further wanderings...

Since last we spoke I have continued my Foot Torture Tour '06 - Thursday saw me arise to move hotels. Fortuitously my interviewee offered to pick me up on Thursday morning, take me to my new hotel and drop my belongings off at my new abode and thence to an interview location - to this offer I said 'yes' - he suggested the members room at Tate Modern - to this I said 'yes' - and aside from being incredibly helpful with my travelling needs, he was also very interesting to speak to about my research and answered many questions for me. And then I got to take on Tate Modern! Hurrah! More paintings than you can poke a stick at... Including the Rothko room _swoon_ then I returned to the new hotel via St Paul's Cathedral and the Millenium Bridge (which I really like, I enjoy the way it appears to have been slung across the Thames)

Returned to the new hotel, thinking the thought: it would have been wise to pay more attention to where I was going when I was driven to the hotel that morning, so as to remember where it was for later solo discovery, fortunately my hunch was correct and I made it there for the agreed rendezvous with My Friend From Norway, who came to London for a few days to visit London and me. Very good to have someone to talk to at long last, meant that I have spent a lot less time in the past few days composing songs from my feet. We did name them however - my feet are now Judas and Thomas. Not sure what the travel insurance people will say when I explain that one of my feet has attempted to sell me to the authorities for thirty pieces of silver and subsequently, made an attempt on its own life when it became overcome with remorse.

Friday we headed back to the Tate Modern for the Kandinsky exhibition, which was excellently, exceptionally, utterly fantastic. Wassily isn't an artist who we see much of in Australia so this was such a great experience - the exhibition traced the development of abstraction in his work from his early impressionistesque work to his later abstract work - which I think would have made it pretty accessible for people that are kind of intimidated by what the point of abstract art is. And it narrated how Wassily arrived in Paris as a lawyer, soon realised that art was his true purpose in life and so converted immediately - so for some, you know, there might be a lesson in that _smirk_

After that we wandered the city, found some cocktails (blessed be the happy hour! It is truly the hour of happiness!), found Chinatown and found the tube back to our hotel.

Saturday was NerdMecca day: Oxford! We caught the train from London to Oxford and had a wander around the town of Spires, even clambering up the CrazySteep stairs inside the tower of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin to take in the view - if you ever need to make friends when you're in Oxford, climb up those stairs, they are so narrow that to pass anyone going in the opposite direction necessitates the kind of bodily contact that would be counted as marriage in some places. The view is beautiful, and photographically documented to the extent that you should be able to reconstruct the town from my records. We then went to the oldest coffee house in Europe, where I had tea. After that, to the Ashmolean Musuem - happy day! - the fruits of earlier nerds and their travels: I buy pencils and postcards, they "bought" sarcophagi and paintings. Half of it is currently being renovated to expand the exhibition space and so is shut down, which was kind of a relief, I had reached my limit.

Being a university town, we felt it our duty to demonstrate cultural sensitivity to the lifestyle of the inhabitants, and so we took ourselves to the pub, where Judas and Thomas felt better after a nice wheat beer. Train back to London, then Sunday was the big challenge: the British Museum. That place is massive! We compiled a shortlist of the things we felt we absolutely had to see and commenced the mission. The Rosetta Stone was a joy to behold, having read about it forever, and especially as you then got to behold the excessive array of souvenirs that the Museum have plastered the image of the RS all over - the mousemat was my personal favourite, although the backpack was also a bit of a winner - the stone was carved well enough to hang about for thousands of years and enable the decoding of hieroglyphs, you'd be lucky if that backpack lasted out the door of the museum. Anyway, onward through Egypt (my new favourite Egyptian deity: the one with the head of a lion and the body of a pregnant hippopotamus - wow did she luck out when the bodily forms of the deities were being attributed). The carvings were stunning, the simplicity of the forms of Egyptian carved granite statues is beautiful, and a great contrast with.... _drumroll_ the Elgin Marbles / Parthenon sculptures - the marble statues from the Parthenon in Athens brought home by Lord Elgin in a remarkably enterprising feat of domestic decoration - takes a keen mind to look at an ancient ruin and think 'yes, they will look just lovely stuck up on my pile of bricks in England' - and create an elegant diplomatic tiptoe between Greece and England centuries later. Ikea can't claim to do that can they?

Leaving aside the politics, the marbles themselves are amazing, seeing them in-the-marble was fantastic, having looked at photos of them countless times, and the incredible detail of the carvings was such a contrast with the Egyptian sculptures next door.

Then it was off to the Easter Island statue - unfortunately the extent of the Easter Island display, at least in the parts of the museum that we covered - then downstairs to Africa. Africa was great, the display is a great balance between material collected a long time ago and contemporary pieces, some ceremonial pieces (ceramics etc) demonstrating the continuity with the older material, and some contemporary art. My favourite was the Tree of Life - constructed out of firearms that were collected in exchange for practical materials that would help people earn a living, and cut into small pieces, then welded by local artists into a giant sculpture.

My internet connection is failing me, so I'll have to leave you here for the minute...