Monumental

Antoine and I went on another monumental run today. I’ve included a picture to illustrate how monumental it was. (Get it?! With all the monuments?!) Neither of us will be walking for the next three days or so. I hadn’t planned on walking for those days anyway, so it works out for me.

At one point, we were running along the banks of the Thames, on a filthy, grimy, trashy beach and we came to a dead end. Our progress was halted by twenty-foot-tall brick walls. We were jokingly talking about climbing over them and continuing on when a person called out to us from their balcony above and asked if we needed help. I told them we were a little lost (we weren’t really), and the guy told us to stay where we were. He went to get another guy, who came out and assessed our situation. By this point I was trying to tell them we could just go back the way we came, but they weren’t really listening. One of the guys proposed getting a rope to lower to us which we could then use to climb the twenty feet to the lowest platform, and now I wish I had realized at the time how cool that would have been, because instead of accept this man’s suggestion that I become Indiana Jones for a few minutes, I insisted we could get out if we just went back a little in the direction we had come from. And indeed we did get out pretty easily; we climbed a ladder and we were back on the street. Never have I been so disappointed in myself for being right.

This afternoon I went to an exhibition gallery called the Barbican Center to peruse an exhibit focused on Le Corbusier, a French architect who spearheaded the modernist movement after the end of the Second World War. It was very interesting, worth the six-pound admission fee. One of his most famous works is known as the Villa Savoye, a modernist building outside of Paris. It showed the world how a functional approach to design can create a beautiful building. His ideas were very radical for his time, but now he is seen as a visionary.

I had wanted to take pictures of the things I saw at the exhibition, but I knew that photography was prohibited. I was contemplating breaking the rule to take a picture of a scale model of a particularly intriguing summer home when I saw a smartly-dressed man examining a uniquely-shaped desk in front of me. He looked at it for a few seconds, then looked around furtively for any exhibition staff, and swiftly gave one of the drawers a tug. It was locked, and I started laughing. I quickly snapped a picture of the model and went on my way.