Buckingham Palace, Museum and the Royal Mews

They only open up Buckingham Palace for tours for about 2 months of the year, when the Queen is on vacation at one of her other homes.

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Unfortunately, you can’t take any pictures inside so there’s not much I can show. I don’t remember much either. It was nice, but not one of the biggest highlights I’ve seen in London. It’s most impressive feature is that it’s one of the few royal palaces actively in-use and open to the public, and of the sheer number of historical and political figures who have walked down those halls and had dinner in the State room.

It’s a relatively modern building, the original build in 1703 followed by numerous additions and remodels. My favorite room was the music room which had a massive gold guilded ceiling, and the white drawing room. Both are extraordinarily ornate, having been completed before the expensive remodeling project was scaled back. The gallery hallway is a mini art museum, crammed with works by Rembrandt, Rubens, and one of my favorites, Charles I with M. de St Antoine by van Dyck.

Once we got to the back steps, we could take some photos.

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My queen, with her crown (in the gift shop).

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Admission to the palace also gave us access to the Queen’s Gallery and the Royal Mews. The gallery was nice, showing some of the royal china, jewellery, and more paintings. The pieces that we liked best were the Faberge Egg, earrings and brooches made with the smaller cuts of the Cullinan diamond, and Napoleon’s circular table with inlays of famous generals throughout history.

The mews is where the royal vehicles are kept.

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The Gold Coach was most impressive. Massive. Gold. Heavy. And supposedly is one of the most uncomfortable to ride in.

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They also stable some of the coach horses here, too.

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It was a good touristy thing to do. (And unlike most of the tourist sites, this one seemed to attract more English tourists than foreigners.) Not at the top of my list, but worthwhile even if just for the van Dyck.

Trafalgar Square – the National Gallery (London), giant chess, and the 4th plinth

We did a bit of London touristing last month at Trafalgar Square. It’s a popular place for London to host public art exhibitions, and that weekend there were two.

“The Tournament” by Jamie Hayon, Spain. The centrepiece of the London Design Festival was a giant chess set with ceramic painted chess pieces 2 meters high. The players sat in comfy chairs overlooking the board while others moves the pieces into position. I was on the waiting list to play one of the matches but they never called.

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The next art installation was called “One & Other” by sculptor Antony Gormley, using the empty 4th statue plinth in the square. The plinth was created in 1841 but they ran out of money for the statue to be put on top. Later they couldn’t agree which monarch or military hero to place there, so it’s remained empty ever since except for some temporary art exhibits.

“One & Other” had 2400 people stand on top of the 4th plinth: 1 hour at a time, 24 hours a day for 100 days. It wasn’t really art, it was more like performance theater. Most people used it as a platform for charity or social causes. We saw 2 “artists,” one promoting a snorkeling business and the other doing a exercise routine in support of a cancer forum. Boring.

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We finally made it into the National Gallery and spent the afternoon looking at some truly amazing works of art. I got to see pieces from some of my old favorites (Bosch, Goya, El Greco), and I discovered many new ones.

“The Arnolfini Portrait” by van Eyck, 1434. Incredible detail throughout, especially in the mirror where it feels like you see your own reflection. I also like the old-school graffiti he painted above the mirror: “Jan van Eyck was here, 1434.”

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“Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures.” Unknown, Flemish, around 1620. A classic painting filled with detailed images of other classic paintings. I could spend hours looking at this one.

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The trip confirmed that one of my all-time favorite artists is Anthony Van Dyck. He studied under Peter Paul Rubens and became his chief assistant, then rose to England’s leading court painter and one of the most successful painters of his day. This portrait was my favorite in the National Gallery. The eyes are incredibly detailed and expressive. To me, Van Dyck had the most talent in being able to make you feel the personality of his subjects.

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King Charles I was particularly fond of van Dyck and commissioned numerous works.

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Rembrandt, self portraits. I didn’t realize that Rembrandt painted himself more than any other artist of the 17th century. Each one is an intimate reflection on his life. In “Self-Portrait at the Age of 34″ (1640), he was at the height of his career and so he painted himself in the clothes and style of the old masters from a hundred years before.

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In “Self Portrait at the Age of 63″ (1669) he paints himself without vanity, older and more reflective. This was painted in the last year of his life and his last self-portrait, possibly his final painting.

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“The Ambassadors” b Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533. The distorted image in the bottom centre foreground is an anamorphic special effect — it’s a skull, but you can only see it from an angle if you stand at a special point on the right side of the painting. I don’t know how he did it.

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Of the modern painters, the Monets were nice but they didn’t move me. But there was something about the Van Gogh’s that caught me. I think it was his dramatic use of the color yellow, not a common color to be given such prominence.

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I also liked “Van Gogh’s chair.” It’s one of a pair of paintings depicting his relationship with contemporary and friend Gauguin. This one is Van Gogh’s chair, with his pipe and tobacco pouch, and onions in the background. The other painting is of Gauguin’s chair, an armchair with 2 books and a candle on it (at a different museum, but it would be nice to someday see them side by side)

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Aug ‘08: Toledo, and scenes from La Parcela González

In August we spent a summer break in Spain with Marta’s family. We stayed as “La Parcela González” (the González’ parcel of land) a few miles outside of Madrid. It’s a beautiful home (still partially under construction) and has some amazing views.

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We met the new family dog, Sammy.

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And had a delicious family barbecue with home-cooked dishes from different regions of Spain, and fresh food from their garden.

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It was a very relaxing trip.

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We also took a quick trip out to Chinchón to get a few bottles of their special (and quite potent) anisette.

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But the highlight of the vacation was the day trip to Toledo, 70km south of Madrid. Location of “La Convivencia (“the Coexistence”), where Jews lived together in relative peace with Muslims and Catholics for over 750 years (711 to 1492). It was established under the Islamic rule of the Caliphate of Cordoba and ended when the Catholic monarchs issued the Alhambra Decree which ordered the expulsion of Jews from Spain. The skyline is distinguished by the Alcázar on the right, and the peak of the Cathedral in the middle.

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I absolutely loved it. Click the picture below to see the entire photo album with all the details and history that I learned.

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The Westminster Abbey bus stop

This is Marta waiting a bus stop. Directly in front of Westminster Abbey. Not down the block, across the street, or around the corner, but a bus stop right outside the main gates. Odd? Or convenient?

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Lunch date – climbing the Monument

The Monument to the Great Fire of 1666 was recently reopened to the public after an 18-month, 4.5 million pound renovation. Marta & I work nearby, so we went on a lunch date to climb to the top.

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Designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke and completed in 1677, it’s the largest stone column in the world. It’s 61.5 meters high, which is also the exact distance to where the fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane.

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There are 311 cantilevered marble steps to the top. Takes about 5 to 10 minutes to walk — but it’s very narrow so you have to be careful for people going the other way.

This is a view looking downward. At the bottom in a secret basement, Wren & Hooke (who were natural scientists) had built a room to conduct experiments in. They designed the shaft to be a telescope — they built a trap door in the orb at the top — but the vibration from the street traffic made their measurements too inaccurate. Visitors can now look down into the room for the first time.

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Just inside the top door, there’s some graffiti from people in the late 1700s who carved their initials in the walls.

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They’ve covered the top with a new “stunning gallery cage” which is really just curved chicken wire. It’s not very attractive, and it makes it very difficult to see anything above. I was hoping to see the re-gilded copper orb at the top. (The original design of a 15 foot statue of King Charles II was deemed too expensive.)

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The views are also quite obstructed. The only way I could get a picture was by jutting my camera lens between the wire, and I was lucky that my lens was small.  (Of course it was cloudy and raining that day, too.)

This is the view to the North. That’s the Gherkin in the middle.

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This is the Eastern view. To the right is Tower Bridge, and you can see a bit of the Tower of London as well.

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Western view. The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral is poking up in the middle.

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Southern view. Thames River.

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View below. They all look like ants down there!

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On your way out, they give you a certificate to prove that you climbed to the top.

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On the north side of the column’s base, a brief history of the fire is written in Latin.

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“In the year of Christ 1666, the second day of September, eastward from hence, at the distance of two hundred and two feet, (the height of this column) about midnight, a most terrible fire broke out, which driven on by a high wind, not only wasted the adjacent parts, but also places very remote, with incredible noise and fury. It consumed 89 churches, the city gates, Guildhall, many public structures, hospitals, schools, libraries, a vastnumber of stately edifices, 13,200 dwelling-houses, 400 streets; of 26 wards, it utterly destroyed 15, and left 8 others shattered and half burnt. The ruins of the city were 436 acres, from the Tower by the Thames side, to the Temple church, and from the north-east gate along the city wall to Holborn bridge. To the estates and fortunes of the citizens it was merciless, but to their lives very favourable, that it might in all things resemble the last conflagration of the world.

“The destruction was sudden; for, in a small space of time, the same city was seen most flourishing, and reduced to nothing.

“Three days after, when this fatal fire had baffled all human counsels and endeavours in the opinion of all, as it were, by the will of Heaven, it stopped, and on every side was extinguished.”

Mummies & the Prime Meridian

It was my niece Annabel’s & nephew Harrison’s first airplane trip, and their first trip to another country. They were so excited that even after an 8-hour flight they insisted on immediately going out on the town to go exploring. They had heard about a mummy exhibition, so we went straight to the British Museum to check it out.

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The exhibition didn’t disappoint. We saw mummies at all stages.

Before:

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After:

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And gift wrapped:

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My sister and the kids loved it.

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Then we went to see the object that I was most interested in: the Rosetta Stone. It’s the tablet that gave scholars the breakthrough to finally translate Egyptian hieroglyphs after 2,000 years. It contains the same text in 3 languages: classical Greek at the top, and 2 forms of hieroglyphs below.

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We also some some excellent examples of hieroglyphs, including one that looks like an Egyptian playing air-guitar.

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There were nice kittens and bad kittens.

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The Egyptian version of the Sony Playstation.

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Egyptian seafood-themed wallpaper & mosiacs.

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A real crystal skull (not Egyptian, and not an Indiana Jones prop).

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And lots of “big head” statues from around the world.

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Another highlight for the kids was riding the tube everywhere. I think it was their first time on a subway train.

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For some odd reason, Annabel was ridiculously excited to see the Prime Meridian line marked in Greenwich, east of London. So we took an evening trip to the Royal Observatory a few days later. As soon as the green laser came into view she started singing “Prime Mer-id-ian” over and over. Very amusing.

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We saw two planetarium shows and went through all of the exhibition rooms. The kids were really into it, and so was I.

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Then the night was over, and we braved the cold weather to go home.

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To see all the pictures, click here: http://picasaweb.google.com/LondonMitch/200902BritishMuseum

The plausible impossibility of death in the minds of cartoon characters

I was on my way to the post office during my lunch break, when I passed a life-sized Bugs Bunny holding a gun and blowing Daffy Duck’s head in an explosion of blood, with his eyes still staring out.

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It’s part of an art exhibition called Splatter, by J.Cauty & Son, at the Aquarium art exhibit store. (Websites are: www.jcautyandson.com and www.theaquariumonline.co.uk)  The theme is “The plausible impossibility of death in the minds of cartoon characters,” and there’s even a creepy video to go along with it.  It shows wha the cartoons would look like if the blood was shown as a result of their violence.

The exhibition ended last weekend, but the dealer was kind enough to let me walk through the site and take a look at the pieces that were still up. Most were paintings but there were a few sculptures, too. This was my favorite piece, probably because I was a huge Tom & Jerry fan as a kid.

(C) The Aquarium, London. From 2008-11

I would love to get one of the pictures, but I’m not sure where I’d hang it. And if I have children, I’d have to hide it until they were old enough not to get nightmares from it.

There were also some mini-sculptures on display, made from plastic toys. My favorite was the Road-Runner who was finally caught by Wile E Coyote.

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The only piece that I thought went over the line was Bambi (or Bambi’s mother). That’s just cruel.

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Of course, I think the point of the exhibit is to explore why one type of cartoon violence is ‘cruel’ and another is ‘funny.’ Maybe it’s because Bambi’s mother was killed by a real man and not another cartoon character?

Smithfield Market, London

I work near Smithfield Market, which has a fascinating history. It’s like a working museum.

Today it’s a market that supplies fresh meat to the restaurants & butchers of central London. Almost a thousand years ago… it was used for exactly the same thing!  It was an open field just outside the gates of London where farmers sold their livestock.

It was a large “smooth field” (the original name), perfect for staging big
events like tournaments and jousting. For 700 years Bartholomew Fair was held here, one of London’s biggest summer parties.

It might also be haunted, because it was London’s main site for executions.

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Most famously, this is where William Wallace (Braveheart) was executed in 1305. It was a brutal death. First he was stripped naked and dragged behind a horse from the Tower of London (several miles away) to Smithfield. There he was hanged, drawn and quartered — hanged to strangle but not kill him, then his privates were cut off, then he was cut open and his intestines were burned in front of him (still alive), and finally he was beheaded and cut into four parts.  His head was preserved and put on display atop a spike on London Bridge, and the rest were sent to other parts of the country for display.

There’s a plaque nearby dedicated to his memory as a patriot.

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Other criminals were hanged, beheaded, stabbed, you name it.  In the 1700’s they took money forgerers here and boiled them in oil. There’s another plaque to honor several people who were burned in religious persecution from 1555-1557.

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In Victorian times, Smithfield was one of the roughest areas of London, filled with pickpockets, muggers and other petty criminals. Oliver would have been afraid of this place.

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In addition to being a meat and fish market, Smithfield was also a place where men could sell their wives. Divorce was expensive, so it was cheaper to sell or trade your wife. This is an etching that accompanies the story of John Hobbs, a drinking song about a man who didn’t have much luck at the wife market.

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To Smithfield he brought her;
But nobody bought her,
Jane Hobbs, Jane Hobbs,
They all were afraid of Jane Hobbs.

Oh, who’ll buy a wife? says Hobbs, John Hobbs;
A sweet pretty wife, says Hobbs.
But, somehow, they tell us
The wife-dealing fellows
Were all of them sellers,
John Hobbs, John Hobbs.
And none of them wanted Jane Hobbs.

The current buildings were constructed in the late 1800’s. There are
loads of intricate carvings and metalwork, and the paint is still kept
the same colors as when it first opened.

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Socially, Smithfield came into its own in the 2000’s with a number of key pubs, restaurants, and nightclubs. So now it’s a meat market in both the day and the night. (I’m a clever wordsmith, eh?)  One of the city’s top nightclubs, Fabric, was built from a converted warehouse. It pioneered the “Bodysonic” vibrating dancefloor — the floorboards are attached to transducers that vibrate to the bass and drums,
so you can feel the music in your feet. Someday I have to check it out.

Walkng around Smithfield, there are lots of signs and warnings to keep people from getting run over by forklifts and delivery trucks. I think this one means that only Egyptians with broken arms and mittens can walk here.

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There are two coats of arms displayed. This one is for the Worshipful Company of Poulters, founded in 1299. It’s sorta like the Masons, but for tasty bird handlers instead of bricklayers. “Remember Your Oath”

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This one is for the Worshipful Company of Butchers, which has records dating back to 975. “Omnia Subjecisti Sub Pedibus, Oves et Boves” — Thou hast put all things under his feet, all Sheep and Oxen. Each year they present a Boar’s Head to the Lord Mayor at Mansion House, a tradition kept since 1469.

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Not to be left out, there’s also a “fruiterer” across the street. They’re quite good. I buy apples & nectarines there.

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Going Animal at the London Zoo

In July [2008] we went to the London Zoo on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

We started by visiting the outdoor reptile exhibits. They have a really cool Komodo Dragon, the largest animal in the lizard species.

Crocolisk!

In the indoor exhibit, we spent 15 minutes watching this iguana climb from branch to branch. It moves so differently, like watching an alien.

More lizards.

Why’d there have to be snakes?

They had poison dart frogs in a variety of colors.

Next exhibit… a pair of hippos. I love watching them swim, so graceful for an animal that looks so big & clumsy.

Spider monkeys. “I can haz banana?”

The zoo’s most excellent new exhibit is the Western Lowland Gorillas, the largest of all primates. Meet ‘Bobby’ and ‘Zaire.’ The goal is to have them breed to help preserve the species.

Did you ever see a llama
kiss a llama
on the llama?…

Duck! We watched for about twenty minutes as a family of baby ducks got separated from their mother by a fence. They swam along the creek, following the sound of her ‘Cheep! Cheep!’ until they found a gap in the fence and were reunited.

Asian lions. (No tigers, no bears.)

There’s a big insect exhibit called B.U.G.S. with all kinds of creepy crawlys.

Grasshoppers.

Cockroaches.

Green beetles.

Meet the meerkats. Marta accidentally dropped some popcorn into their enclosure, so they wouldn’t leave us alone.

Penguin feeding time!

They have a butterfly enclosure, just like the one we saw in New York City. They had the same atlas moths, but this time we got to see them in caterpillar-form.

Anteater feeding time!

“The Queen” and her “Beavers.” Two words I’d never thought I’d see together in the same sentence, let alone inscribed on a plaque.

“Is it safe to come outside? Let me poke my extra-long neck out and check.”

Blue Parrots. “No no he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!”

After the zoo, we took a mini-cruise down the canal to London’s “Little Venice.”

I was amazed at how many people have boats on the canals of London.

Little Venice was pretty, but we expected there to be a lot of restaurants and shops there. Instead it was mostly residential. We ended up walking to Bayswater and discovered our favorite new Chinese restaurant, Kiasu.

Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and the oldest object I will ever touch

I’ve always been fascinated by astronomy, so I knew when I moved to London that I’d have to visit the Royal Observatory. They host a limited series of evening lectures, and I bought tickets for late January to see “Destination Mars.” Mars was quite close & bright at the time, and I was excited to see it through their 28-inch refracting telescope. With my old 8-inch scope I could just make out the polar caps, so I could only imagine what I’d see using a 28-incher.

The observatory is located in Greenwich, about 30 minutes east of central London. The neigborhood is very pretty, large stately buildings with long manicured lawns circled by bicyclists and joggers. It reminded me of an Ivy League college campus, like Harvard in Boston. As we approached the observatory we saw a green laserbeam rising from it and piercing the sky. It was the international time line, the demarcation of Greenwich Mean Time, pointing due north from the Observatory along the prime meridian line (zero degrees longitude) which was fixed there at an international conference in 1884.

© Grant Sager

(I tried to take a picture with a cell phone (below), but it didn’t quite capture the beauty like the photo I found on Flickr (above).

As you can see, the laser was visible for many miles… because the sky was covered with clouds. Not a good sign when you want to go stargazing. Damned London weather. There was no way we’d get to use the telescope tonight.

The park is closed at night, so they had to escort us to the observatory on a golf cart shuttle bus. Then we were taken down to the planetarium where the astronomer/lecturer gave us an impromptu discussion of Mars and the possibility of life on planets in other star systems. (Quite cool — I wish I had my own planetarium to play around with.)

With time to spare, they decided to take us to the observatory dome so that we could at least see the 28-inch telescope, even if we couldn’t look through it.

© Science Photo Library/Photo Researchers, Inc

The observatory is a beautiful piece of scientific history. It was commissioned by King Charles II in 1675 and designed by Sir Christopher Wren (who also built St Paul’s Cathedral and many other landmarks in London). Its main use was to perfect the determination of longitude and other measures which ushered in the modern age of navigation.

The 28-inch refracting telescope was built in 1893 and is still the largest of its kind in Britain, 28-feet long and weighing 1.4 tons. Even the engineering work to build the mount to hold the scope was a feat of engineering in its day. The counterweights are so precise that you can nudge the telescope from side to side with your finger — I know, because they let me try it.

During World War 2 the British government hid the telescope in a bunker for safe keeping, and brought it back after the war. It’s mostly retired, not used by scientists but still opened for tourists and astrophotography. Hopefully I’ll get my chance next to look through it next time.

I also can’t wait to return and see the rest of the exhibits and planetarium shows. We only got to see a few items during our visit, like this meteorite which is labeled “the oldest object you will ever touch,” about 4.5 Billion years old (that’s 4,500,000,000). I touched it. It was cold.