July 25th

This day was our second day in London. It was much more eventful that the first. We got up around 9:30 so that we could get ready and go to the Nottinghill Market. Apparently they do a big outdoor market on Saturday’s that’s one of the most popular ones in the surrounding area. People come from all around London and the smaller towns in and around it to shop at this market, so we thought it would be a lot of fun to go. We took more time than we planned getting ready, and didn’t actually make it to Nottinghill until about 11:30. We weren’t in much of a hurry though. When we got there it was so packed. We walked down Portobello Road, and the market is near the end of the road. We split into smaller groups, and I stayed with Julia and Amanda, and we didn’t actually make it to the market until after 1. Instead, we found really fun, cheap shopping on the way to the market. We found a couple clothing stores where everything was 5 pounds, so about $8. I got a pair of shoes and a shirt, and Julia and Amanda got quite a few shirts and some shoes. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, these were very small stores, leaving no room for fitting rooms, so we just had to try stuff on over our clothes in the middle of the store and look in mirrors…it was quite the experience. We eventually made it down to the market . . . I think (I’m not sure if we made it to the actual market, or just more stores that had stuff set outside), and it wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be. There were some cool things to look at, like little antiques and trinkets, but nothing that I would really want to buy. And there wasn’t as much stuff as I expected, which is kind of what leads me to believe that we didn’t make it to the actual market. But it was still a lot of fun, nonetheless. This was the first time on the trip that I had actually gone shopping, so it was nice to just go around with a couple girls and try on ridiculous amounts of clothing. After Nottinghill, we headed over to Shakespeare’s Globe, again crossing the Millennium Bridge, which made us think of Harry Potter. Our plan was to get tickets to As You Like It for that night, but when we got there we found out that it’s not like the other theaters where you can buy tickets the day of. Apparently, they usually sell out weeks if not months before the night of the show. Luckily, we were able to get tickets for Monday, August 3rd, so we’ll be able to go then. Our tickets are standing tickets, so we’ll have to stand for almost 3 hours, but they were only 5 pounds, and I don’t think it will be that bad. The play will make it go by quicker. After the Globe, I walked with Julia and Amanda down to Tower Bridge. They were going through the Tower of London, so I walked with them to there and then got on the subway. (Dad, I know you’re reading this, and don’t worry, I was safe. I stayed in populated areas and I was only by myself for about an hour. :) ) I took the subway to Kennington and transferred onto a different line to go to Leicester Square. I grabbed some lunch and went shopping for a few minutes (finally bought a sweater!), and then headed home. I was planning on going out to dinner with a couple of girls later in the evening, but they ended up going to a musical, so I just stayed in for the night. It was another really slow day, but it was actually a lot of fun.

July 24: Wicked!!

Friday was our first free day in London, and most of it was pretty uneventful. Megan came in around 9:30 to get us to go try to buy tickets to Billy Elliot. I didn’t want to see Billy Elliot, so I just stayed in bed, and Kylee had been up super late, so she stayed in bed as well, and Amanda and Julia went with her. When they came back, they woke us up to tell us that Billy Elliot was sold out, so they bought all four of us tickets to see Wicked!! For only 45 pounds! I was really excited. By this time, it was about noon. Yup, that’s right, we had stayed in bed until noon. It was amazing. This trip is great, but we are going all the time, and it is so exhausting, so having a chance to sleep in ridiculously late is a rare and beautiful thing. We finally got up and got ready. Kylee went out after about an hour to do a bunch of stuff that she and some other girls had planned. Julia and Amanda went running, and I was going to go to the Imperial War Museum with them when they got back. A few minutes before they came back, it got super stormy, and I decided that I didn’t really want to spend another day outside in the cold weather. So I just decided to stay in. I got to work on some homework, relax, and actually take my time to get ready for Wicked. Not to mention, I got some time by myself. I love hanging out with most of the girls here, but 5 weeks with the same people gets a little bit hard. It was nice to be by myself for a while. Wicked started at 7:30, but we were leaving at 6:30, so around 5, I started getting ready. I had offered to start making dinner before Amanda and Julia got home. We were having hamburgers, and I thought they would take a while to make because our stove doesn’t really work that well. I took the meat out of the fridge and figured out how to defrost it in our microwave, and I also found that one of our burners works just fine, so it only took about 20 minutes to make the hamburgers. Amanda and Julia got home about 10 minutes after they were done, so it was perfect timing. After we ate, I finished getting ready and we left for Wicked. We were supposed to be meeting Kylee at the Victoria station around 6:45. When we got there though, she wasn’t there. We waited for a while, and the rest of our group came, but we couldn’t find her. So we waited at the station and the rest of the group went over to the theater (it was only across the street). At about 7:10, right when we needed to leave to go into the show, Susie came back and said that they had found Kylee at the theater. So now that we were all together again, we headed into the theater. It was so amazing! The stage set up was so cool. And the show was fantastic! I will never be able to look at the Wizard of Oz the same way again. For those of you who don’t know the story, Wicked is a musical about how Glenda becomes the good witch and how the Wicked Witch of the West becomes known as Wicked. It also shows where the Tin Man and the Scarecrow come from. It was such a good musical. Afterwards, on our way home, I ran into Susie, Terry, and Becky, and they were going to eat, so I decided to go with them. It was too late to go to a restaurant, so they got Chinese food, and I went to Subway. Spending the evening watching Wicked more than made up for not doing anything else today!

July 23rd: Day at Cambridge

Thursday was our day trip out to Cambridge, located about 50 miles north of London. A bunch of us were running late, so we had to rush quite a bit to catch our train, but we made it with 4 minutes to spare! When we arrived at the train station in Cambridge, we stopped for some drinks and pastries. After two days in a row of having hot drinks and pastries in the morning, I’m convinced that it should become a daily occurrence. It makes for such a better morning. Our booking with our tour guides didn’t start for a while, so Darrin led us around Cambridge to the point where we would need to meet, and then gave us about 45 minutes of free time. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get stuff done. I ran back to the post office to grab some stamps, which was really convenient because it’s the only chance I’ve had to get to a post office during business hours since we’ve been in London. The woman at the post office was really annoyed with my debit card. Apparently, in the UK, writing ‘see id’ on the back of your card does not count as a signature (in the US, ‘see id’ is accepted as a signature as long as you can present id). She finally sold me the stamps, but was really discontent with the idea of my signature being on my driver’s license rather than my card. I had two credit cards with my name on them, a government issued card that also had my name and a photo, plus a copy of my signature, and she was still skeptical that the card was really mine. It was a little bit ridiculous. But oh well, I got the stamps. After the post office, I went back to our meeting point and waited on a bench. There was a little old man sitting next to me, who was quite entertaining. There was a map posted on the wall behind us, and every time somebody would come to look at the map, he felt the need to stand up and explain to them that the map was situated in the wrong direction (north was not up), ask them where they were going, and then proceed to show them where it was on the map and how to get there. I think he secretly wanted to be a tour guide. After a few minutes, the rest of our group started to come back and we headed off to meet our guides. We split into two different groups, and the group that I was in headed off to tour King’s College Chapel. Our tour guide, Sally, made various stops on the way to point out different sites and throw in different bits of Cambridge history. She told us about a Cambridge University holiday, May week. May week actually occurs in June, after final exams, and is two weeks long. It’s kind of like our spring break, where everyone just relaxes and has fun, regardless of how their grades are turning out. She explained that an old May week tradition is night climbing, which is where students climb up buildings to pull pranks on certain nights between the hours of midnight and 6am. Some of them over the years have been pretty creative. Big pranks don’t happen as much anymore, because measures have been added to make sure students can’t climb certain buildings. Eventually, we made it into King’s College Chapel. The architecture was similar to other churches that we’ve seen, but the interior was completely different. The stain glass windows were there, and there was beautiful fan vaulting, but that was the most elaborate of the decorations. Everything was unpainted inside. There were decorations on the wall that had been placed by Henry VIII. The chapel took over 100 years to complete, due to consistently running out of money. It is done in perpendicular Gothic style, which came late in the Gothic period. The building of the chapel was started by Henry VI, who wanted it to be very plain with no interior decorations, because he felt that this was more righteous than embellishing the chapel with décor. Even the small amount of decoration that was added by Henry VIII was more than Henry VI wanted. Our guide explained some of the implications of the decoration. Above one of the stained glass windows that has a full image of Christ in it is an H, for Henry VIII. This symbolizes that Henry was putting himself above Christ and God. She also pointed out interesting historical points, such as different parts of the church have the initial H with different attached initials, indicating the different wives of Henry VIII. It was interesting to be able to see exactly when certain parts of the church had been built due to the initials that were on that part. After King’s College Chapel, we went to All Saints Church, a much smaller church. The most interesting part of this church was a large stained glass window at the front with images of different saints. William Morrison helped design this church, and in one of the images on the window, the face of the saint is believed to be the face of William Morrison, and another is believed to be his wife.
After this we broke for lunch. We went to the Eagle Pub, which has been in Cambridge for many years. The ceiling in part of the pub is covered in signatures of American soldiers from WWII. Across from the pub is the laboratory where the double helix was first mentioned. For lunch, I had fish and chips for the first time. It was not what I expected. The fish is like an entire fish battered and fried. I was thinking strips of fish filets. The chips were fries that were very greasy and fried (but really good). It was served with ketchup and tartar sauce. For some reason, I was expecting different types of condiments. It was not quite as good as I expected (the fish was a little bland for my tastes), but it was still really good, and I had to try fish and chips in England. I’m sure I will try some again. I’ve heard that the best places to get it are actually little hole in the wall places rather than a pub or a restaurant.
After lunch, we met back with the rest of the group to complete our tour. Megan and I ended up getting switched into the other group, so now we had the other tour guide. He was still pretty interesting. We went to a museum, and he showed us different paintings from different movements. I actually really liked him because he analyzed the paintings and explained what was happening and the significance of that particular painting to the movement. It made it a lot more interesting that just looking at more classical paintings. We were in the museum for a little over an hour, but it really went by pretty quick. After the museum, we went punting, which was by far my favorite part of the trip. Punting is an activity where a group of people sit in a little row-type boat, and a punt chauffer stands on the back of the boat and ‘punts’. This is done with a 24 foot pole that the punt chauffer pushes off the bottom of the river with to propel the boat. It was so much fun. Our punt chauffer was a boy named Orlando, who actually was a student at Oxford, but he worked in Cambridge. He was hilarious. He was a classic example of that dry British humor. He chatted with us the whole time, occasionally tossing in historical facts about Cambridge. We learned about a couple of the different colleges (there are 31 total so it would’ve taken days to learn about all of them). We got to see the first bridge put over the river, which gave the town its name (the river is the Cam river, so when the bridge was built, the Cam had been bridged, making it Cambridge). Also, we got to see some of the spots that had been used to film the Harry Potter movies (we seem to be seeing a lot of those places here). Punting really was a fantastic way to end the day…I think it should become a worldwide activity. Punting down the Logan river? I think so.

July 22nd: Magic carpet ride...

Good morning…or not so much. We had to get up at 4:45 am today to be at the train station by 5:45. It was miserable. Trains should not run that early. Between the metro, train, bus and waiting time, it took us 3 hours to get to our destination: Brinton’s Carpet in Kidderminster. At least we had a little extra time to sleep on the train and bus though . . . and after getting up that early, we all took full advantage of that time. When we arrived, they took us into a room with chairs set up and design boards all over. They also had coffee, tea, water and cookies set out which made us all a little cheerier. I had a cup of tea (English breakfast tea in England? I think it’s pretty necessary), and some ginger cookies, which were incredible! The staff did an introduction presentation about Brinton’s Carpet, and then split us into groups. My group went to the archivist first. It was absolutely incredible how large of a design library and archive the company has. There were shelves and shelves full of binders from the floor to the ceiling with different collections from the past 200 years. There were tons of cabinets filled with books from different time periods, movements, regions, and designers that the company uses for inspiration. The archivist showed us some of the original patterns, and one was even signed by King Albert. It was really amazing. We got to look through the old Japanese stencils that have been kept for centuries, and original sketches and hand paintings from the company’s designers over the years. She explained to us that the archive in this building was the main archive for all of Brinton’s worldwide. Some of it is uploaded into an electronic database, but not all, and the manufacturers in different cities in the world all call there to get records and inspiration. Brinton’s still uses many of their traditional patterns, either as they are or with a modern twist. It really is incredible that a carpet company retained that much stuff over 200 years, because usually stuff like that gets thrown away because the designers and or company don’t think that the trends will come back. Styles come and go, and once they’re not popular anymore, what’s the point in keeping them? It’s a good thing they did though. After the archivist, we went to our session with the designers. One designer in particular, a residential carpet designer, is the one that talked to us about everything. He talked about the staff, and the differences between the company’s commercial and residential designers. Considering there are only a couple of designers on staff, they really do put out a ton of work. He explained the programs that they use, and the process from getting a pattern from a sketch to an actual carpet. He showed us some of their newer stuff that’s just starting to come out. They’re trying to do bolder, more modern patterns. I liked them a lot. Rather than a full pattern across, they’re doing patterns that fade to plain, either from the side out or the center out. He showed us some of the design boards that they’ve had to do from conventions and stuff. Their goal was to make the board itself a piece of art, rather than just pictures stuck on, so all of the pictures we’re in collages and cut out in patterns. They were really cool. And I definitely do not envy the person that had to cut them all out. These couple of sessions had filled our morning: 9 to 12, so after the designer chat it was time for lunch. Brinton’s was providing lunch for us, which was really great. It was a little weird, because they had some pretty classic British food, which includes sausages and other meats wrapped in breads and pastries. I tried one that wasn’t bad, but the others were a little strange. They also served normal sub style sandwiches, chips, and juice. I had a tuna sandwich…I think. It was definitely fish, and probably tuna, but with different stuff mixed in than I’m used to. It was still really good though, and free food is always a bonus! We ate pretty quickly and still had an hour left for our lunch break, so most of us curled up on the carpet strips on the ground to lie down and chat. Some people fell asleep for a while. Surprisingly, I did not. Whoot, go me! After lunch, our group went to tour the factory. We had to wear bright yellow vests for safety, and weird headphones so that we could hear our guide over the weaving machines. They made great accessories to our dress outfits…not. The factory was really interesting. We started in the area where they dye the yarn. The yarn comes in on pallets every day, and they have a machine that picks up a stack of like 4 pallets, sets them in a pot to be dyed, and then pulls them back out. It’s amazing that they can dye that much at once and still have all the yarn be a consistent color. After being dyed, the different colored yarns are stored on shelves that go from the floor to the ceiling until they need to be used. From there, we went to the part of the factory where they prepare the colors of yarn that they will need for a particular carpet. This is done by dropping a specific amount of yarn into one section of a big box. The sections are completely separated, so the different colors of yarn are placed in the different sections, corresponding to where they need to be in the weave. It really is an innovative process. And all of the machines used by Brinton’s were designed and built by the company, which is more impressive. From there we went to the looms, where the carpet is actually weaved. We got to watch them work for a while, which was really cool. It’s amazing to see what looks like a mess of yarn go into a machine and come out a large piece of patterned carpet. Unfortunately, we were moving too quickly to take in pictures of the archives and the designer works, and they don't allow pictures in the factory. So no pictures for today. But regardless, Brinton’s was a fabulous place to tour, and I think it would be a great place to work. They have a factory in Las Vegas, and the main USA headquarters is in Georgia…internship, maybe??

Patterns

These are my 3 museum patterns from London. The first one with the floral and stripes was inspired by the ironwork collection at the V&A Museum. The second one, the squares, was inspired from modern artwork at the Tate Modern museum. And finally, the third one, with the circles, was inspired by the coin collections at the British Museum.

July 21st: Sick in London

I was really sick this day and didn't do anything, making this a very boring post. I simply wanted to make a post to keep track of the days. I did learn that our flat is very foreboding when there's only one person in here!

July 20th: Museums, monuments, and magic!

We started Monday morning with the Victoria and Albert museum. It was such a good museum. It had a ton of variety ranging from ancient to classic to modern. And there were so many different types of collections. There were paintings, jewelry, a modern fantasy collection, ironworks, fashion, and many others. It was really nice to walk through a museum and see different things instead of a bunch of the same things. One really cool thing in this museum was the really famous white beaded dress and jacket that Diana wore. We also had an assignment to do patterns from 3 different museums, and the V&A museum was one. So for the museum, we split into groups that were led by the different juniors that did the Angela Adams pattern assignment last year. Our group did a few exercises where we would pick an object, sit down in front of it for a while and sketch a pattern inspired by the object. It was a really good exercise but I seem to struggle a lot with patterns. But this is the first time I’ve ever done patterns, so hopefully it’ll get better.
After the V&A, we walked down to Tower Bridge and the Tower of London. The Tower is located on the north bank of the Thames river. It is now preserved as a historical monument. The tower is made up of several buildings behind defensive walls and a moat. When it was actually used, many important people were imprisoned and executed there. The bridge crosses the river. It was really cool to see because it was like a real castle. Like bricks, towers, drawbridges, and all. It really felt like Old England. It was really interesting.
On our way to the Tate Modern Museum, we walked by London City Hall and went inside to look around. London City Hall is a really modern building designed by Norman Foster. It is in the shape of an egg and the exterior is all windows. The exterior of the building is made up of almost 4,000 glass panels. It was really cool inside. You walk down a spiral ramp that is mimicked by a spiral mirror on the ceiling. It’s really interesting. The shape of the building was chosen so that they could fit more space inside without taking up space on the ground. I think it works out really well. It’s one of my favorite buildings that we’ve visited so far. After stopping at London City Hall, we walked by the Globe (Shakespeare theatre), and continued on to Tate Modern Museum. It was a really great museum. We weren’t allowed to take pictures in any of it, so I probably won’t remember too much of it in a month, but I enjoyed it while I was there! It was a lot of really interesting art. It was all modern, as opposed to a just a modern collection in a museum. The only other completely modern museum that we’ve been to was the Pompidou in Paris, so it was really nice to have another modern museum day. There were 6 floors to the museum, but only 2 of them were free to the public so that made it very manageable. Much better than viewing all 6 floors. Some of the art was a little bit too weird for me though. Some of it was so out there that there were warning signs about explicit content and children under 16 weren’t allowed in the rooms. I guess anything can be seen in an artistic way, but some things are harder to understand than others. But it’s good to be exposed to different styles, I guess. All of these things took up most of our day, until about 6 pm. At that point, we split up, and I went with Beccah, Whitney, Malory, and Jenna over to Leicester Square to buy theatre tickets for Harry Potter 6! That’s right, we saw it in London…in the same theatre that they did the premier in. The movie didn’t start until 7:45, so we got some Burger King (much better than the McDonalds in Italy), and ate in the square. At around 7:30, everyone else started showing up, but it was too full for us to be able to sit together, so it was just the 5 of us. But that was just fine. The movie was so amazing! A lot of people have criticized this one more than the others but I thought it was just as good. And it made it even better than a lot of the places that they show in the London parts of the movie were places that we had gone to that day such as the area around London City Hall and the Millennium Bridge. The Millennium Bridge is the bridge that the death eaters tear down at the beginning of the movie, and we had just walked across it an hour earlier to get to the metro to Leicester Square. It was really weird. After Harry Potter, we headed back to the flats (around 11:15, it was a long movie) and hung out at home for the rest of the night. As a great finish to the day I got to chat with Nash for the first time, which I loved. The day was incredibly long, but the exhaustion was well worth it!