I'm in London with three of my favorite people! Katie, her husband Aaron,
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ckd, and I have rented a vacation flat for a week. We arrived yesterday morning and didn't schedule anything for ourselves to do other than settle in, explore the neighborhood a little, and so forth. We went to Tesco and bought pikelets and crumpets and Welsh cakes, and only stopped ourselves from buying scones because we already had so much else. (We did buy other food too. It turns out I really like Red Leicester cheese.)
A relevant digression: a couple of months ago I started running again, after about a decade of not running. I started slow (slow pace and short runs) so as not to injure myself, but the way I was running (taking too long steps and therefore landing too hard) led to injury anyway: I have a stress fracture in one shin, and the other shin has either shin splints or else a stress fracture that hid from the X-ray. I've been resting as much as I can, and using leg braces and a cane when I do need to walk. I recently added a second cane, and I walk much faster with two canes than I do with one, except on stairs, where I run into the
centipede's dilemma: which limb do I move next?
(To reassure you all: most of the time I'm in no pain at all. When I feel any pain at all it means I've been letting my legs get too much stress, and I need to back off for a while. Over the last few weeks I've been noticing improvement in how much I can walk before my legs start to ache, which is great considering how much walking there is to do with all our sightseeing here.)
Today we went to the British Museum. I don't have as much to say about it as I did before I emailed my dad about it, because now I feel like I've already said most of it. But I do have a few things left to say:
We had a tour of the Roman Britain room, led by a museum volunteer. I enjoyed the tour even more because it made me think of the tour guides I know:
anne and my housemate Amber. Then we split up for a little while before lunch. I ended up in a room with several statues that were on the covers of various textbooks I've used. (Um. Not business school textbooks, undergraduate Classics textbooks.)
At lunch we talked about different preferences for salted vs unsalted butter in the North and South of England, and buying butter being a natural human impulse, which made me think of
pameladean since we've referenced that bit in
Murder Must Advertize before. :-)
Lunch was on Dad today as a belated birthday gift to me, which is why I emailed him in particular about the day. Some other meal this week will be an early birthday gift from him to Katie. We ate in the sit-down restaurant on the third floor of the museum. It was delicious! I had sencha tea, which I don't think I'd had before, soup whose name I didn't catch (it's their current "seasonal soup"), and a smoked salmon salad. Katie and Aaron had tortellini with mint and I think peas, Christopher had swordfish with some sort of salsa, and all of it was very good.
After lunch Katie, Aaron and I went to the exhibit on the Sutton Hoo burial. There was some amazing stuff there and in the Roman Britain room--beautiful work in precious metals, particularly the large silver platters. (I wondered, but didn't ask, how they keep them so shiny. I think frequent polishing would probably wear down the plates, so perhaps the display cases are filled with a gas that keeps them from tarnishing.)
I went to see the Cycladic art and discovered that their small room on the Cyclades is currently closed but they've turned one corner of the Minoan room into a tiny display of Cycladic pieces. Right next to them I saw a small bowl that came from MY PROFESSOR'S DIG OMG I WAS SO EXCITED TO SEE THAT! I've even been to that dig! One of my Classics professors used to go be an archaeologist on Crete every summer, and that was the same professor who led the study abroad group trip to Greece (and Crete) that I went on in 2000 or so. Kato Zakro was the excavation site.
I used a museum wheelchair for the day. I wouldn't have thought of asking to use one, but a guard offered it when he saw me walking with my canes. I demurred at first, but he pointed out that it's a lot of walking, and I realized that using a wheelchair at the museum would probably mean I could do more walking the rest of the day. I now have a lot of respect for the arm strength of anyone who regularly propels themselves in a chair! (I hope personally owned chairs are better tuned and easier to manage, but I don't know whether they are.) Usually I propelled myself about within each exhibit, but accepted Katie's or Christopher's offer to push me from one exhibit to the next. Pushing myself the longer distances was both tiring and much slower than walking (or being pushed). Other things I learned about using a wheelchair: people often seemed to literally not see me, walking into my path even more than I'd have expected from a place so filled with distracted tourists; I had a hard time hearing (and participating in) my companions' conversation when they were talking at standing head height and I was seated; and even someone who is big on consent and bodily autonomy will grab someone's wheelchair and move it without asking, in an attempt to be helpful. (O beloved person who did that, I thought about not mentioning it because I know you felt bad about having done it, but I think it was a valuable thing for me to learn and so I did decide to mention it. And I didn't say which of you it was, so I'm not trying to make it about you. It could have been any of you!)
On the way home Katie and I split off to go see another tat shop. (Every time I see a tat shop I think of
lydy in the Fourth Street con suite explaining that it doesn't mean tattoo shop, it means a shop where they sell tat: kitschy stuff for tourists. I'd been so confused when she said she thought of getting the Underground map in a tat shop--that would make a very large tattoo! Or, as it turned out she really meant, a quite reasonable and attractive design on a t-shirt.) Then we stopped in a loose-leaf tea shop we'd noticed earlier. I was disappointed to see it was all their own brand, since a housemate has asked me to keep an eye out for East India Company tea.
For supper we had takeaway fish and chips! Or at least, Aaron did. Katie had a Cornish pasty and chips, Christopher had chicken and mushroom pie and chips, and I had scampi and chips (which turned out to mean breaded fried shrimp, with possibly some scampi seasonings in there). But we all tasted each others', so we've all now had this traditional British takeaway dish.
Tomorrow we're going to see
Twelfth Night at the Globe. (Our Twelfth Night tickets are birthday presents from Mom to all four of us--our birthdays range from late May to mid September, so this trip is near all four of our birthdays if you stretch the definition of "near" a bit.) Thursday we're going to Stonehenge, Oxford, and probably Avebury. Saturday we'll see
The Play That Goes Wrong, which is described as "
Fawlty Towers meets
Noises Off." The rest of our days are unscheduled, but we have more than enough on our list of things we'd like to do!
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