April 17: St. Paul's and Last Market Day

I decided I wanted to go to St. Paul's Cathedral for their Palm Sunday service this morning, so I did. It was bitter-sweet walking toward the Cathedral from Mansion House tube station. I will miss seeing that dome on the horizon. I found a pretty garden just across the road from the church, so I stopped for a rest and some pictures. The service started in Paternoster Square, which is just behind the church. There were men dressed in red and black church service uniforms handing out palms folded into the shape of a cross and detailed pamphlets with the whole script of the service in them. The men were all decked out in their finest, and one was even wearing a very fancy-looking kilt! The bells of the Cathedral rang and rang and rang till 11 o'clock. We waited for awhile till we heard trumpets and then we saw the procession coming. It was lead by clergymen carrying a gold cross and followed by two donkeys. Behind the donkeys came more clergy and then the choir, men in white and black robes and boys in high ruffled collars. Behind them were lots of children carrying big green palms. The guy in charge (at least I assume he was the head honcho since he was wearing the biggest hat), who is I think called "the President" spoke for a few minutes and then we filed into the church singing and yelling "Hosanna!" Inside, we found seats and listened to the service, reading the whole scene of the Passion of the Christ. It was very close to the Catholic Passion though just a little different. I sat for awhile after the service, listening to the organist play. I had hoped to explore the church more but the men in uniform were trying to usher us out and I was starving.

I caught the tube to Liverpool Street and walked to Up Market, where the best food is on Sundays. I got lucky and met my friend Katie on the way to get food. I got a halloumi and couscous and vegetable wrap that was beyond amazing. Seriously, it was the best food ever. The halloumi cheese was unreal and it was covered in a mint and sour cream sauce that was divine. I could have died happy after eating that. It was also huge, so it took me a good 25 minutes to eat as we shopped around. I will dream of that meal forever. I wasn't really looking for anything specific in the market. Katie found a few tshirts and I considered a rough-cut emerald ring but it was just too similar to my new ruby one and it was smallish so I'll wait on that. After we'd exhausted the market, we found a bench in the sun and chatted for awhile, enjoying our last time in a London market. By the time we got home it was almost time for dinner, so I picked up some hamburger meat at the grocery store and made a huge pot of spaghetti when I got home. It was really huge. I had waaaay too much so I fed a bunch of my friends and I still have at least 4 or 5 meals worth left over in the fridge. At least I don't need to cook in our stupid little kitchen again. Now it's time for another round of homework and studying.

Garden by St. Paul's

The start of the procession in Paternoster Square

Donkeys!

Choir

Clergy

Blessing the palms

Everybody piling in the Cathedral

I "accidentally" took a picture in the Cathedral. Oops.

Outside the Cathedral

Halloumi wrap

April 16: Last Trip to Portobello Road

This morning I took off for Portobello Road across Hyde Park. I went alone because I really wanted to be able to explore at my own pace. It was an amazingly beautiful day. The sun was shining and bright and warm and there was just a hint of a breeze that smelled like flowers. There was even a carousel in the park that reminded me of the one in Mary Poppins. When I got to the market, I wandered all over, looking at all the tourist junk and antique marvels. There were lots of wisteria blooming on the old houses. For lunch, I had planned to visit the iconic Hummingbird Bakery for one last red velvet cupcake with cream cheese frosting, but a bakery stall caught my eye in the produce section of the market. They were selling piles of doughnuts with bright sprinkles, which is what I was drawn to, but then I noticed a sign for an apple cream filled pastry and had to try it. It was incredible. The outside was a flaky pastry originally in an oval shape but folded over a layer of cinnamon apple preserves and a huge dollop of fresh whipped cream puff cream. The top was sprinkled with cinnamon and big chunks of sugar. I was pretty much in Heaven.

Walking back up the street, I bought a few more Beatrix Potter prints, just because I like them, two botanical fairy prints from an old book about flower fairies that show the "Mountain Ash Fairy" and the "Plane Tree Fairy" (plane trees are very common here and they're very odd-looking so of course I notice them all over and to me they really symbolize "London" the same way a red bus or Big Ben does so this was the perfect souvenir with character for me). I searched all over for a nice silver spoon set or something but nothing was quite right. There was lots of silver plate but that's not good enough. I really thought about getting an antique tea cup or two (I stumbled across one that had beautiful trilliums painted on it) but I don't think I could get those home in one piece. I found a really great jewelry seller who had exactly what I'd been looking for. I bought a big rough-cut ruby in a bright carmine red in a teardrop shape with a nice simple but heavy silver setting. I liked it so much, when I saw the same jewelry designers second booth a little later, I picked out a round, cushion-cut rose quartz ring that sparkles something fierce in the sunlight. There were two little British girls manning that booth and they "helped" me pick it out. They were stinking adorable! Oh, and as I left the produce area, I made sure to stop at a tent selling nectarines that I'd seen last week and had been craving all week. They are the best nectarines I've ever had!

I walked back through Hyde Park towards my flat, enjoying the day. It had become pretty overcast, and almost looked like rain but it so pretty, with the bright green new leaves in the park set off against the dark purpling gray sky. I found a horse chestnut with very low branches that was flowering and satisfied my year-long curiosity as to what the heck the white flowers look like up close. They were really pretty and I was surprised to see that the older flowers had some bright pink in the center. I met my friends in the park, having a picnic and playing soccer. We'd decided to throw our own "Mini Mifflin" party in Hyde Park so we put down the extra bed sheets we had and procured a frisbee and a soccer ball. It was lots of fun. I'm glad I left when I did though, because the idiot boys decided to get a goofy miniature barbecue tinfoil thingie and light it in the park where signs proclaiming "No fires of allowed" are everywhere. Predictably, they got caught just as their sausages were getting done and had to beat a hasty retreat back to the house. They're not real bright.

Beautiful Hyde Park, literally right across from my flat

Wisteria on Portobello Road

This is a yellow tree peony. That gate post has to be 7 feet high...Um, wow!

Portobello Road

Beautiful ancient climbing rose. It was a true purple-black.

Amazing apple cream puff thingie

Tree peonies, for 5 pounds. I almost died.

Old man with a chunky dog on his shoulder, drinking whisky outside the "Duke of Wellington" pub and listening to a wacky looking Asain lady wearing a crazy knit hat playing guitar (pretty badly). You can't get more Notting Hill than this!

Nectarines!

Hyde Park on a Saturday afternoon. Sighhhhhhh...

Silly duck on the Round Pond

The Round Pond

Horse Chesnut

So that's what they look like up close!!!

It was a busy night and I ordered two new goldfish from a breeder in Hawaii. One's black with a super long tail and telescope eyes and the other is identical but silvery white. They'll be arriving at the house on Friday afternoon, just before I get there, so there's an added incentive to leave London. I've already decided to call the black on "Winston." He needed a British name, and "Charles" just wasn't going to cut it. We threw a big party in our common room after dinner and everyone came down. We split into teams of "Trashy Americans" and "Posh Brits" and dressed the parts and played games against each other. I think my team, the Brits, won, but nobody was really keeping score. I'm kind of surprised no one got hurt, with the crazy games we played. I tried to go to bed a little early, since I'll be getting up to go to church at St. Paul's Cathedral tomorrow morning!

April 15: Homework Day

After the lovely night I had last night, the last thing I wanted to do was spend my day doing homework, but it couldn't be helped. I started early in the morning and didn't finish till bedtime and I've still got some left. I wish this was just a semester abroad, not a study abroad!

April 14: Party on a Boat!

Today for history class we had to explore the Imperial War Museum. The museum was very good, and I enjoyed my visit. They had a bunch of different kinds of tanks from WWI on, and it was interesting to see how the tanks had evolved over the years and changed into purpose-built machines. I really liked the "home front" exhibit, which had posters and items from Britain during WWII. My favorites were two posters. One was blue and pictured a woman and child running in a foggy street with the inscription "Carrots keep you healthy and help you to see in the blackout" and the other showed a beautiful lady surrounded by military men with the words "Keep mum she's not so dumb!" Ha! We also learned that before becoming the Imperial War Museum, the building used to be an insane asylum known as Bethlehem Royal Hospital, or it's more popular slang name, "Bedlam."

After the museum, my friends and I came home and started frantically getting ready for our farewell dinner, which was supposed to be a secret, but we all knew already that it was to be held on a boat on the Thames. It felt like Prom again! We had so much fun running from room to room for curling irons, shoes, nail polish, and everything else. I will really, really miss most of the girls I live with. We have so much fun together! Eventually we made it to Foundation House where they took pictures of us then loaded us onto a coach bus and took us down to the boat. I'd forgotten my camera, but my friends all took millions of pictures so I'll post them as soon as I can. On the boat, tables were all laid out with appetizers and we were handed a glass of champagne as we walked in. Elegantly dressed folk sat at some of the tables but we had an entire side of the boat to ourselves. My appetizer, an eggplant and veggie dish with goats cheese and walnuts, was incredible. I ate my friend's too when she couldn't because she's allergic to nuts. They brought out wine then, giving a bottle to every other person so that everyone had half a bottle to themselves. Oh dear. Honestly, some people were already tipsy from the champagne on an empty stomach and they did not give us water so lots of people were drinking the 13% alcohol wine as if it were water which really, really wasn't good. One girl was falling over before the main course even came, and another was nodding off into her lamb and barley. Anyway, I'm smarter so I was fine. My main was chicken breast in a creamy mushroom and tarragon and cinnamon sauce that was just amazing. I will need to try that this summer. The friends who had ordered the lamb weren't as pleased with their dish, and the barley it came on was strangely cooked. It was still kind of rawish inside, so it was almost crunchy. Strange. By this point in the evening, most people were pretty tipsy. The friend I was sharing a bottle with had polished off almost the whole thing in the time it took me to drink one glass. She wasn't doing so hot by the end of the night! The really bad thing was that they never gave us any water so everyone was guzzling the wine. Well, thank goodness for common sense (which really isn't so common, I'm discovering) that says "don't chug wine on a boat."

After dinner, we went up on top of the boat as we went past the O2 Center and the Thames flood barriers, which was just amazing. It had been cool enough to see Big Ben and the Tower and all those from the boat in the light but now it was dark and everything just looked magical. It was chilly but not terribly cold, so we could enjoy ourselves on the roof of the yacht. It was soooo much fun! When we finally went back down to the tables to warm up, our dessert had been set out and oh my goodness! I had layered mousse on mango sauce with a big white chocolate bonbon on top. It was even better than it sounds! SO good!!! Someone had gotten a bottle of champagne which was being consumed so everyone was pretty jolly by that point and some were starting to look like they needed a nap. A singer came out and started singing cabaret style songs and we all went up to dance. It was beyond fun. Even our professor came out on the dance floor! We went back up on the roof as we passed Tower Bridge on the way back and it was just surreal. I do not want to leave this wonderful city!!!

We stayed on the roof of the boat talking and laughing and trying to keep the drunks from falling in the river till the boat's crew kicked us off. Then we decided to go to this Australian pub that some of the guys had found a few days ago that they promised us was "right across the road." 30 minutes later, we finally found it. We herded everyone in and started dancing again. It was a blast. By this time, though, people had really started getting sick so I left a little early with some friends to get my roommate home after she was ill. It was after midnight so I was ready to leave. We made it home by 1 and hung out in the kitchen for awhile before bed. I love these people so much and it's going to be so strange not living with them. Tonight was just the best night ever, watching London light up at night and dancing till I dropped and enjoying a great meal with great people and even coming home and stopping at every stranger to try to hush my poor wine-soaked friend as she bid them "Hullo stranger! Have a lovely evening!" and hearing "Wait! My shoe is over there!" and "You guys are the best. I love you Noel, I love you Amanda, I love you Katie. Will you hold my hair? I need another newspaper..." This has just been the best semester ever.

April 13: Mamma Mia!

This morning I went over to Leicester Square to the tkts booth to see if they had any special tickets for Mamma Mia. Though that particular show does not "discount" their tickets like most do, they do lower the prices on some days if you're lucky, and I got lucky and got a fantastic ticket for 35 pounds instead of 67. I came back home for Travel Journal, which was quite successful if I do say so myself, and dinner before heading to the theater. The show was great fun. It was kind of strange hearing the songs in British accents but everyone was very good. It was definitely a "feel good musical" as they advertise. At the end, everyone was dancing and singing along to Mamma Mia and Waterloo. I had an absolute blast!

April 12: Frankenstein! (And the Wallace Collection)

This morning's Contemporary Britain class was all about the Kray twins, gangsters who ran London's East End till they finally got jailed. The professor had done quite a bit of sociology research and had written an article on the twins, so he really knew what he was talking about. For Museums class, we walked through Hyde Park over by Oxford Street to see the Wallace Collection, which is basically one family's amazing art and artifact collection housed in their old mansion. It was pretty incredible. It's best known for it's Rococo art, and it did not disappoint. There were frills and crazy flourishes everywhere! The collectors really liked that strange "peasant farmer"-style of still life painting. In one room, I counted 11 paintings of dead animals on one wall alone! For some odd reason, every other painting seemed to have at least one or two dead lobsters in it! It was a lot of fun to walk through the rooms and see the different themes and styles. I loved the beautiful re-done wallpaper in bright colors. Rococo art is just fun to look at and kind of giggle over all the insane details and extra flounces and curlicues. On the walk back, my friends and I stopped for Belgian waffles drizzled in creamy milk chocolate which we ate as we strolled back through the park. I am so going to miss this city!!!

Tonight was the looooong-awaited production of Frankenstein! Unfortunately for me, the first thing I learned upon arriving at 7 was that my favorite actor, Benedict Cumberbatch, who was supposed to be playing the Creature, had lost his voice at the matinee. The other actor that shares the role (the two are both famous and they switch off between being the Creature and Dr Frankenstein), Jonny Lee Miller, was getting his Creature makeup on last-second and the show had to be pushed back till 8 for him and the understudy to get ready. When we got into the theater, I was amazed at how they had changed the space from when we had seen Hamlet there just a few months ago. The walls were all covered with gray painted rough fabric, which we had seen being made on our back stage tour back in January. The director of the production is Danny Boyle, who is really famous and really good, and he went all-out on the minimalist yet intricate set. Above the stage was hanging a big light-fixture for lack of a better word. It was a big elongate triangle-shaped mirror hung flat-side down, with different shapes and styles of light bulbs dangling from the surface of the mirror. When we first got there, they were lit up with a red light so they looked really sinister, almost like dripping blood. On the stage, they had the center part turning round and round, with a strange object on it. It was a probably 7 ft square frame suspending a round semi-transparent buckskin-colored balloon-like thing, except where a balloon is spherical, this was like two circles that bulged out but were sewn together all around. We eventually realized that inside the shape was a man. We could only see his silhouette and later we realized that it was supposed to be like an artificial "womb" structure. This rendition of Frankenstein started with the Creature's "birth" scene, which is not how the book goes, but I guess they took some artistic license. The Creature burst from his "womb" and onto the floor where the poor guy writhed around on the stage for at least 15 minutes, naked and made up to look like he had been grotesquely sewn together, trying to discover how to use his limbs. The actor, Jonny Lee Miller, was really incredible. He flopped around like a newborn giraffe, unable to get his legs to work. He played the Creature as very child-like, which made the rendition even sadder. The understudy for Dr Frankenstein did a pretty good job. He did very well at the mad scientist bits, but not so well expressing emotion, especially when he's supposed to be sad when the Creature kills his little brother in a bid for attention, and during the romantic parts with his fiance Elizabeth.

Throughout the show, the light fixture above the stage was used to show changing time of day, mood, and season. The lighting and sound effects were incredible. There was one strange, incongruous moment that happened just as the Creature was rejected by a horrified Dr Frankenstein and ran away into the world. As we were watching the poor Creature get beaten and screamed at, suddenly a train burst from the back of the stage. Problem was, it was weird. The play is, I believe, supposed to be set in the late 1700s, but this train was done in what I'd call "Steampunk" style. It was made of gears and chains, spewing fireworks, and the people riding it were wearing Steampunk-style goggles and clothing. It was really odd and only lasted long enough for the people to jump off and beat up the Creature, but it definitely did not fit. I don't know what the heck Danny Boyle had been thinking. The rest of the play was pretty much how you'd expect a beautifully done rendition of Frankenstein to be: sad and mesmerizing. The acting on the part of Jonny Lee Miller was phenomenal. I was sad for the Creature, but also recognized the wickedness it had decided to embrace. The Frankenstein understudy was ok, but I wanted Cumberbatch. The girl who played Elizabeth, Naomie Harris, who is a famous British actress (she also played Calypso in Pirates of the Caribbean), was really good. The guy who played the old blind man who befriends the creature was really good. The only bad one was Frankenstein's father, who has a decently large minor role. The actor was just awful. Like, embarrassingly awful. We could not imagine how they could have cast this guy, but when we got home we found out he shares the last name of the actress who did Elizabeth, so hopefully that's why they cast him because he was bad. I just about died of fright when the Creature lept from the bed in the scene where he kills Elizabeth. As he jumped, we realized that he had been concealed in a man-sized cavity in the mattress and covered with the sheet so we had had no idea that he was in there. It was super scary!

All in all, I'm kind of glad I didn't see Cumberbatch in the role of the Creature. It's just such a sad, grotesque and heart-breaking role. Plus the Creature does have to flop around naked for awhile, and well, that's just awkward. Anyway, I immensely enjoyed myself but now I'm going to find something happy to read before I go to bed.

April 11: I don't want to leave London yet!!!

I can't belive how fast this semester went!!! I am really, really sad to be leaving London in just 11 more days. Today in class we went over the plot and different adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in preparation for seeing it tomorrow. I'm super excited to see the actor Benedict Cumberbatch play the Creature. He's one of my favorite actors and seeing him live will be, I'm sure, amazing. After class I hopped on a tube to Leicester Square to see if they had any lower-price tickets for Mamma Mia (they don't discount but they do occasionally put their prices down so instead of 67 pounds, a ticket is 35), but the guy at the booth said they didn't get many that day and they were gone already but to try back on Tuesday or Wednesday, so I'll come back Wednesday. Instead, I caught up on some homework and ate popcorn.