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September 2024
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One week in London
It's
a long trip from Tirana to New Orleans, so I decided to stop somewhere
on the way. London seemed like a good idea. Why only one week? Because
it's all I can afford, even in less than desirable conditions. Once I
stayed in a hotel in Paris where I had to relocate a chair to the top of
the bed so I had space to open the bathroom door. I used to say that
was the smallest hotel room in the world. I was wrong. This hotel room
in London is smaller. It doesn't even have space for a chair. And a
chair could be useful there, especially after climbing the stairs to the
fourth floor of this Victorian building. Well, as I said, it was all I
could afford (barely). And I was determined to make the most of my stay
in the British capital, and cram as many museums as I could in those few
days. Only one week but a lot of activity. Get a drink and sit down,
it's going to be a long newsletter. But stay with me and I promise you
some Harry Potter at the end.
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Day one
Despite
the morning drizzle, I started my day with a walk in Kensington
Gardens. I saw the Italian Gardens, the Peter Pan statue, the Arch
sculpture by Henry Moore, and the Albert Memorial. I even found the
bench where I read The Lord of the Rings decades ago when I lived here.
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A good place to read The Lord of the Rings
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Then I went to the Victoria and Albert
Museum, the main attraction for the day. It's hard to describe, because
it seems to have everything, but I would call it a museum of decorative
arts. There are thousands of objects, including furniture, ceramics,
glass, metalworks, jewelry, textiles, and also sculptures, paintings,
prints, drawings, photographs, and books. The area called the Cast
Courts is one of the most impressive, even knowing they are all copies.
They have, among many other things, a full-size replica of
Michelangelo's David (I saw the original recently at the Galleria
dell'Accademia in Firenze) and a full-size replica of Trajan's Column (I
saw the original many years ago in Rome, and another replica more
recently at the National Museum of Romanian History in Bucharest). My
favorite pieces in the museum were a few paintings by J.M.W. Turner and a
few photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
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Victoria and Albert Museum
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Next I went to the Natural History Museum,
which is just across the street. The star here is the building itself,
both externally (with a façade covered in sculpted terracotta tiles) and
internally (with a main hall that resembles a cathedral, stained glass
windows on both sides, and an enormous skeleton of a whale hanging from
the ceiling).
I finished the day with another long walk that took me to Kensington
Palace (birthplace of Queen Victoria) and to Prince's Square (where I
lived decades ago, now refurbished and gentrified and certainly beyond
my purchasing power).
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Natural History Museum
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Day two
Time
to get into the tube (that's what they call the metro here) and go to
Trafalgar Square. That's the site of the famous Nelson's Column, a
monument over 50 meter tall celebrating Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who
led England to victory against France and Spain at the Battle of
Trafalgar (hence the name of the square), preventing their combined
fleet to attempt taking control of the English Channel as a first step
for Napoleon to invade the United Kingdom.
The main attraction in Trafalgar Square is the National Gallery, an
impressive art museum full of memories for me. The collection is
spectacular. They have many iconic landscapes by Claude Lorrain
(including The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba) and by J.M.W. Turner (including The Fighting Temeraire).
Boticelli and Ucello. El Greco and Velázquez. Ingres and Delacroix.
They have several works by Raphael and by Titian, and a room full of
Rembrandts. And Degas, Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Seurat.
Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks and The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck. Room after room of amazing art.
Since I was in the area, I also visited the National Portrait Gallery,
which houses many very well known paintings and photographs of
historical figures, from Henry VIII and William Shakespeare to James
Joyce and Elizabeth II. I was particularly glad to see portraits of
fellow travelers like Lord Byron and Richard Francis Burton, always an
inspiration.
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The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, by Claude Lorrain
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Day three
Rain.
It's London, of course there would be rain. I spent most of the day
inside the British Museum. A long trip into history and into my own
memories. My old tricks still work. I went to the back entrance at
opening time, to get a shorter line, and then moved directly to the
third floor, to find the Egyptian rooms almost empty and ready for me to
admire the mummies and sarcophagi in tranquility. One hour later you
could barely move in that area, now filled with hordes of tourists. I
worked my way down from the third floor and explored as much as I could.
Yes, I saw the Rosetta Stone (the key to deciphering Egyptian
hieroglyphs), the Elgin Marbles (it still hurts me that they were
stripped off the Parthenon and brought here), and the Hoa Hakananai'a (a
large Maori statue from Easter Island), but I have my own favorite
pieces. The Lewis Chessmen (Scotland, 12th century), with their little
startled faces, always make me smile. The bronze head of Augustus
(Egypt, 25 BCE) has a pair of sad eyes that could hypnotize you. And the
small bronze Pazuzu head (Iraq, 900 BCE), which I sketched decades ago
in my visits to the British Museum.
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The Lewis Chessmen
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Then I went to Charles Dickens's house, where he wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. He wasn't home, but I got to see his working place, his bedroom, his dining room, and the rest of his spacious lodgings.
I also visited the John Soane's Museum. He was a rich architect and
collector, and his house is crammed with art works. What attracted me
there was the fact that he was a friend of J.M.W. Turner, and I was
expecting to see some of his paintings in the collection. Apparently
Soane only owned three of them, and just one is on display. However, he had
three large Canalettos that were more than enough to justify stopping
by.
Then, at night, I went to the Trafalgar Theater to watch The 39 Steps. Very funny version of the Buchan's book and Hitchcock's movie, with just four actors interpreting dozens of characters.
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Dickens's dining room
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Day four
I needed a calmer day after all the walking done so far, so I only went to four museums.
The first stop was the Sherlock Holmes Museum, which recreates the
fictional house on 221B Baker Street where the detective lived and
worked. They did a good job decorating the rooms with authentic objects
from the last decades of the 19th century, inspired both on the books
and the movies.
Then I visited the Wallace Collection. It's a large 18th century
mansion, filled with an impressive collection of European and Oriental
weapons and armor, plus paintings, watercolors, drawings, and
ostentatious decoration. There was a predilection for the Rococo style,
which doesn't appeal to me, but there is also plenty of good art to see,
including five Rembrandts, four Turners, and eight Canalettos.
I also went to the Cartoon Museum (one exhibit about the history of
English cartoons and one about superheroes and English artists) and to
the Photographers Gallery (a four storey building dedicated to
photography, with several exhibitions).
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Sherlock Holmes's living room
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Day five
Cloudy day, which was the best weather I got so far. There was a little
sun early in the morning, and then it disappeared. I took the tube all
the way to the Tower Bridge, and walked alongside the Thames to the
south. It's a very photogenic river, with views to attractive bridges
and some famous landmarks like St. Paul's Cathedral and the Houses of
Parliament.
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Houses of Parliament
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My first stop was the Tate Modern, a museum
housing modern and contemporary art. The modern part was very
interesting, including Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Dalí, Ernst,
Magritte, de Chirico, Lichtenstein, and many other classics. The
contemporary part was boring and stale.
After a very long walk, I reached the Tate Britain, the original Tate
Gallery (now they have four, the two in London plus one in Liverpool and
one in St. Ives). So many great things to see. For me, of course, the
main course was their collection of paintings by J.M.W. Turner, the
largest in the world. There are about one hundred works on display (they
own 300 oil paintings and 36,000 drawings and watercolors), which kept
me there for a long time. I also admired works by Blake, Canaletto,
Waterhouse, Millais, Rossetti, Bacon, Moore, Hockney, and many others. A
very good museum.
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Norham Castle, Sunrise, by J.M.W. Turner
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Day six
Went on a little tour outside the city. First I visited Oxford,
90 km north-west of London. Just walked around the city looking at
those buildings that are so full of history but still in use by the
University of Oxford, the world's second-oldest university in continuous
operation (the first one is the Università di Bologna). So many
memories of movies and books set in Oxford, like the His Dark Materials trilogy, the Inspector Morse novels, The Oxford Murders,
and of course the Harry Potter series, which doesn't happen in Oxford
but has a Hogwarts School that would fit perfectly here (actually, a few
scenes were filmed here).
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Oxford
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Then I went to Stonehenge, uber famous
prehistoric megalithic structure in Amesbury. If you can pretend that
all those selfie-obsessed tourists are not there, the place is like a
trip to the past, with those enormous stones sitting in the middle of an
empty field for unknown reasons. I like to imagine that the people who
built Stonehenge did it just because the stones looked nice there.
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Stonehenge
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On the way back to London, I stopped at
Windsor for afternoon tea. It's a quaint little town (population:
32,608), 35 km west of London, that is the site of Windsor Castle, one
of the many residences of the royal family. It seemed the perfect place
to have afternoon tea, since it was a habit born in the royal court.
Anna Maria Russell, Duchess of Bedford and a court lady for Queen
Victoria, annoyed with the long gap between her early lunch and her late
dinner, started having some tea and cake late in the afternoon. This
ritual was adopted by other royal courtiers and also by the queen, and
soon became a national tradition. My afternoon tea in Windsor consisted
of Earl Gray tea, egg sandwiches and cucumber sandwiches (no bread
crust), scone and strawberry jam.
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Windsor
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Last day
To close my English mini-tour, I went to Watford, 24 km northwest of London, home of the Leavesden Studios, now named Warner Bros. Studio Tour London - The Making of Harry Potter.
It's not a theme park, it's an exhibition of sets, costumes, and props
used in the Harry Potter movies. The sets are impressive for the size
and for the level of detail. There's the great hall of Hogwarts, the
entrance hall of Gringotts Bank, Diagon Alley, and a few others. I think
the two things I liked the most were the collection of prosthetics for
the goblins working at Gringotts and the large model of Hogwarts castle
(15 meters in diameter) used for exterior shots.
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Hogwarts
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And the food?
For this visit to London, I decided to explore the wonders of pub food. I
went to places with names like The Pride of Paddington, The Dickens
Tavern, Shakespeare's Head, The Clarence, The Champion, The Victoria,
and The Ship & Shovell, and found food that was good and
interesting. The famous fish and chips, found in any pub, is a battered
haddock fillet, chips, peas, and tartare sauce. The secret is using ale
in the batter. The steak and ale pie is steak slowly cooked in ale and
encased in shortcrust pastry. Bangers and mash is the pairing of
sausages and mashed potatoes (sometimes they glaze the sausages with
honey and mustard, which is delicious). Scotch egg is a hard-boiled egg
surrounded by sausage meat and coated in breadcrumbs. I ate all that
accompanied by shandy (half lemonade and half beer), which is the only
way I drink beer, the traditional pub beverage.
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What's next?
I'm already in New Orleans, where I will stay until the end of October. But that's a story for another time.
Laissez les bons temps rouler! (That's a popular saying here, a
word-for-word Louisiana French translation of "let the good times
roll".)
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