St. Paul's

Today was a pleasant day. This weekend has brought a brief lull in my busy schedule of the past couple weeks. I woke up this morning (well, technically it was afternoon) with an empty day ahead of me. I was free to choose my activities. So, I decided to go see some sights.

First, I went to the Tate Modern, a free museum of modern art south of the Thames in downtown London. I saw some curious things. The main entrance to the museum is fashioned to look like a warehouse. As you walk down a huge, gently-declined ramp, your eyes move to the text printed on a bridge in front of you. It says:

“It has been raining for years now, not a day, not an hour without rain. This continuous watering has had a strange effect on urban sculptures. They have started to grow like giant tropical plants, and become even more monumental. To stop this growth it has been decided to store them inside, among the hundreds of bunk beds which, night and day, receive refugees from the rain.... Turbine Hall / 2058 / London”

At the bottom of the ramp you walk through heavy multicolored plastic strips hung from the bridge above into a space populated by yellow and blue bunk bed frames. Each bed has a book fastened to it. I was only familiar with a couple of the books. One was Fahrenheit 451, the popular Ray Bradbury book about a frightening future where original thought is outlawed. The other familiar book was Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a story about a couple in Hiroshima a few years after the bomb. It emphasizes the rift between the man and the woman as a result of their traumatic wartime experiences. Last year, I wrote two or three papers about this story for one of my classes, so it was fun to see it today. It seemed all the books were unified by the idea of a radically-different future caused by human intervention. There were also two gigantic sculptures in this space: one of a spider-looking thing, and another large red thing. And there was a sculpture of a gigantic cat skeleton.

Needless to say, it was a very strange place, which is what you would expect from a museum of modern art. A lot of modern art is hit-or-miss, I think. I was able to appreciate a lot of the exhibits though, because I love to see unique perspectives or different takes on reality. I caught myself once looking at the artists’ names before considering the art itself, which I quickly tried to avoid. I wanted to develop my own sense of appreciation for some of the art, not just look at the paintings by famous people. Anyway, it was worth the trip. And it took them about twenty minutes to tell me cameras weren’t allowed, so I got some nice pictures before I knew it was against the rules.

The rest of my afternoon was spent in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Once again, cameras were not allowed, and unfortunately they posted their sign in plain view at the entrance, so I didn’t get any pictures. I’m glad I don’t have pictures though, because a photo could have never done justice to the breathtaking beauty inside that church. It was designed by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the previous cathedral, which stood on the same spot, and it took 35 years, from 1675 to 1710, to complete. The tip of its spire stands 110 meters above the floor of the cathedral, and the space between these two extremes is filled with huge stone pillars, magnificent mosaics, and an indescribably beautiful dome. After wandering around for a few minutes with my neck craned upward, I found out there was a mass starting at five, so I decided to stay for mass. It was quite an experience. I was there a bit early, so I was ushered past the area where patrons usually sit into a thin row of seats along a path leading to the altar (which was at least fifty feet tall). It’s a little hard to explain, but I had a very good seat. The service was begun by an all-male choir composed of young children and grown men (no castrati, I assume). They sang magnificently in strong, clear tones, and the cathedral rang with every final chord, sustaining the note for half a minute after the choir had stopped singing. I couldn’t believe how beautifully the children sang. The choir was supported by an organist on an instrument as old as the cathedral itself. Between songs, the priest read passages from the Bible, but this didn’t happen very often. We mostly just listened to the choir, which was okay with me.

I wore a pair of shorts and a t-shirt today in the optimistic view that it would be a good day. It was sunny for awhile, but it turned a bit cold in the evening. I was a little underdressed; but from the way the Londoners reacted to my shorts, you would have thought I was running around nude. I would estimate I caught at least 30 people staring at my bare legs. I was flattered, of course, but also a bit unnerved. I must have seen at least two thousand people today, just walking around, and out of everyone I saw, I was the only man wearing a pair of shorts. Cultural difference, I suppose.

I watched Die Hard tonight with Dave and at one point a guy was watching a football game between Notre Dame and USC. I was very excited. Leaving the United States has really shown me how much I love it. I’m very glad to be in Europe right now and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it, but I do miss a lot of people and things in the US.