I slept until seven, which was a record for the month. I was worried about getting into the shower, but it was unoocupied. At breakfast, I refused everything but a glass of orange juice, the pitcher of milk, and an empty bowl. The server, who I had thought was just going through the motions, suddenly thawed, offered me a second glass of juice (which I took), and checked again at the end of the meal to see if I had maybe changed my mind and wanted toast. But two bowls of muesli (way more dried fruit than in my hand-mixed stuff, but also much better than eggs and baked beans) cut with All-Bran was quite enough.
The art show I wanted to see was out in the East end, so instead of walking all day as I had planned, I bought a one-day Travelcard for UKP 4.10 from a machine in Tottenham Court Road Tube station. I tried catching a number 8 bus up on Oxford Street; it took forever before one arrived. I went up to the top and sat in front of the front window. Everyone else on the top seemed to be shabbily-dressed thick-necked men in their fifties. I had planned to take some bird's-eye shots for the kids but, intimidated by the company, I only managed one discreet shot of the front window. Even with that minimal distraction, the bus hurtled past the Royal Exchange before I realized it. I packed up hastily, went down quickly and rang the bell (there must have been a way to do it on the upper level, but I hadn't thought to look for it in advance) but the bus didn't stop until Liverpool Street Station. This is why I avoid buses for the most part, even in cities I know well.
I was going to get off at the Royal Exchange, which is across the street from the Bank of England, and see if they had hours posted on the door. There was a chance that I could change my ancient money on Monday morning just before heading out to Heathrow, but my flight was at one, I needed to get there by eleven, which meant catching the metro at ten. If the bank opened then, I would be cutting it close. Since I was one whole metro stop past the Bank, I put that visit off until later, and instead walked east past Spitalfields Market (with some people just setting up, unloading trucks at a single entrance). I crossed Commercial Street and headed down a small laneway. The street signs, posted on the brick walls of corner buildings, had Devanagari script below the English names. I turned into Brick Lane and was met with a solid phalanx of East Indian restaurants, appliance shops, and spice stores. I realized this must be the "Little India" I'd read about in the guidebooks; I hadn't paid much attention, because I hadn't intended to get this far east.
A little past all this was a complex of buildings which used to be Truman's Brewery, now turned into a gallery called Atlantis, hosting the Body Worlds exhibition. This was written up favourably in Time Out; it was a show of corpses that had been "plastinated", dissected and soaked in resin until their flesh was preserved. The technique was invented by a German man now living and working in China.
It was three minutes to nine, and they were just opening. There were only a handful of people there, but it took a while to get in; the first family tried to pay with a credit card, the system was set up for euros (had I brought mine along, I could have used them), there were complications. I had time to read the notices about limited capacity and waiting times, but the show was new enough (and early enough on Sunday morning) that I mostly had the exhibits to myself. As art it was questionable; some of the poses were stunning (a man holding his skin over his arm, a deliberate reference to a detail of Michelangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel), others gimmicky (a plastinated man holding a plastinated horse, holding his brain in one hand and the horse's in the other) or simply cheesy (an "exploded man" looking like a Dagwood sandwich). As an anatomy lesson, it was fascinating, and I spent quite a while with each plastinated corpse. I had wanted to take an anatomy course in university, but it was open only to certain majors. In between the full-body arrangements were low cases with collections of "slices" or cross-sections, and plastinated arrangements of organs showing the effects of common diseases, smoking, and drinking.
Near the end there was a series of small glass jars showing embryos from 3 weeks to nearly full term; although I was quite familiar with the sequence, the tiny details were striking. The row of jars led up to a plastinated woman with eight-month fetus in utero, which should have been quite moving, but the effect was partly spoiled by having her posed incongruously reclining with hand on head like an odalisque. I didn't realize at that point that the day before (opening day), a man had thrown a tarp over them and spilled an obnoxious liquid to try to force the exhibition to close, or that the next day another man would attack one of the exhibits with a hammer, doing tens of thousands of pounds of damage.
I emerged a little early for lunch (good thing, I later read that the Brick Lane restaurants had gone downhill) but had the consolation of Spitalfields Market on the way back. It was in full swing when I reached it; it didn't have the foodie ambience of Borough Market, but more of a fleamarket feel. There were booths with clothes, leather goods, household odds and ends, candles and incense. It had a small international food court in middle but though it was reasonably multiethnic (Thai, Indonesian, Caribbean) nothing looked compelling. I found a nice stall with some shallow wooden boxes filled with CDs, dance, reggae, worldbeat; for UKP 20.00 total I bought two Soul Jazz (UK label) compilations, In The Beginning There Was Rhythm (New Wave funk bands like A Certain Ratio, the Slits, Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four) and Nuyoricka (Latin jazz rock from the 70's).
I walked back to Liverpool Street Station, which was a full-fledged railway station, and walked the length of concourse (dodging people leaving on holiday journeys) to Underground station at the far end. I took the Tube one stop to Bank station (the joys of an unlimited ticket) and got out in front of the Royal Exchange. It had a neo-classical temple look, with a pediment and big columns. The Bank of England opposite had its great bronze doors shut, with no signs or any other sources of information. I would have to come the next day and see.
I walked down one block of King William Street to Monument station; as I stood on the corner with Cannon Street, there were three Starbucks in sight. Going into the Tube station, I caught a train to Embankment station, walked up past Charing Cross Station, and to the National Gallery again. This time I went in the main entrance and straight back to room 16 with the Vermeers. In the same room were some nice interiors and one landscape by Pieter de Hooch. Room 17: the van Hoogstraten peepshow box, about a metre long with two small holes on opposite sides. Looking in one of them I saw what appeared to be the interior of a Dutch house, but looking through the glass front showed that it was painted anamorphically on sides of box. An amusing device.
Room 17a: floral still-lifes, including (if you looked closely) beetles of various types, houseflies, caterpillars. Rooms 18, 19, 20: 19th C French paintings (Claude, Poussin) of a type I never cared for. Room 21: Dutch landscapes, many by Aelbert Cuyp (interesting considering that there was a ticketed Cuyp show on; there seemed to be several paintings in the room by him, but there was a sign apologizing that some were gone) and Hals. Room 22: more Dutch landscapes, boats and thin flat vistas dominated by sky and clouds, by van Ruisdael, Hobbema, and van de Cappelle.
Room 23: Rembrandt portraits and biblical scenes. There was a time when I thought Rembrandt's treatment of shadow overdone, but I was wrong. Room 24: larger Dutch works. Room 25: smaller genre paintings (these are an amusing break, but don't really hold up on their own) and still lifes. 28: Flemish (I went through quickly) 29: a large three-chambered room stuffed full of Rubens, yikes. 30: Velasquez, including what was supposed to be a rare nude (the pose reminded me of Ingres's Odalisque in Louvre, but I don't know if it is common) 31: van Dyck and Rubens. 32: Baroque Rome, including Guido Reni, Annibale Carracci, and some Caravaggios (notably Boy Bitten By Lizard). This was a nice reminder of the Caravaggio show we had seen in Rome.
Room 33: French 18th century, largely forgettable except for some portraits by Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun (there was some reason I was supposed to disapprove of her, but I have forgotten it). 34: Constable, Turner, Gainsborough (walked through very quickly) 35: Hogarth (worth a quick look, but too broad for me) 36: British 18th C portraits (if I could have run, I would have) 37: Italian late Baroque, with a nice surprise, paintings by Sassoferrato, bright like Michaelangelo and with clean lines, not cluttered with detail like many of his contemporaries.
Room 38: Canaletto! More in one modest room than in all of Venice, I suspect: seven large canvases, and a handful of small ones. The regatta scenes were more a goad to the imagination than interesting as art, but the view of the Scalzi church with old Santa Maria (now replaced with the railway station) was interesting.
39: Goya, and more scenes of Venice, this time by Francesco Guardi, forming a nice contrast with Canaletto (these didn't look as though they were first pencilled in by a draftsman). 40: good ol' GB Tiepolo.
41: This is where it started to get interesting again, with Millet, David, some Ingres portraits, Courbet. 42: Corot, and a small but very fine Caspar David Friedrich Winter Landscape.
43: Monet, including one of the many Gares St. Lazare, and a painting of the beach at Trouville in which grains of sand were still embedded. Also the ubiquitous Japanese bridge from the garden at Giverny, and an Irises. A Caillebotte canvas, and one of Manet's Executions of Maximillian, this one cut up and reassembled, making it look like a collage from a few decades later.
44: Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres. This is a huge canvas (you can't really tell in reproductions), and less pointillist than the La Grande Jatte in the Art Institute of Chicago (for which several small studies were hung here). 45: Cezanne, Rousseau, van Gogh (though the two best of his, Sunflowers and Chair, were gone to the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam for an exhibition; since we had benefitted from such trade specifically in that case and in many others in the past, I could hardly complain). 46: Degas, to finish off the gallery.
Whew! I took the subway straight up to Tottenham Court Road station. My head was hurting; I had had no lunch, and more importantly, no coffee. I stopped in at Caffe Nero, a chain claiming to serve authentic Italian coffee, and had a so-so double cappuccino. This afforded me the opportunity to perch on a stool at the counter and read a copy of the Times, including a scathing dismissal of the Body Worlds show as a failed attempt at "shock art". I walked over to the British Museum with about hour and a half before it closed.
Since it was late in the day, the Mexican and North American galleries were closed. I went down to the new Sainsbury African galleries. These, ironically, took the same tack as the Tate of grouping objects from many different times and cultures. It was more successful here, at least for me, perhaps because I knew less. I was taking pictures for the kids again, turning the flash off and bracing myself against pillars (modern, not ancient) and walls.
Up to the large Asian gallery at the north end of the bilding. The west half was East Indian, nearly all religious subjects, many from temples. The most striking were some 13th C Orissan carvings in black stone. The cases on the north wall were devoted to Burma, Vietnam, Java, and then a series of Chinese artifact cabinets of rather garish Qing dynasty work. These were followed by blue-on-white Ming vases, but I preferred the clean lines of the Ming monochrome porcelain, and the intricacies of the red lacquer foliate dishes. The Song dynasty ru ware and ding ware also very simple and elegant.
Upstairs was a Korean gallery, clearly supported by a lot of money from somewhere (Koreans in the UK or in Korea?) but what was most interesting was in the anteroom, recent purchases from North Korea, including the original artwork for garish propaganda posters of the type we could still buy in China in 1987 and were probably long gone.
Strangely enough, there was no Japanese collection; some temporary rooms are devoted to rotating exhibitions, but they were closed in preparation for an upcoming one. There was a nice small exhibition of modern Chinese calligraphy including some striking avant-garde works.
I bought some books in the Museum bookshop for my kids -- Subterranean Rome, a book full of pictures of places like the Domus Aurea and mithraeums which we couldn't photograph when we saw them, and a paperback Encyclopedia of Calligraphy with many different techniques and alphabets. These may not have been the best gifts for children, but didn't want to give them Rosetta Stone mousepads or little porcelain Egyptian-style cat statues. At any rate they appreciated them when I unveiled them on my return.
Back to the hotel to rest my feet for a few minutes and drop off my purchases (books get heavy fast), and then I was off to dinner. I walked down Bloomsbury Street to Shaftesbury Avenue, then down to Charing Cross Road. As it was early, I poked around in some small second-hand bookshops before retracing my steps to Shaftesbury Avenue and the restaurant called Mela, which offered "Indian cuisine, country style".
The interior was nice but not intimidating or pretentious; I noticed a K'Nex Ferris wheel in one corner. I ordered a Kingfisher beer (brewed in the UK, but bringing back memories of drinking the real thing in huge 750ml bottles in India in '82) and sipped it, watching the chefs in the open kitchen. My starter was calamari pakhtooni, described on the menu as "succulent squids tossed with Goan piri-piri red hot soured sauce and bell peppers". The star of this dish was the sauce, which dominated the dish as had the sauce of the eggplant the night before, but this one was so much better. It was thick enough that I could pick it up easily with a fork. My main dish was Tawe ki Bathak, "tender breast of duck, pot roasted with coconut, coriander, and cumin, flavoured with mint and coriander". This also was fabulous, with an intense green sauce. I had ordered a naan, and scooped up tasty mouthfuls. I had also ordered a side of seasonal vegetables, which to my delight turned out to be bitter gourd (they checked with me first to see if I still wanted it) cooked with onions and tomatoes. I cleaned all of the plates. I ordered a serving of ras malai for dessert; this was good but not transcendent, but was a nice finish to the meal.
As the server took the dessert plate away, I asked the maitre d' for the menu again to take some notes. "Are you in this business?" he asked. I was worried he thought me a spy from a rival, though the menu was posted outside; I simply wanted to save some time. I told him no, I was just an amateur cook, and really liked the food. He said that he could get me a copy, and came back in a few minutes with an envelope containing a full-sized menu, several takeout menus, and some business cards. As I left, my server and the maitre d' were by the door to say goodbye. "This was my last meal in London," I told them, "but had it been my first, I might not have eaten anywhere else."
I walked back up to the hotel, arranged my things, and packed my bags for the morning, while watching the sinking sequence of the movie Titanic on the TV (it was a bit silly seeing something with that many visual effects on a small screen, though the story was definitely a small screen story). I turned off the TV, moved it out of the way, set up the Newton and keyboard, and started typing up travel notes. I had just reached the writeup of my pint of beer at the Lamb when I was seized by sympathetic thirst. So I walked down to the Museum Tavern just opposite the British Museum. This was not smoke-free, but was much less smoky, because most of the people there (it was not crowded, but most tables had someone at them) were tourists. They were not loud but I could hear their lack of British accents. The bar had displays of repeated bottles of Budweiser, and neon vodka coolers. I had a pint of Courage Directors Bitter, sitting by the door (where I could get some fresh air occasionally), and tried to ignore the banal techie conversation by a couple of Canadians to my left). As I sipped my beer, I reflected that I tend to deserve the tourist situations I let myself get into, this was no exception. When my pint was done, I slipped out quietly and walked back to the hotel.