Today I went to the Tate Modern Art Museum with Kate and Erin. PJ left for the airport around 1:30 and after I dropped him off I took the tube to St. Paul's and walked across Millennium Bridge to the museum. The first exhibit I saw was "Sunflower Seeds" by Ali Wei Wei. I read about this exhibit a few weeks ago in The Evening Standard. Basically it's about one million porcelain sunflower seeds on the floor of half of the ground floor. It's actually pretty bizarre. I tried taking a picture of it but you really can't tell what it is in the picture. When it first opened a few months ago, people were able to walk on it. In the paper there were pictures of people laying on the seeds like they were at the beach. However after a few weeks they realized that with everyone walking on the seeds a lot of dust was spreading in the air and it would be bad for your health after an extended period of time. Now you can only look at the exhibit.
I walked upstairs and met Erin and Kate. We went to the fifth floor and we saw a lot of cool paintings, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstien, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, and Diego Rivera. I really liked the Warhol room and the Picasso paintings that I saw. I only saw one Rivera painting, I don't even know what it was called, but I was kind of disappointed by it. I wandered to the second floor by myself because they had already seen it. The theme of the floor was Poetry and Dream and I found an artist that I really like, Juliao Sarmento. He's a Portuguese artist and they had a really cool collage/sketch of his called "Dublin-Trieste 2 December 2009" that's a combination of his drawings alongside a sentence of a love letter written by James Joyce. There was a lot of interesting artwork in that room. It's kind of cool that I found an artist that I like a lot. I guess you could say Sarmento and Warhol are my favorites.
After the museum the three of us came back to Mile End and I got Nando's with Sammie and Kate. Tonight I'm going to update my Shutterfly site and watch Beowulf so I can write a paper on it. Oh and of course listen to the Steelers game.
Yesterday, as I said, Kate, Erin, PJ and I went to Oxford for the day. Oxford was so cool, I was expecting it to just be a campus but it actually has a town all around the campus. I guess there are a lot of colleges within Oxford and Christ Church is the most famous one. We took a bus for 13 pounds from Victoria to Oxford and it only took about two hours. It was absolutely freezing yesterday, so we all froze while we walked around and took pictures. We saw Christ Church Cathedral and the dining hall that inspired the Great Hall in the Harry Potter movies.
They had a lot of Harry Potter and Alice in Wonderland themed things (the writer of Alice was a professor at Oxford). There were a lot of Christmas trees everywhere, which made everything so much cuter and legitimized the freezing cold weather. It was supposed to snow, but sadly it didn't.
It's weir that people actually go to school there; the dining hall was all set up for dinner later that would be later that day. There were a lot of tourists walking around, I'm sure people find that annoying if they go to school there. Everything was basically outdoors except for the dining hall and the cathedral. The cathedral is the oldest Anglican one in England I think. It used to be a Catholic cathedral and then Henry VIII made it into an Anglican cathedral. I was eavesdropping on a tour but I didn't really get the full story. There is a really old window in there though, it's Thomas Beckett's window but he has no face because people took the face pane out so that Henry VIII wouldn't order them to remove the window.
We walked around campus a little more, saw the library and some plazas/squares. They're obsessed with rowing, each college has its own team and there was a wall outside decorated with stuff about their V8s or whatever. It was kind of cool. In the book store they had a bunch of rowing t shirts and stuff with all of the colleges' different blades on them.
After we were done exploring the campus, we walked around the town. There are a few main streets and a closed roof market where we found the most delicious cookies ever. I got a triple chocolate chip one and all of our cookies were still warm when they gave them to us. We walked around the market and shopped for a while before going to a different street.
After the markets we stopped in the University bookstore. Erin, Kate and I all bought the same glorious navy blue Oxford University crew neck sweatshirt. I'm wearing mine right now, it's so warm. The four of us bought a few souvenirs and walked down the street to the Oxford University Press store. All of the citations I've done for papers now have a place in my mind because Oxford U Press publishes basically everything important. All four of us were really excited to go inside.
PJ had the brilliant idea for me to get some books. They had so many books that I want to read. PJ bought me three as part of my birthday present: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, The Great Gatsby by Scott F Fitzgerald, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. It was so amazing I was really excited to get them. We also all took pictures with the famous Oxford English Dictionary.
By that time we were all pretty much ready to go home. We walked around some more and looked at Christmas decorations and shopped, then we found the bus to go back to London. I can't even describe how cold it was yesterday though, it was painful. I'm really happy we went to Oxford. I think PJ had a good weekend in London, it was great to see him!
M
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