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!