For History class today, we went to see the Banqueting House. I knew literally nothing about this place before we went, but the professor gave us a good tour. The house had been part of the Whitehall Palace complex that burned down a long time ago. The Banqueting House was the only building that survived. It's apparently another architectural marvel, like Queen's House in Greenwich, done by the same architect. It's neo-Classical design "revolutionized" English architecture. Personally, I like the Gothic and Tudor styles just fine. Anyway, it's basically just a big rectangular building. It's function was just to hold banquets and masques and other royal entertainments for foreign dignitaries. It has a very ornately painted roof by Rubens depicting cherubs crowning James I, who had a bit of an obsession with the concept of the "Divine Right of Kings" (the idea that God made kings into Gods on Earth, so they were special), comissioned by his son Charles I, who got into some pretty darn serious trouble for his and his father's notions of kingship. The Banqueting House was the site of Charles I's exectution. I had always assumed he'd been beheaded at the Tower, or Marble Arch, or some other traditional execution place, but turns out they build a scaffold on the outside of the Banqueting House just for the occasion. The other interesting thing about the Banqueting House is it's where Mary and William of Orange were formally crowned in 1689.
We then went to the National Portrait Gallery to browse. We didn't have much time there, since it was getting close to dinner time and I was starving, so I went straight to the Tudor rooms with a friend to see the paintings. I will definitely be coming back, because there is no way I could see it all in such a short time. Just in the half hour or so I was there, I learned that a painting of Edward VI, Henry VIII's son, had been recently put through an x-ray type machine, and they had discovered that it had probably been started when he was a prince, then changed once he became king to show him as taller and more manly (even though the kid was all of nine). I also learned that some of the most famous pictures of Henry VIII's wives were done after their deaths and that there was a horrific and unfortunate fashion trend for nasty little pointy mustaches somewhere in the 1700s. Obviously I will need to explore that further.
I came home to make myself stir fry. I had a big bag of mixed veggies that I threw in a pan with soy sauce, lots of ginger and lots of garlic, a bag of pre-cooked noodles that only needed to be warmed up in a pan and I pan fried a chicken breast with more ginger and garlic. It was an absolutely heavenly meal, and I can't wait to eat the leftovers!
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