that natural glisten nor probably the lingering scent of dried orange if I had been allowed to get close enough to smell them.
Outside the busy commuter-filled entrance of the London Bridge Tube station, we surprised Luan with Alison’s early presence (well, actually right on time, but early in terms of when I told him she would arrive). Alison was pretty good at taking everything in quickly and politely accepted without a word that Luan was limping along/dragging his foot like an Asian Igor, until we explained to her that Luan had an herniated disks from trying to jump out of a car to steal fruit from a tree in Hong Kong (yes, no lie) and that the pain medication that he took for it made his foot (I guessed that he had an pinched nerve in his back that was supposed to read signals from his foot, making it feel like his foot was in intense pain) go completely numb and not easy to walk on. I declared I wanted curry or any other kind of Indian food, because if the Brits was going to keep India subjugated under British imperialization for more than 200 years, at least a little bit of culinary good should have come from it. We had a nomnomnomz meal full of delicious spices, rich sauces, slow-cooked tender meats, and soft nan at what seemed to be an authentic Indian place (good sign: only Indian people were eating there and the waiters barely spoke enough English to describe what it was that we were all amateur-ly ordering).
After our meal, we took a walk westward on South Bank as the sun set when we came upon people crowded around and on the Millennium Bridge, London’s pedestrian-only suspension steel bridge with a funny and wobbly history that connects the Tate Modern with St. Paul’s Cathedral. Special lights and cameras were set up and the traffic was halted on the bridge. A camera crew was filming some teen girls walk down the bridge as if they were on a runway, and some people sat under the bridge to watch the footage on small black and white television screens. Right as we got there, the audience clapped and the runway music stopped. We thought we had just missed all the action, since the guy-in-charge released the backed up pedestrian traffic, but we went up onto the bridge to investigate/be nosy anyways. When we got up to the top of the bridge, the manager stopped us, asking us if we could wait for a few minutes as they did some takes. We said, of course! Alright, prime front row view! Four models came out dressed in muted fall tones.
Alison remarked, “That one second from the right is mad short and old.”
I replied, “Well yeah, because that’s Twiggy! At least, I think that’s Twiggy. Does she look familiar to you?”
Some old British guy crossing the bridge from the other side came by us and told us, “Yeah, would you look at that? It’s Twiggy right over there!” and walked away. Thanks for the confirmation, old man. Haha!
I didn’t know that Twiggy was so short either. She was about a head shorter than the other models and was wearing heeled booties too. I guess I’ve only seen pictures of her alone in the prime of her career and seated during ANTM judging panel scenes (sooooo fake, btdubs). In between takes, she seemed somewhat pissed at something or someone, but managed to put on that Twiggy fierceness during filming. I thought the model on the left was particularly pretty, although she looked like she needed a sandwich (or a dozen). I loved the gold-lace embroidered shirt she was wearing. After touching up on hair and makeup, the cameras started to roll after the director yelled all quiet on the set, the choreographer would yell out “5,6,7,8!” as the music came on. The four women turned away from the camera in a ripple and strutted away from the cameras into the dusk, then on cue, they looked back at the camera over their shoulders as they walked away until the director yelled cut. They were filming a fall commercial for Marks and Spencer, a British clothing and upmarket food retailer. Luan said he would send us a video of the Millennium Bridge shoot when it came out in the fall. Noice!
When the director decided to wrap it and allow traffic across the bridge again, we crossed and continued our way westward on the North Bank, following the route I took the night before and through to Westminster Bridge where we had our stereotypical touristy evening photo shoot at the Big Ben and Parliament. The buildings looked so fabulously beautiful and lit in the evening! Crossing back to the South Bank, we caught the ferry eastward back to Canada Water. It was such a chill and scenic way to end the evening, seeing the skyline of nighttime London go by and passing under London’s famous bridges.
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