Something happens and I'm head over heels.

So I have been slacking a bit on my blogging responsibilities. Sorry :( I will try my best to update everyone on what has paso.

Yesterday, I went with Dezi and Ari to the Victoria and Albert museum, which is literally a couple hundred feet from where we go to school. Very convenient for us. This museum has just about everything you would ever want to look at. What follows will be various random snapshots of the museum, and only some of them will I actually comment on. Okay, here we go:

First thing you see as you enter:

It was in this very moment that I realized how extremely immature and uncultured I am, because all I could say as I walked in was "Oh! Look at that. What a wonderful first impression of this place." I've since repented and have taken on a more European view of art :)

This piece was called Silencing Falsehood. Hmmmmm.......

I thought this one was really cool because of the plaque that was below it:

This piece was done as a memorial to the sculptor's young wife who had recently died.
Look familiar to anyone? This is the exact outfit Mick Jagger wore at a concert! My first thought: He has to be one of the smallest people ever to fit into that!!!

This was part of a very large exhibit on the interior design in England 1700-1800's roughly. Really cool, and really hard to capture in a picture. I try.


This is me being an English nerd, but this is totally a first edition of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market!" Being one of my favorite plays ever written, seeing this took my breath away.

Pretty scary eh? This was part of a Modern exhibit. They had a whole bunch of random stuff from the 70's 80's and 90's. This next one is my favorite though:


And . . . .

I want them. That's all there is to it.

These pictures are on my walk home from the museum.

In this part of the neighborhood, when the sun is out, it makes the whole street shine with a blinding white light. For a moment, everything seems serenely perfect in a very civilized and classy way. It all seems so fresh and new, and yet you know these buildings are probably older than the state of Utah.


And then, we decided to go to St. Paul's Cathedral. Unfortunately, the battery to my camera died and couldn't take any real pictures of the inside. But I will post some pictures that I took just today from the outside.


Being inside of there felt like a very humbling experience, which was probably what the architects of the cathedral were going for. I can't remember the last time I had been inside a building that was so expansive on the inside. You really feel very small. We actually got to sit in during a mass commemorating St. George. That was certainly a cultural experience for me. They would have a choir sing some hymns during mass, and you can only imagine what that sounded like. As I sat there in my chair, I would look up as high as I could, and suddenly had a strong desire to fly. I would have loved to be able to fly up to the highest ceiling in the cathedral and look down on what I looked like down below. I intend to go again, and I promise I will post real pictures.

The first thing we did today was go to the British Library. I'm still not sure how to process everything I saw there. Guys, I saw the first edition of the actual Gutenberg Bible. I mean, what am I supposed to do about that? I could only stand there in awe, but that seemed so . . . not enough. I also saw handwritten copies of Jane Eyre, Mrs. Dalloway, and a Wadsworth poem, all written by their authors. AND, most importantly, I saw Paul McCartney's handwriting as he first wrote the song Yesterday. That was impressive as well. The single thing that literally held me still where I stood was a fragmented copy of the Gospel of St. John, written around 300 AD. For some reason, I had a curious feeling come over me like I was really looking at something special. I stood there for quite some time, with zero motivation to see anything else that day.

Next was the National Portrait Gallery!

That was really neat as well. I have two favorite parts. One, was the gallery of the Tudors. I got to see the real, original paintings of Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, Henry VIII, and Anne Boleyn. I mean, come on. That was really cool! My next favorite was the room with the original portraits of the Romantic authors. Yes, this is me being an English nerd again. I felt like Po on Kung Foo Panda when he exclaims, "I've only seen paintings of that painting!" I saw the portraits of the Shelley's, Lord Byron, Blake, Keats, and Austen. That was just really cool to me, and probably pretty boring to everyone else in my group.

Nope. The day is not over yet. After this, we head for the Globe theatre to see another Shakespeare play we studied, All's Well That Ends Well. On our way, I guess we walked across THE bridge at the beginning of the 6th Harry Potter that is destroyed by the death eaters. All I could really take in was how windy and freezing it was, and how nasty the Thames really is. It's not much better than the Jordan River. I mean, that river had to endure the Industrial Revolution.


When we actually reached the other side after what seemed like a blustery, freezing eternity, we encountered a very pleasant part of town that surrounded the Globe.




We got to rest there for a bit before our show started. Though it was windy, the sun was out, providing a bit of warmth. There is something about being around a body of water that eliminates stress. Our entire group has quite literally been running themselves into the ground living life to the fullest in London. But when we sat next to the bank of the Thames, we found ourselves really relaxing for the first time since we arrived.

Here is the inner part of the Globe! We had terrible seats, but that's okay. I was happy to be there :) One of the coolest parts of the performance was birds would occasionally fly in and across the stage, and perch on one of the rails up in the balconies. It's an open roof you see, and we were completely exposed to nature and the elements.


A real live band would occasionally play music in the balcony on the stage, right above the actors.

This was the end where the actors came out and bowed to the audience. Immediately afterwords, the cast broke into a little dance party for us. It was very Knight's Tale-ish.