London, Part III

Friday Brian had a conference in London, and I tagged along. Well, not to the conference (yikes!) but to travel there and back. A few other Oxford postdoc/grad students also went, so there was a small group of us on the train. There were a number of museums close to Imperial College where the conference was being held. So I spent half the day at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at the vast collection of art from centuries ago and from all over the world. It's a huge museum with four floors taking up seven miles if you were to walk around and see everything.

Two of my fave areas were fashion and the Raphael cartoons. (Talk about completely two different things within the same museum.) The fashion section had displays of popular outfits from centuries ago until present time. The V&A just acquired the pearl "Elvis" dress that Princess Diana wore to a visit to Hong Kong in the 1989. It's stunning!

The Raphael cartoons room might be a bit difficult to explain. But cartoons actually just mean painting on paper. The cartoons from Raphael depict different biblical scenes and they are enormous in size. About 2000 pieces of regular sized paper make up one cartoon. The cartoons are actually initial "samples" of a design to be woven into a tapestry. Only one of the actual tapestries hang in the V&A, the others are in the Vatican in Rome. But the cartoons themselves are beautiful and because of their size, they are quite amazing to see.

After I spend a good part of the afternoon in the V&A, I walked up to Harrods, London's best known and most posh department store. Tourists like to visit Harrods to see the food halls. They are very glamorous and have amazing displays of meats, cheeses, fruits, teas, etc. I also walked around on the fashion floors and felt a bit out of place, since the likes of Dolce & Gabanna, Prada, Versace, Chanel, etc., had full spring collections there.

Next I went to Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park and walked around. I visited the grounds of Kensington Palace where Princess Diana lived and took some pics. By 6 p.m. the academics were done with their conference, so I met them at a pub called the Queens Arms where many people were enjoying their pints outside on the street. Well, actually it was called a Mew, which is like an alleyway, but much nicer. I think about three Porshes and two Ferraris drove by as we had a few pints!

We decided to grab dinner before we headed back to Oxford, and found an Indian restaurant just up the street. We ordered a number of different things to share. Brian ordered a chicken and pepper dish which said it was hot. But so far, hot here isn't all that hot. Well we renamed it fire chicken after we all tried it and I seriously couldn't think straight for about 5 minutes after tasting it - it was brutal! The rest of the food was great and it was fun to visit with some of the students from Oxford I hadn't met yet. Headed back to Oxford via train and was home by midnight.