The Giverny Expedition

Friday led Adam and I to Giverny, the quaint village of Claude Monet’s country home and meticulously manicured gardens. After nearly diving into the train as it was departing from Gare St. Lazare to not be left behind, we found ourselves wedged between two fellow North Americans, a Canadian law student en route to Tanzania and a kindly Alabaman whose background was never disclosed. Obviously, this combination recalls nothing less than Fantastic Four ideals, but, sadly, Adam and I were terribly unimpressed by our chance company. The Canadian woman seemed to have an uncanny ability to judge nearly every city in Western Europe by the amount of hours needed for one to fully appreciate each regions’ unique history and culture. For example, Nice and Cannes could each be “done” in half a day. In her eyes, Eastern Europe was a completely irrelevant land of one toothed eighty year old Slavic women, grimy streets filled with puddles of Chernobyl residues, and, if I’m not mistaken, the entire geographic area is surrounded by a barbed wire fence to keep the goats in. She was a bit more concise, matter-of-factly stating, “There’s no reason to go to Eastern Europe”. Alabaman was missing his accent and was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. His downfall/super power, depending on if the glass is half empty or not, was his masterful ability to bore you to death in a matter of minutes.

Anyways, the train arrived in Vernon, a small city about 6km away from Giverny. That’s probably the best thing about this city, but more on that later. To actually reach Giverny one must take a coach (English for bus) from the train station, walk, or rent bicycles at a very furry gentleman’s restaurant across the street. We opted for the bikes and were off to Giverny, following the Seine through its gorgeous Norman meadows and surrounding foothills. In no time we reached our destination and found ourselves amidst a sea of tourists largely consisting of old people and German and French school groups. Not to shy away from crowds, Adam and I hopped in the queue and anxiously fidgeted about as if Mickey Mouse himself was on the other side of the wall signing autographs and time was running out before his cigarette break began and we would miss our chance to get our notebooks signed. Before entering Monet’s estate, one is forced to meander through the gift shop. I didn’t mind this so much, as I always enjoy seeing how an institute identifies itself through typically useless and overpriced nic-nacs. I would say Giverny shot about par this round, give or take a small handicap. Not a problem because, after all, the gardens are what we came for and not calendars and scarves.

Monet’s Giverny Gardens

Monet like dis one

hon hon hon! oui oui!

the great one himself

house and gardens

The gardens were quite nice despite the crowds and cell phone boomboxes that seemed to resonate throughout the estate. Orchids, roses, and other flowers of beauty whose names escape me filled row after row of colorful blooms and leaves. It really is a stunning sight at first glance, and while the beauty remains upon further inspection, the crowds and commercialization of a place intended for quiet isolation and reflection detracts from the magic of the place. We walked through his home, several rooms filled with average furnishings and more crowds, finding a small ray of sunshine amidst the gloom in a sublime photo of an unassuming Monet standing surrounded by massive canvases of the famed water-lilies in his living room. We then rejoined the lines shuffling through the gardens (“the ants went marching one by one, hoorah, hoorah!”) and made our way to the water-lily ponds, eerily similar to the paintings but for the man in a boat fishing out dead lily pads with a net. Overall, a charming village and a well managed estate befitting a man of Monet’s stature, but personally it was more plastic than organic and not the place it must once have been.

The bike ride back to Vernon was splendid and a needed escape from the claustrophobic Jardin du Monet. The Seine is gorgeous in this part of France, about a two hour train ride north of paris, and the fields of red poppies reminded me of driving through the English countryside only a week or so earlier. Our arrival in Vernon found us with stomachs growling and, with a more efficient mode of transportation underneath us, a need to explore this potentially charming town of Vernon. Though exploration was a priority, our “hunger pains were sticking like duct tape” and so a quest for comida took precedence. Little did we know we would be forced to pedal our way through every nook and cranny of the city center to actually find sustenance for ourselves as every restaurant in town was closed with no sign of reopening for at least another 3 hours. Our solution was hit up the local Monoprix, which I translate to mean Win-Dixie, and grab the usual horn of plenty: baguette; cheese; orange juice; water; and hommus. This was by far the least palatable rendition of this meal yet. We seated ourselves under a small tree on the corner of a nearby street and began to laugh uncontrollably at just how strange this town and its people presented themselves. Not a single restaurant open at 4:30 in the afternoon, nearly every man in the city had a shaved or greasy or sometimes both head with a sharp Romanian facial structure, women walked by with tattoos of small tropical islands on their shoulders, little children did not exist, and one out of every three elderly people had a small dog which they obviously did not want as noted by the dogs being dragged across the sidewalks leaving a trail of claw marks in the concrete with each pull of the leash. We took amusement in this city, but ultimately found ourselves weirded out to the point it was absolutely necessary we escape as soon as possible. The city responded to this request with a heaving “no.” Returning the bikes was simple, but we waited for at least thirty minutes for the furry man to return Adam his license. This was not too big of a deal for me because the restaurant had a tv and was playing Grease. It was the part at the end where Olivia Newton-John throws away her prudent garb for black leather pants in a final effort to get John Travolta to again desire her and everyone breaks out into song and dance and eats cotton candy. Our train arrived an hour later, as did our old friends from the ride to Vernon. In an effort to sit in silence, Adam and I split up so as to become less of a target for Canadian or Alabaman accompaniment. We returned to Paris and worked our way back to the Three Ducks to rendezvous with Rees for another dinner and a midnight viewing of the Eiffel Tower.

(Adam)For several hours each night, beginning around 9 and continuing until roughly 1 in the morning, the Eiffel Tower lights up with thousands of bulbs, and on the hour a 5 or 6 minute light show of flashing patterns renders the tower a shimmering beacon in the night sky. We went out to the Champ de Mars to discover it packed with thousands of French students, who had just finished their last exams and were celebrating in style. We sat on the steps of the peace memorial at the far end of the field and contented ourselves with splitting a bottle and watching the reveling French youth till the hour struck, this was not to be however. We were approached by two girls with the typical question, “do you have a light?” After responding no they began speaking with us, which was useful for me as I am constantly trying to practice my spoken French, but slightly strange for Tripp and Rees because there were frequent pauses to translate or ask clarifying questions. We learned their names were Pauline and Isaure, the latter being by far the more bizarre, trying endlessly to teach me various words of l’Argot (slang) and intermittently grabbing our bottle of wine, taking a huge swig and handing it back without breaking stride in her lecture on the ways we didn’t comprehend what she was trying to explain. After a while they wandered off, presumably to spread the good word elsewhere, and after being silently impressed by the lightshow we strolled back to the hostel for some sleep and puzzlement over the ramblings of the bold, bizarre, and ultimately friendly youth of France.

Duck, Duck, Tower!

Thursday May the 29^th saw us travel south of the river to take up residence in the 3 Ducks Hostel, which was quite different from the Woodstock. The 3 Ducks, while clean and cozy, is also sterile and to be blunt, packed with Americans who delight in transporting their own culture across the Atlantic, rather than absorbing that of the country they’re visiting. We (Tripp, Rees, and I) left our bags at the hostel and set out for a day of rest and recuperation, owing to the marathon sprint through several arrondisements the night before and our resulting sore feet. We strolled out to the Champ de Mars in front of La Tour Eiffel, stopping on the way to pick up supplies for our cornucopian midday feast. A ten minute walk saw us splayed out on the grass, staring up at the impressive, industrial tower and enjoying a wonderful dejeuner of bread, cheese, olives, and wine.

Malheuresement, the gods then decided that a nice day like that was prime time for a rain shower, prompting us to head for a sheltered bench to wait out the storm. Tripp and Rees read from their books as I struggled to write legible postcards on my lap. The spattering raindrops actually quite matched the mood of the day, recharging our batteries and gradually conquering our fatigue from numerous late nights and early mornings. Tripp decided that he would brave the rain in search of a bathroom and ventured out into the unknown. Luckily he returned and after the storm let up slightly we walked under the tower and stared up at its intricate ironwork, marveling at the accomplishment that the tower is and was, quite a feat of engineering. There were crowds of tourists wandering the square concrete field under the Eiffel Tower, which made for good people watching opportunities, but also encouraged some rather aggressive beggars to approach anyone they could find and ask the fateful question “speak English?” If the answer is yes they hand you a hand written note on an index card explaining the plight of their family and how desperately they needed your money. This was marked by a somewhat surprising indifference on the part of the young gypsy girls as to whether or not you actually were interested in them, rather they gave off the air of frugal shoppers comparing prices at a supermarket, dropping one can as soon as a better one (more likely to give money) came into view. However you spin it, their presence is a sad testament to the inequality that lives in every modern city today, including the so called “first world”.

We followed Tripp’s nose away from the Eiffel Tower, after being asked politely by an American tourist, “do you fellas know where the Loove is? I think its some kind of museum around here,” and hastily responding in Russian, German, and French as to our general surprise at his expertise on Parisian monuments. Our flaneur-ing led us towards an unmarked door leading down a stairway underground, which ended in a large parking deck. This then took us out somewhere behind what we eventually learned was the Musée Quai Branly, a museum that focuses on multi-cultural and ethnic artifacts and artwork. We were extremely impressed by the building itself, it masterfully created a large inner courtyard and yet managed to arrange the space somehow so that one was led along a path through gardens that semi-circled the building, presenting a different view of the building at every turn. The architect, Tripp learned, was a Frenchman named Jean Nouvell who had created a roof for the inner courtyard of intersecting red and orange triangles and then covered the outside of the museum building with structures to encourage hanging plant growth and protruding boxes of different colors over a background of translucent forest images on the walls. It was a very intriguing structure to walk around, and our wandering brought us to the far end of the space from where we had entered and a wall of overlapping transparent blue glass that was layered with greetings in various languages, most of which shifted in and out of focus depending on your individual perspective. As the museum was already closed, we contented ourselves with the outside of the building and walked back to our hostel. Hoping for a more traditional French meal than the night before we walked around our hostel’s quarter and stumbled upon a wonderful restaurant called “la cuillere en bois” (the wooden spoon), which specialized in galettes, similar to the thin pancakes called “crêpes”, filled with all sorts of savory goodies, such as goats cheese, fried eggs, mushrooms, and onions. The meal began with quiches and for dessert, an assortment of chocolate and fruit filled crêpes, Tripp mistakenly ordered a cup of applesauce. It was a wonderful foray into the delicious universe of French cuisine and feeling completely satiated, we decided to call it an early night and returned to the 3 Ducks to chew the fat and eventually get some well deserved sleep.

Capt Rees and His Birthday Extravaganza

Wednesday we aimed our sojourns closer to the river Seine and, after a hasty breakfast of bread and jam, set out for the Jardin des Tuileries, walking past the high fashion boutiques selling watches for 500 Euros. We found some seats next to a central fountain in the gardens and decided that rather than rush the experience of the Louvre and other museums we should appreciate the decent weather and recumbent chairs and vegetate for a spell. Afterwards Tripp and I agreed we felt much better, having shaken off the morning stiffness in our joints, so we headed for the iconic glass pyramid in the central square of the Palais de Louvre, designed by I.M. Pei and which is now the main entrance into the museum. We navigated through the throngs of tourists and after a brief period of discussion decided to wander rather than aim for specific works. This is actually quite prudent when dealing with a museum the size of the Louvre, the statistic that I found most telling about its vastness was that if you were to sped one minute in front of every work of art in the Louvre, day and night, it would take over 2 weeks before you had seen everything.

With that chilling fact in mind we entered the central of three huge wings that make up a large “U” shape and proceeded to marvel at all the beautiful and celebrated works around every corner. We saw the Venus de Milo statue, the Winged Victory of Samaranth, the wall size Jacques-Louis David paintings, and of course the Mona Lisa, which attracted the biggest crowd and apparently merited the biggest display case. Tripp marveled at the audacity and garish grandeur of the fifth “wall”, placed in the middle of the room and covered in glass, whose sole purpose was to house the Mona Lisa, a painting roughly a foot in length and width. I suppose that when Dan Brown thinks you hold the key to an unsolved mystery of Christianity, your already immense value as a work of art sky- rockets. We continued on, seeing many interesting works including one of my personal favorites by Ingres called the Turkish Bathers, a very voluptuous painting that somehow captures the feeling of a steamy sauna on canvas.

Wandering for hours and only skimming the surface of what the Louvre had to offer we settled on following our growling stomachs across the river into the quarter called St. Germain-de-Près, a very expensive arrondisement with lots of art galleries and beautiful facades. At different intervals this area of Paris was home to many of the city’s noted avant gardes, existentialist writers, and surrealist painters. After buying a baguette and cheese (yes and the obligatory bottle of cheap French wine) we marched straight back to the sunshine of the Tuileries to lounge and eat and drink to our hearts content. By this point the sun had come out and I was nicely full, so we decided that a nap was certainly in order.

After catching some rays and watching a group of about ten French kids play a spirited game of cache-cache (hide and seek), which was enough to wake us up, we hit the dusty trail and headed for the Musée d’Orsay, home to a huge collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and sculptures. Walking through the well laid-out museum was very enjoyable and we were able to see many of the actual paintings that we are studying during this prolonged research voyage, including works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Monet. I was thrilled however to see what is certainly my favorite painting hanging there, Les Raboteurs de Parquet (the floor strippers) by Gustave Caillebotte, it really is a different experience seeing it in the flesh.

But why was this night different from all other nights? Because tonight Rees the great arrived from his adventures in Italy and the south of France to spend a week with us in Paris. It also happened to be his twentieth birthday so we made it a point of greeting him in style, by going out to an expensive Indian restaurant for dinner and toasting his health repeatedly. After dinner we dithered about how best to celebrate such a momentous occasion and settled on walking south till we found a club or bar worth checking out. Thus it was that the saga of Wednesday night began. Rees, Tripp, our mysterious roommate JP, and I waltzed along the streets of Paris, coming eventually to a bridge packed with groups of French youth making merry and playing music as the lights from the banks of the Seine twinkled like the stars that glistened in the water below. After marveling at the beauty and warmth of that view and the spirited raucousness of the locals, we moved on in search of an unnamed Jazz bar or other establishment, preferably with live music we agreed, and then came to the startling realization that it was just after 1 am and our hostel, which was half a city away had a lockout curfew at 2.

As the metro had stopped running we decided to hoof it back, but thanks to my phenomenal sense of direction and orientation, I was able to send us roughly a kilometer farther west than we should have been. It was at this point that Tripp took over directing us and, without a map, set us on the right track. Rees then saw that it was getting close to lockout time, so sprinted on ahead through the Parisian night, with Tripp and myself pelting along behind him shouting directions, unfortunately not aware that JP was not inclined to run after three crazy people he hardly knew and thus wasn’t following us. Somehow we came to an intersection and I saw Rees turn off to the left, which Tripp and I yelled to him wasn’t correct, but he was too far away at that point to heed our shouts, so Tripp and I jogged back to the Hostel, found it still unlocked twenty minutes after the curfew (so why the blazes did we run helter-skelter?) and decided that Rees would never be able to find the hostel since he had only been once to drop off his bags, and had admitted to us that he got lost that time as well since it was incorrectly marked on his map. What a wonderful birthday present to give someone, a night of wandering and running lost through the streets of a foreign city, topped off by sleeping on the street because you couldn’t find the hostel you paid to sleep at. However, miraculously, Rees then appeared at the door along with JP, who he had somehow run into (what were the odds?) and the night ended well with the three of us marveling at my horrendous failure to find magnetic north, and JP backing away slowly from his now clearly adrenaline crazed bunkmates. In the end, it wasn’t the night we had planned, but it was the night that transpired and it was quite an incredible experience.

Jazz for a Rainy Day

Tuesday it rained. Sometimes it stopped, but other times it kept raining. Mostly it rained. So, obviously, it was this most glorious of days Adam and I set forth to get our bearings on the city, particularly the northern end, and check out a few museums and figure out the location of the Moulin de la Galette, one of the sites we are researching.

Our first destination was Sacre Coeur, a massive cathedral constructed in the early to mid 19^th century just a few blocks from our hostel. Step after step, stair after stair we ascended the staircases towards our destined peak, the Basilica of Paris, with its vaulted roofs and magnificent stained glass. We were very impressed by the solemn glory of the gothic masterpiece and walked around the cathedral with the other tourists, in awe of the various statues and paintings hung near all the altars, indeed we were rendered silent by the might of the building itself and its commanding orientation at the peak of Paris. After surveying the Parisian vista for minutes on end we decided to descend from the mount and explore the rest of Montmartre while searching for the Moulin de la Galette.

The Moulin de la Galette served as a mill from about 1620 until 1873, at which time the family’s remaining son turned the site into one of Paris’s epicenters for elite, artsy soirées. It was the site of the Parisian Alamo, with the last of four brothers dying in one of the wings of the windmill while fighting “tooth and nail” (as the placard put it in French) against the invading Prussians. The man who turned the Moulin de la Galette into the hipster spot in Paris for Renoir, Van Gogh, et al was the son of that very brave last Brother, family name Debray. There is a famous painting of the interior gardens of the Moulin de la Galette by Renoir, but since the property is now a private residence except for a restaurant on the corner with its own windmill to attract ignorant tourists, and because our project deals with landscapes, we chose to focus on a slightly lesser known painting by Van Gogh of the buildings exterior and surrounding neighborhood. So, we found it, and moved along in pursuit of the Musee Nissim and Musee Moreau—sloshing through puddle after puddle of rain along the way. Actually, to be perfectly honest, I was jumping into them.

I discovered these two museums while reading a book about an American man’s twenty years spent in Paris titled The Flaneur. The Musee Moreau houses a collection of paintings, stained glass, drawings, and sculptures by Gustav Moreau, a contemporary and close friend of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Moreau once accused Baudelaire of attempting to change the world through flowers in his poetry. Baudelaire responded to Moreau questioning how he planned to change the world through paintings of jewelry. Gustav Moreau, to the best of my knowledge, was gay and loved both jewelry and the end of the world. These fascinations are equally represented through many of his works of art.

The Musee Nissim was established because of a daughter’s promise to her dying and severely depressed father. After bearing two children, his wife ran off with an Italian stableboy never to be seen again and as a result the newly-found bachelor became obsessed with collecting impressionist and neo-impressionist art and spent most of his family’s fortune amassing work after work by the likes of Monet, Manet, and Pissarro. After his son died as a pilot in the first World War he became a recluse and refused to speak with anyone except museum curators and his daughter. Just before he died, he told his daughter he wished to have a museum constructed to display his private holdings named in honor of his son. The museum was finally completed in 1935 under his daughter’s supervision. Sadly, because of the family’s Jewish heritage and despite their standing in French high society, the daughter and her family were all taken to Auschwitz in 1942 where they died along with the family’s name.

To get back on track, we worked our way westward from the Moulin de la Galette over to the Musee Nissim only to find it closed, with Adam and I left standing in the rain, two against nature. Luckily, the Parc Monceau was nearby with a nice little shelter to shield us from the rain. We took full advantage of this structure, ate the remains of our delicious English cakes prepared by none other than Lady Erica of Buckhurst Hill, and soon enjoyed the engulfing company of thirty or so Parisian high school children all on their lunch break and itching to both escape the confines of their educational prison and the buckets of rain falling from the sky. Because of the wonderful company/crowd under our hut Adam and I soon departed and began to navigate our way towards the Musee Moreau, which, upon arrival, we discovered to also be closed.

Thus it was that we discovered one of the great truths of Paris: all museums are closed on Tuesdays, and if not on Tuesday then for sure on Monday. Feeling that we had thoroughly wasted a day we decided to be true flaneurs and wander around Paris without a mission or a goal, which led us to the river Seine, which we strolled along for some time while marveling at the grand buildings on the Ile de la Cite, especially Notre Dame, which towers over its neighbors. Our loop then brought us back to the right bank to see the Centre Georges Pompidou, which houses the Museum of Modern Art, which was closed (mais bien sur!), but the unique inside-out design of the building is still worthwhile even from the plaza in front, becquae while the water pipes, heating ducts, and electricity wires are on the external surface of the building, the interior space is left free and open for virtually any purpose.

Later that night, after a homecooked meal of pasta and a baguette, word got round of a neighborhood jazz club jam session. Being quite the connoisseurs of jazz, Adam and I decided to check this place out. The club was a stone’s throw from the Moulin Rouge, in the heart of Paris’s red light district, but easily the most low-key street on the block. The jazz club was below the bar, in a sort of cave. Within minutes it became much more than a cave, transforming into a veritable cavern of treasure filled with mellifluous voices and some of the most cohesive jazz I’ve seen live and in such an intimate setting. Most songs were actually sung in English, despite a predominately French audience (15 of the 20 people in attendance), with interspersed periods of authentic scat. Requests were summoned and I gladly asked to hear “Corcovado” a song made famous by Tom Jobim, Stan Getz, and Astrud Gilberto during the height of Brazil’s bossa nova movement. The night lasted for hours, and without a cover charge at the door the prices of drinks seemed very reasonable, so it was that the music and reveling continued until the wee hours of the morning, at which point a need for sleep began to take precedence over a need for more music and it was time to retreat to a moth-eaten bed with itchy sheets and an obese, snoring Indian man as bunkmate.

Bienvenue a Paris!

We arrived in Paris on Monday the 26^th via the Eurostar, a train that travels directly from London to Paris and passes underneath the English Channel along the way. The train departed from London’s newly renovated St. Pancras Station around 3:30 and arrived a la Gare du Nord in Paris only 2 ½ hours later. After checking into our first hostel, Woodstock, we set down our belongings and greeted the city of lights with open arms. By greeting the city with open arms what I really mean is we found a place to eat. We settled on a small (petit) restaurant with a wonderful view of Sacre Coeur, a cathedral in Monmartre posied on one of the highest hills in Paris with glorious views of the city at sunset. Our vista was further enhanced by the “string hustlers” tugging at people on their way up to the cathedral. I refer to them as string hustlers because of their rather forceful halting of unaware visitors, particularly the male counterpart of a male-female duo, and assault them with string which would be hastily “French” braided to their wrists with remarks such as “it is beautiful,” “your wife will love,” etc. and then request the 2 or 3 Euros for their beautifully crafted wrist adornment. I’m sure it is an incredibly frustrating situation for both parties, but from afar I delighted in conjuring up my own conversations that were taking place which I won’t go into here. After the dinner and complimentary street performances we retired back to the hostel to post the remainder of our London bloggings and get an early night sleep.

Cambridge

Friday we set sail for lovely Cambridge, home of two compatriots of Tripp from his travels in Brazil the previous summer, who offered to show us around this historic town for a couple of days. We arrived at the train station and walked five minutes to where one of these gracious hosts, Lizzy, lives on Mill Road, surrounded by ethnic food markets and Charity stores. After dumping our packs we went in search of our other contact Katie and toured the historic King’s College Chapel, constructed by Henry VI and later added onto by Henry VIII, and were amazed at the multitude of miracles that were recorded on a map of England inside the Chapel, including the miraculous removal of a bean from the ear of a man where it had been lodged for 37 years, jolly good show I say! Also because Lizzy was a student of St. John’s College we were able to get the key to the tower of their chapel, which looms over the entire city and provided some great vistas from the roof after the precarious climb up the twisting spiral staircase. The next order of the day was punting, a truly English tradition involving a flat bottomed boat about the size of a canoe that is “punted” along a slow moving river with a long pole. We had previously stocked up on sandwiches and crisps from the local Sainsbury’s and so spent a happy two hours drifting down the river Cam, learning (or in my case remembering) how to steer around the irritable river guides. Finally it was time for the thirty-fifth annual beer festival on Jesus Green, hosted and run by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, with hundreds of different ales, bitters, and stouts from all over England. The bars were organized by district, North, South, East Anglia, and even a bar dedicated to Cambridgeshire breweries, and some of the beers had memorable names to go along with the wonderful flavor, my favorite was Comrade Bill Bartram’s Anti-Imperialist Soviet Ale. After five hours of drinking and merry-making we waltzed off to the theater to see the new Indiana Jones movie. I found it to be highly entertaining and a good 2 hours or so of action sequences and chase scenes, Tripp on the other hand thought the film was dull and decided to sleep for almost the duration, waking for the final scene to give it two thumbs down and throw popcorn at a kid in the front while yelling “Doctor Jones! Doctor Jones!” We finished the day with a proper paper cone of chips and a long sleep on Lizzy’s couch. The next day we woke to get a real English breakfast a local café, consisting of eggs, toast, beans, tomatoes, and tea, which works wonders when your head feels several sizes too large after a long night. Lizzy then took us round the Fitzwilliam museum, which is incredibly ornate and houses some of the lesser known works of artists ranging from Picasso to Degas and Rodin, well worth a visit. We then said our goodbyes and caught the afternoon train back to Liverpool Street station.

Swan on the River Cam

Beer Fest Festivities

Captain Nelson

King’s College

Punting on the River Cam

We returned to Buckhurst Hill late that afternoon, freshened up, and headed to Guanabara, London’s Brazilian night club with live samba, caipirinhas, and many of my English amigos I met while in Brazil last summer. It was great seeing everyone and artificially re-living “a vida carioca.” I chipped my tooth, unfortunately, but only slightly and surprisingly not due to personal clumsiness. Someone’s forceful elbow created a small chain reaction which ended with my beer bottle hitting the bottom left corner of my left front tooth. I repeat, this was not due to my own clumsiness and at the time I had hardly begun to drink. Overall, Guanabara was a blast and it was wonderful catching up with everyone. Thanks to Suze, Adam and I were able to catch a cab home from the club instead of walking the 15 miles back in the rain for the small fare of £50. That’s a sarcastic comment because it equals about 100 USD. Jesus Christ.

The next day involved rummaging through heaps of records and flat caps, one to Adam’s delight and the other to us both. Adam likes flat caps…or at least trying them on and admiring himself. This all took place in Soho, mostly along a single street that also contained curry houses and strip clubs. We visited on of the curry houses, but left the strip clubs to dodgey men with missing teeth. We also poked our heads in to the British Museum to admire the Queen’s antiquities. It was wonderful to see all the colorful displays of relics from the beginnings of civilization to contemporary African art designed to look like a chair made out of AK-47s. Adam and I got lost from each other as the museum was closing and proceeded to wander around the museum’s inner atrium looking for one another for about 20 minutes until one of our strides finally caught up with one another and we were found at last.

Abbey Road

Abbey Road

Abbey Road

Abbey Road

Abbey Road

Abbey Road

click the images for a slightly enlarged version

Skin, bones, and London Redesigned

Wednesday the 21st we ventured off to the Somerset House on the Embankment which houses several different galleries. One in particular that we were interested in was called Skin and Bones, dealing with the parallel themes found in the design of fashion and architecture over the last half century. Before we got to that we were intrigued by a free exhibit entitled Open City, which was put on by a group called Design for London, currently working on a comprehensive massive overhaul of the entire city’s layout and ethos. Where the streets form dangerous crosswalks and traffic jams, pedestrian zones would be created, waterways would be utilized for transit, green zones would be created in previously polluted spaces, and a focus on the history and organic nature of the city would be manifested in new developments. Overall a very well put together proposal and plan, and even included a large board where anyone could post their reactions and suggestions, some of which had already been added into the overall master plan. Afterwards we moved on to the Skin and Bones exhibition, which was extremely informative and more interesting than I expected, specifically the fashion which I generally don’t understand very well. Each section was classified by an idea, for example “Shelter” or “Weaving”, which was then represented by the work of fashion designers and architects, with scale models, photos, and video clips illustrating their implementations of their ideas. Such famous architects as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Toyo Ito were included in the exhibit, many of whose work I was unfamiliar with, and the combination of the displays and Tripp’s knowledge of their other work and backgrounds made the entire experience both exciting and revelatory.

Post Countryside

In 1871 Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet were in London in order to escape the ravages of the Franco-Prussian War. Pissarro sought refuge with his relatives living in South London, in the borough of Lewisham, and over the course of his year long stay he painted several famous landscapes, two of which we ventured out to do research on; the Avenue at Sydenham, and Fox Hill in Upper Norwood. We caught the train from Waterloo Station fully expecting a day of photography, interviews, and marvelous views, but as we were quickly finding out even the slightly hastily laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. Locating the Avenue wasn’t too difficult, nor was recreating the perspective and borders of Pissarro’s famous painting, which sold in 1984 to the National Gallery in London for the hefty sum of £625,000. It was, however, complicated getting anyone to agree to speak to us on tape, apparently because of a certain tendency in Britain to not have an opinion on anything relating to our project, or rather a steadfast resistance to telling us said opinion(Tripp’s note: for further information regarding British modesty consult my new personal Jesus, Bill Bryson). To top it all off, it seems that most people in Sydenham are unable to direct you to Lewisham, Norwood, or evidently anywhere in their immediate environs. So instead of recording the reactions of several Sydenham locals after taking photos, we received a series of recommendations about where we might find someone with expert information about Impressionist paintings and their relationship to South London. Thus began what can only be classified as a whirlwind wild goose chase around the seedier side of the city upon the Thames. Our inquiries at the Church of St. Bartholomew led us to walk back to Sydenham proper and search for a book store whose owner, we were assured, would be willing to talk to us. Actually he claimed to have no thoughts with regards to any of our questions and told us we might be better off going to the Lewisham Library, which is located “just down the street”. The problem now was that we were off the map, so we went into the post office to ask directions to the Library, where there was no help to be found. Finally we made for the nearest bus stop and headed in what we hoped was a southerly direction, winding our way for almost half an hour through towns with names like Brockley, and something along the lines of Cat Garage until we arrived in central Lewisham and located the Library. Things were looking up for us, it seemed. We then spoke with a man who, though you may not know it, is something of a celebrity in the greater Lewisham area. Who could this be, you might ask, why certainly no self-respecting celebrity would speak to you two, but there you would be wrong, because we met with none other than John Coulter, librarian and archivist extraordinaire of Lewisham Central Library, and author of several books on the history of Sydenham and Norwood. He showed us several maps, listened politely to our somewhat jumbled thesis and further research ideas, and sold us a book about locations of famous paintings in London, after which point we asked to take his picture for our records. “If you wish,” he chuckled, clearly wondering what planet we were from, and ever so modestly positioned himself for a portrait for his biggest, if not youngest, fans (for authorized portrait of John Coulter see previous post).

Upon departure from Lewisham Central Library we were off to Fox Hill, Upper Norwood. After missing our stop, or the bus just not taking us there, we found ourselves in Lower Norwood (though it now proclaims itself East Norwood). It was here we came to the conclusion that your everyday Joe-London has not the slightest clue about their locale, so we decided to use our instincts and walk to Fox Hill. We climbed for about 20 minutes and came to the spot where Pissarro painted the road on Fox Hill with its distinctive curve and twenty degrees of steepness. We snapped our photo and began the ascent to the top of Fox Hill, the second home of Victorian England’s Crystal Palace. Little did we know the disappointment that would ensue as we became eager to see this world renowned establishment, formerly the home of many a classical music world premier and the world’s first cat show. It turns out that the Palace is now nothing more than a barren mall of grass with a few sphinx heads and a statue of an Indian man. So it was, and off to catch the train back to Waterloo we went, walking back through our esteemed Sydenham along the way and stopping at a chippy for take-away chips with just not enough salt and vinegar to make it worth it. Don’t be discouraged, reader, on this day we reveled in our disappointments and had a blast.

Going to the country, gonna eat alot of (tea and cake?)

As the last few posts have comprised non-original material (apart from the photos) I feel an explanation is necessary. We’ve been extremely busy here in London, hoofing it all over to parts hitherto unknown in the quest for the “true” London experience, and research material. Erica, who is angelic in her obliging nature in letting us stay at her flat, also offered to drive us out into the country for a day, so we could experience what the rest of England is really like. The “country” has quite a different meaning over here, referring to the rolling hills and sweeping meadows and forests that comprise the vast majority of England’s landscape, occupying the undeveloped spaces between the industrial centers of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and London, among others. In order to accomplish a bit of research while on this sojourn, we looked up several John Constable landscapes, which are from the 18th century, and thus slightly too early for us, but regardless he is certainly England’s greatest landscape painter. He painted of and around the town of Dedham, which is close to a place called Flatford Mill, where his extremely famous painting “The Haywain” was made, and which hangs in the the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

We got up early (8 am) and drove the 60 miles out to Dedham and Flatford, strolling around the town and asking people we met for directions to Flatford Mill, which wasn’t very clearly marked. After stumbling upon a woman painting the scene of a water lock at Dedham Mill, we moseyed on back to the center of town and explored the church, which was easily the most impressive building in the area. In fact it is featured prominently, particularly the bell tower, in most of Constable’s work.

Among other things, the ornate door and stained glass windows were destroyed by the Puritans (weak!), but one small section of window that was too high for them to reach has the initials ES on it, referring to an Edward Sherman, the ancestor of a certain General Sherman who gained fame in the US Civil War. Sherman’s house in Dedham is covered with graffiti from the 18th century by boys he taught to read and write, carving their initials and even nicknames into the brickwork. The town is also linked closely to Dedham, Massachusetts, which donated 1000 pounds(2000 dollars) to help restore the building, and has a memorial to the NASA astronauts from the Apollo 11 mission that landed on the moon. Continuing on to Flatford Mill, we found it completely preserved, virtually unchanged since Constable and full of spectacular views and fields full of curious sheep(yes, they were curious). We then traveled further to a town in Suffolk (the county in England north of Essex) called Lavenham, which has stood virtually untouched since the 17th century. Most of the houses there are pre-Victorian and are now slouching and sliding over very dramatically, and among other places we visited a tea house that is rumored to be haunted called Tickled Pink, after its owners hundreds of years ago named Mr. and Mrs. Tickle, who sided with Cromwell and the Roundheads against the Monarchy and were thought to be witches, by way of which the townspeople tortured them by tickling them to death (probably not with feathers though). One of the houses here, not pictured below, is thought to be from whence the children’s poem about a crooked man who lived in a crooked house originated.

Overall it was quite an excursion out into the country, full of incredibly useful and interesting information from Erica, and a great many photos of a nice day out in Constable Country (great name for a theme park?) My apologies for how long it has taken to get a real post up again, but its been a very tiring, although enjoyable, week and a half and the late nights have meant late mornings which have meant not a lot of time to chronicle our adventures. Rest assured more will be posted soon about expeditions to the uncharted regions of South and West London, meetings with John Coulter, Abbey Road graffiti, and much, much more. Love to John Constable, and to all of you readers (Javier).