Back Home in London

After travelling Southern Europe for nine days, I arrived in London from Athens on Sunday night after 10 hours and 3 connections on Alitalia. We visited Barcelona, Rome, Florence, and Athens. s I'll soon be posting pictures from and accounts of the different cities we visited. I took more than 800 pictures on the trip, so I'll be spending sometime cutting that down to a more manageable size and posting the good ones.

In Roma

We arrived in Roma yesterday and took naps, then went out for pasta and gelato. Today we hit up the Colosseum, Michelangelo's Moses, St. John Lateran, and the Roman Forum. Tomorrow is the Vatican, Trevi, Spanish Steps, and a sunrise breakfast on a hill overlooking Rome, though not necessarily in that order.

Barcelona was great. Visited Parc Guell and Sagrada Familia, a park and a church by Gaudi, a famous Spanish artist with very organic and somewhat droopy style. Reminded me of Dalì and Dr. Seuss. Pictures inside Sagrada were wonderful, even if it isn't finished and won't be for a long while.

FYI, Spanish is the second language of Barcelona, the first being Catalon (not sure on spelling), a regional dialect close to Spanish.

Well, I'm off to eat a pasta dinner!

Leaving for Fall Break Trip

Well, I should be packed, seeing as friends and I are leaving for a 9 day traversal of southern Europe tomorrow. But no worries, I'll get around to it. Be prepared for plenty of pictures when I get back!

Tomorrow we're heading to Barcelona, Rome, Florence, and Athens. I'm excited!
But first I have to write a 1000 word review of two of the plays I attended for class.
W00t. Pack. Sleep. Alarm. Shower, Tea, Toast. Class. Fall Break!

In the meantime, here's an ominous picture of London's omnipresent CCTV system. London is the most CCTV'ed city in the world, thanks to IRA terrorism in the 80s. You see these little things all over the place.

Dinner and Vanilla Ice

Last night two of my flatmates and I made a feastly meal consisting of pasta and sauce, rosemary chicken, rosemary fried potatos, sweet corn, and bread. Then we left to see Vanilla Ice in person at a club, which was great except for it being too crowded to be enjoyable at all. He did some newer stuff and then, of course, 'Ice Ice Baby' and the 'Ninja Rap' from the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie of the early 1990s. Enjoy the food pics!

Schoolwork!

I haven't posted anything lately because I've been super-busy. I have two papers due within 4 days of each other, but come early next week I'm planning on catching up on a bunch of topics.
Thanks for your patience!
In the meantime, here are a couple pictures from our trip to Windsor a couple weeks ago.

Field trip to St. Martin's-in-the-Field

For my 'Christianity in Britain' class today we went to the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Field, one of the first churches built expressly for Anglican worship, as opposed to being appropriated and modified from Roman Catholic roots. It is located on Trafalgar Square and is currently in the final phases of renovation.

Many elements of the Church of England's style of worship are evident in the design of the building. First, the building has excellent acoustics due to Anglicans' emphasis on sermons and 'the word'. Second, there are 'box seats' of sorts, balcony-level seats that face inwards where nobles paid annual rent for their seats. The main body of the church was for the plebiscite masses and had no pews. There is also the Monarch's Box and the Admiralty's Box, special seats for those two entities when they attend the church.

The church is very plain: white with gold trim. The trim was a sort of low-key version of the kind in St. Paul's.

Today the church has a strong social outreach program which has its origins in WWI. British soldiers would leave for and return from the battlefront from Charing Cross station in Trafalgar Square, and so St. Martin's ministered to the soldiers while they were waiting for trains.

The church is also used almost daily as a concert hall for classical music, as a way to raise money for its £2m in annual maintenance costs. It also operates a restaurant on the premises.

Tour of the National Theatre

On Friday I took a backstage tour of National Theatre with my class. It is a very interesting place. The idea for a national theatre, a focal point for the country's drama scene, had been kicking around since the 1840s, plans finally got rolling in the 1940s, and the building opened in the 1970s (and it shows! the architecture is nothing to call home about).
The theatre complex consists of three theatres: the Olivier, which is the main stage where we saw St. Joan the other day; the Lyttleton, a smaller theatre, and a studio theatre, whose name I forget.

The Olivier is named after Laurence Olivier, who was a driving force behind the idea of a national theatre and was the theatre's first artistic director. It is a circular theatre with 118 degrees of seating around the stage, which is one of only two revolving drum theatres in the world, the other being in Vienna.

The National Theatre is a repertory theatre, meaning that more than one show is shown in each venue at a time, which often requires daily set changes. The Lyttleton theatre was designed with this in mind. Entire sets can be constructed on casters on the right stage or rear stage and then wheeled into place and lowered so as to be flush to stage level. This can allow two sets to be swaped easily, and they often have a third set that is easily taken apart and moved around the other sets.

The studio theater is incredibly flexible. It is a rectangular room with two levels of balconies ringing three sides of the room and reconfigurable seating on the floor. Plays have been held on the long transverse of the room, the short transverse, and there have even been plays held in the balconies with the audience in the middle of the room.

The theatre makes most of their sets and props in-house. We went through the workshops and saw the giant canvas frame and three movable bridges they use to paint the backdrops, as well as some of the more interesting props they've made recently. We also saw in-progress models of the horse puppets they will be using for an upcoming production called 'War Horse', about WWI seen through the eyes of a horse. Some of the horses will have three people inside: one in back, one in front, and one for the head, which will have many points of articulation. Some models will have a saddle and rider on 'horse'-back.

It was interesting to go on this tour and see how much work goes into putting on these performances. The theatre has approximately 150-200 fulltime employees, and is funded through box-office sales, sponsorships, and government backing. I am considering returning there to catch another play in the near future.

UPDATE: the dear mother found virtual tours of the National Theatre. Enjoy!

Imperial War Museum

Yesterday some friends and I went to the Imperial War Museum. Its subject is mostly from WWI onwards, as far as I could tell. In the lobby there were some impressive pieces of military hardware, including an 80ft tall terrestrial periscope tower used by the Germans in WWI, and one of the first British tanks deployed in WWI in an attempt to cut the stalemate. Also of interest were the German and Italian one-man submarines used in WWII. The German variant could carry two torpedoes, one on either side, while the Italian variant had a detachable bomb that could be detached onto the hulls of targets.

I spent most of my time in the basement level, where there were exhibits on WWI, WWII, D-Day, and a 'Conflicts since 1945' section. There were also sections covering crimes against humanity and the Holocaust. There was a walk-in lifesize mockup of trenches to walk through, which was rather interesting. They piped in smells and it was much colder in that darkened room, effectively making a more eery and uncomfortable experience, which was further amplified by well-placed speakers and life-size figures of solders. Very well done.

There were also interesting displays about the 'secret agent' aspects of war, including covert weapons and a display on the SAS' role in the 1980 embassy hostage crisis in London in which hostages were taken in the Iranian embassy. The SAS stormed in after the hostages started getting shot.

It was an interesting museum to say the least.

Evensong at St. Paul's Cathedral

Today I went to evening service, called 'Evensong', at St. Paul's Cathedral. Attending the evening prayer service (I think it's the equivalent to 'Vespers' in some Catholic circles) is a free way to get inside the cathedral and walk around a little, because otherwise you get charged £9, which is a bit pricey. The interior of St. Paul's is the most beautiful church I have ever visited.
Most historic churches/cathedrals/abbeys feature varying shades of gray and perhaps brown in the interior in modern times. At one time they were brightly painted and colorful, but the paint has been worn from hundreds of years of disrepair and lack of maintenance and restorative work. While the cathedrals are incredibly stately and majestic, they're still... gray.

The interior of St. Paul's, on the other hand, is set in a stunning black, white, and gold motif. The stonework is white marble, the floors resemble a diagonally-oriented chessboard with black and white squares. Tombs and statues are in black. The contrast is breathtaking, and we haven't even gotten to the golden crowning and dome yet.
Normally, when I've seen gold in churches, I tend to think it is a little overdone and gaudy, or at least that's what I will think now that I've seen St. Paul's. The Basilica of the Sacred Heart, on Notre Dame's campus, for example, has gold features that seem very heavy compared to its tasteful yet ornate use in St. Paul's. Add to this the dark wood in the quire and the large amount of light let in through the mostly unstained windows, and the view inside this massive cathedral is truly breathtaking.

I'll be heading back there sometime soon to actually pay the entrance fee and get up into the giant dome, as I've heard the view is amazing from up there. The good view isn't a coincidence: the City of London has strict zoning requirements restricting height anywhere near St. Paul's so that it remains a prominent part of the landscape, which is what drove all the skyscrapers to the Canary Wharf area. This happens to also create wonderful views from St. Paul's dome.
I've also heard that you have to see St. Paul's before you go see St. Peter's in Rome, otherwise it's anticlimactic. I'll be travelling to Rome in a couple of weeks, so I'm pumped!

St. Joan at the National Theatre

Last night I went to see the classic English play 'St. Joan' by George Bernard Shaw at the Royal National Theatre. Shaw was inspired by the canonization of Joan in 1920. This was a big hit in the 20s and 30s, and apparently every actress would have died to play Joan in that time period.
While the play may be a classic, this adaptation was not classical. This was a modern, 'artsy' production, but not in a bad sense. From what I could tell, it was Shaw's play, but presented differently. Battle scenes were represented by banging chairs on the floor and sticks on corrugated aluminum, while the transitions were set to haunting eastern-inspired vocals.

The play itself was interesting, but a bit long-winded. One scene had three people debating at a table for at least 20 minutes, and there was at least one more scene with the same problem. Perhaps the British accent impeded my ability to follow the dialogue effectively, but the emotion behind the dialogue seemed forced and over-acted. The main actress, in addition, adopted a forced country accent which did not help her character, which was definitely played as more of a madwoman than one of strong conviction. Her acting, too, seemed over the top.

The production was interesting, but not riveting. The set was imaginative and the style was interesting, but the acting fell through on key parts. Also, the seats were uncomfortable.

Anyway, we're planning a trip to Cardiff in Wales for the weekend. Should be a good time!