This week flew by. Last Sunday afternoon I met Blair at her hotel in Piccadilly Circus and we wandered back toward my dorm, stopping first to get hot drinks and gossip. I took her by the
PMC on the way back and we had fun checking out some of the crazy architectural structures that were constructed around the Square. I especially liked this one that looked like an upside down banana peel. We went for Chinese food, and later met up with Bill and Lissa and went to a pub called the Doric Arch.
Monday was Research Day for most of us. We didn't have class because the Session 2 kids were having their first day, and it was our only chance to go to the library for our paper that's due tomorrow. It was a frenzied day of looking through books and trying to figure out exactly what we were writing on. Toward the end of the day we found out that they were going to let us pick up a couple books to use this weekend---if they hadn't, we would've been completely screwed.
On Tuesday we left for our three day trip to Bath. Our first stop (well, second. Our first was picking up our professor at a bus stop in Richmond) was Stonehenge. We only stayed about half an hour. It was kind of weird to see it without a ton of people milling around. No drums either.
And as you can see it was a nice day (well, at that point it was). Kind of looks unreal, doesn't it? The whole experience of going there for the solstice was kind of unreal too, though, so maybe it is no matter what. Someone mentioned that it was smaller than they expected, and I definitely agree. But it's still kind of amazing.
Our next stop was Stourhead Gardens, this gorgeous estate, owned originally by the Hoare family. They created this landscape garden that basically imitated landscape paintings. It was carefully set up so that you would walk around and pause every so often to look at different "views". There were little temples and cottages and grottos scattered around the lake, and we walked around and looked at them. It rained on and off but we were all armed with umbrellas and raincoats. Funniest part: when each of our professors in turn stopped to "tie their shoelaces"... in the bushes...
The garden was amazing, and I loved the lake. I think on this 
trip I keep seeing places I would love to live, if I ever have millions and millions of dollars. This is one of them. I joke that I'll just go back to my thousands of photos someday and pick out which bits I want to use when planning my house. Ha. Wish that were even remotely possible.
We went inside the house at Stourhead, which
was also pretty cool. As always I really liked the library. They had some neat paintings, including one of Richard Wilson's Lake Nemi paintings (which I may write about in my paper), and several showing the Epiphany scene of Mary, Jesus and the Magi. There were sheep in the field in front of the house. Before we went in, I thought there was one loose and running with someone... turned out to be a dog. Oops.
I absolutely love the sky in most of these pictures. I am sure I have more interesting shots that have the little temples or grottos, but I'm a sucker for blue skies with clouds.
We arrived in Bath, at the George Hotel. Lissa and I were rooming together. Our professors took us out to dinner at Pizza Express. I think the meal lasted a good two and a half hours, between some people getting starters and most of us having dessert. MMmm I had margherita pizza and chocolate cake. There was also wine, which was really good. It was neat to see our professors outside of class; I was sitting next to Martin Postle and I talked cycling with him (he rides to work every day, and my dad does pretty often too), and we all talked about other stuff with him. He used to be the Senior Curator at the Tate Britain, is probably one of the most preeminent Reynolds scholars, and we get to not only take classes with him but also have dinner with him. And he's just a normal person, except he (and Andrew Sanders does too) knows a lot of really interesting stuff. I guess Yale should prepare me for things like this, but it still gets me.
A group of us wandered around Bath for a bit after dinner, since it was still light. Bill and I saw an older woman dragging a dog by a leash... only it wasn't a real dog, it was plastic. Crazy.
The next morning we did a walking tour of Bath. It was pouring rain for most of the time, and we got pretty miserable. Nell was sharing my umbrella and we started singing rain songs, and eventually reprised "Little Bunny Foo Foo." We stopped frequently, going inside the Pump Room, where we drank a bit of nasty restorative water, to the Assembly Rooms, which were boring but where we got hot drinks (mmm cocoa with marshmallows) and to One Royal Crescent, a Georgian house. We had a break for lunch, and then we did an audio tour of the Roman Baths. A little boring at first but it got better, and at the end of it some of us had tea in the Pump Room (I of course had cocoa again. More marshmallows. It was a good day).
Most of the class (including the professors) went to a spa after this, but Nell, Bill, and I opted not
to. We wandered back to the hotel, stopping at a bookstore, and then reconvened to go to dinner. We found an Indian restaurant, which was delicious, and then we wandered some more. We made our way to the river and walked along it for a while, admiring especially the ducks. We have seen a lot of ducks lately, and somehow it never gets old. It started raining again, which was not quite as fun. My umbrella developed a habit of flipping inside out. The first time it did that it was funny. The next five times, not so much.
We checked out of our hotel on Thursday morning and drove to Salisbury, where we walked around the Cathedral, its Close, and the Water Meadows. It figures a lot in John Constable's paintings, which I think I'm going to write about in my last paper, so it was pretty cool to see where he'd been painting. When we were on our way in, some guy from BBC South was filming us for something about tourism, and when we got back I found the link on the BBC website. You can't see me in it, but look for my class at around 43 seconds: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7500327.stm The Cathedral was beautiful inside, and hilariously the jazz band from the Cathedral school was playing Born to Be Wild when we were in there. They were really good too!
We walked through the Water Meadows to see Constable's view. Things were pretty flooded, and it actually started raining again so we went to a pub for lunch. It stopped raining while we were inside, and I took as many pictures on the way back to the bus as I had on the way to the pub, since the sky was now blue and (you guessed it) had pretty clouds. Too bad I can't paint, I could've been the next Constable and made a bunch of cloud studies. Instead I just take endless (and not always very good) photographs. Ah well.
We then headed to Wilton House, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke. A big old mansion, it was filled with paintings and sculptures. There was an entire room with paintings by Van Dyck, several Reynolds, and a series of Wilson paintings of the house and its grounds, which was pretty neat. The grounds were lovely, with a Palladian bridge, an
obelisk that purported to be Egyptian but didn't seem to be at all, a Whispering Seat where you could whisper messages to the person at the other end, a lovely little rose garden, and some kind of Japanese-like garden with red bridges. Another place I would love to live. Well, not the house, really. Even though I like art, I wouldn't want to be so relentlessly surrounded by it. But I loved the grounds of the house.
We got back around 7 and were all pretty exhausted. We made a Waitrose trip to get food for dinner. My room turned out to smell terrible! The carpet was wet, no idea why, and it smelled just awful, so they let me sleep in another room. It's starting to smell better but it's been almost three days, they washed the carpet I think and left the window open, and I still am not ready to move back in. So I'm down on the ground floor by myself.
On Friday Patty, Marla, Hayley and I went to Greenwich (second time for me). We explored the National Maritime Museum, and then I left them to run through the Queen's House briefly, where I saw a couple Reynolds paintings, as well as a Gainsborough and a Hogarth. I met them back outside in time to see the red ball at the Royal Observatory drop at 1 p.m. Sailors used to set their clocks by it.
I then got on the Tube and went to the Tate Britain, where I looked at works by Wilson and Jones in the Prints and Drawings Room for my paper for about an hour and a half. When I left I
saw a train car dangling from a crane. Music was playing as it turned in the wind. Apparently that's art? Kind of weird.
I went back to the dorm, got some dinner, relaxed a bit, and then it was time to go see Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe! It started raining, and we were really worried that we would just be wet and unhappy throughout the performance, but no! We got ponchos and it did rain some, but the play was absolutely hilarious and it didn't matter. We were groundlings and because there was a bridge that extended out from the stage, we were almost in kind of a pit, between the stage and the bridge. We were able to lean against the bridge while watching, which was really nice. Seriously, we had so much fun. The actors were great, the set was nice, the music was good, and it was just in general a fun show.
Unfortunately yesterday I had to settle back into the real world, where I have papers to write. I wrote and goofed off all day, was about halfway done by the time I stopped. We were going to a pub as a group, but most of the group pregamed so Lissa, Bill, Conor, and I left early and headed to the Bree Louise. We were there about an hour when the rest of the group showed up....and we left. Oh well. We were tired. And knew that we had to write papers today.
Unfortunately I have little motivation right now. I need to write about 700 more words to finish the paper due tomorrow. Too bad this blog entry can't count toward that, I'm sure I've written far more words than I need.
I go home on Saturday. Don't even want to think about it.
PMC on the way back and we had fun checking out some of the crazy architectural structures that were constructed around the Square. I especially liked this one that looked like an upside down banana peel. We went for Chinese food, and later met up with Bill and Lissa and went to a pub called the Doric Arch.Monday was Research Day for most of us. We didn't have class because the Session 2 kids were having their first day, and it was our only chance to go to the library for our paper that's due tomorrow. It was a frenzied day of looking through books and trying to figure out exactly what we were writing on. Toward the end of the day we found out that they were going to let us pick up a couple books to use this weekend---if they hadn't, we would've been completely screwed.
On Tuesday we left for our three day trip to Bath. Our first stop (well, second. Our first was picking up our professor at a bus stop in Richmond) was Stonehenge. We only stayed about half an hour. It was kind of weird to see it without a ton of people milling around. No drums either.
And as you can see it was a nice day (well, at that point it was). Kind of looks unreal, doesn't it? The whole experience of going there for the solstice was kind of unreal too, though, so maybe it is no matter what. Someone mentioned that it was smaller than they expected, and I definitely agree. But it's still kind of amazing.Our next stop was Stourhead Gardens, this gorgeous estate, owned originally by the Hoare family. They created this landscape garden that basically imitated landscape paintings. It was carefully set up so that you would walk around and pause every so often to look at different "views". There were little temples and cottages and grottos scattered around the lake, and we walked around and looked at them. It rained on and off but we were all armed with umbrellas and raincoats. Funniest part: when each of our professors in turn stopped to "tie their shoelaces"... in the bushes...
The garden was amazing, and I loved the lake. I think on this 
trip I keep seeing places I would love to live, if I ever have millions and millions of dollars. This is one of them. I joke that I'll just go back to my thousands of photos someday and pick out which bits I want to use when planning my house. Ha. Wish that were even remotely possible.We went inside the house at Stourhead, which
was also pretty cool. As always I really liked the library. They had some neat paintings, including one of Richard Wilson's Lake Nemi paintings (which I may write about in my paper), and several showing the Epiphany scene of Mary, Jesus and the Magi. There were sheep in the field in front of the house. Before we went in, I thought there was one loose and running with someone... turned out to be a dog. Oops.I absolutely love the sky in most of these pictures. I am sure I have more interesting shots that have the little temples or grottos, but I'm a sucker for blue skies with clouds.
We arrived in Bath, at the George Hotel. Lissa and I were rooming together. Our professors took us out to dinner at Pizza Express. I think the meal lasted a good two and a half hours, between some people getting starters and most of us having dessert. MMmm I had margherita pizza and chocolate cake. There was also wine, which was really good. It was neat to see our professors outside of class; I was sitting next to Martin Postle and I talked cycling with him (he rides to work every day, and my dad does pretty often too), and we all talked about other stuff with him. He used to be the Senior Curator at the Tate Britain, is probably one of the most preeminent Reynolds scholars, and we get to not only take classes with him but also have dinner with him. And he's just a normal person, except he (and Andrew Sanders does too) knows a lot of really interesting stuff. I guess Yale should prepare me for things like this, but it still gets me.
A group of us wandered around Bath for a bit after dinner, since it was still light. Bill and I saw an older woman dragging a dog by a leash... only it wasn't a real dog, it was plastic. Crazy.
The next morning we did a walking tour of Bath. It was pouring rain for most of the time, and we got pretty miserable. Nell was sharing my umbrella and we started singing rain songs, and eventually reprised "Little Bunny Foo Foo." We stopped frequently, going inside the Pump Room, where we drank a bit of nasty restorative water, to the Assembly Rooms, which were boring but where we got hot drinks (mmm cocoa with marshmallows) and to One Royal Crescent, a Georgian house. We had a break for lunch, and then we did an audio tour of the Roman Baths. A little boring at first but it got better, and at the end of it some of us had tea in the Pump Room (I of course had cocoa again. More marshmallows. It was a good day).
Most of the class (including the professors) went to a spa after this, but Nell, Bill, and I opted not
to. We wandered back to the hotel, stopping at a bookstore, and then reconvened to go to dinner. We found an Indian restaurant, which was delicious, and then we wandered some more. We made our way to the river and walked along it for a while, admiring especially the ducks. We have seen a lot of ducks lately, and somehow it never gets old. It started raining again, which was not quite as fun. My umbrella developed a habit of flipping inside out. The first time it did that it was funny. The next five times, not so much.
We checked out of our hotel on Thursday morning and drove to Salisbury, where we walked around the Cathedral, its Close, and the Water Meadows. It figures a lot in John Constable's paintings, which I think I'm going to write about in my last paper, so it was pretty cool to see where he'd been painting. When we were on our way in, some guy from BBC South was filming us for something about tourism, and when we got back I found the link on the BBC website. You can't see me in it, but look for my class at around 43 seconds: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
We walked through the Water Meadows to see Constable's view. Things were pretty flooded, and it actually started raining again so we went to a pub for lunch. It stopped raining while we were inside, and I took as many pictures on the way back to the bus as I had on the way to the pub, since the sky was now blue and (you guessed it) had pretty clouds. Too bad I can't paint, I could've been the next Constable and made a bunch of cloud studies. Instead I just take endless (and not always very good) photographs. Ah well.
We then headed to Wilton House, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke. A big old mansion, it was filled with paintings and sculptures. There was an entire room with paintings by Van Dyck, several Reynolds, and a series of Wilson paintings of the house and its grounds, which was pretty neat. The grounds were lovely, with a Palladian bridge, an
obelisk that purported to be Egyptian but didn't seem to be at all, a Whispering Seat where you could whisper messages to the person at the other end, a lovely little rose garden, and some kind of Japanese-like garden with red bridges. Another place I would love to live. Well, not the house, really. Even though I like art, I wouldn't want to be so relentlessly surrounded by it. But I loved the grounds of the house.We got back around 7 and were all pretty exhausted. We made a Waitrose trip to get food for dinner. My room turned out to smell terrible! The carpet was wet, no idea why, and it smelled just awful, so they let me sleep in another room. It's starting to smell better but it's been almost three days, they washed the carpet I think and left the window open, and I still am not ready to move back in. So I'm down on the ground floor by myself.
On Friday Patty, Marla, Hayley and I went to Greenwich (second time for me). We explored the National Maritime Museum, and then I left them to run through the Queen's House briefly, where I saw a couple Reynolds paintings, as well as a Gainsborough and a Hogarth. I met them back outside in time to see the red ball at the Royal Observatory drop at 1 p.m. Sailors used to set their clocks by it.
I then got on the Tube and went to the Tate Britain, where I looked at works by Wilson and Jones in the Prints and Drawings Room for my paper for about an hour and a half. When I left I
saw a train car dangling from a crane. Music was playing as it turned in the wind. Apparently that's art? Kind of weird.I went back to the dorm, got some dinner, relaxed a bit, and then it was time to go see Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe! It started raining, and we were really worried that we would just be wet and unhappy throughout the performance, but no! We got ponchos and it did rain some, but the play was absolutely hilarious and it didn't matter. We were groundlings and because there was a bridge that extended out from the stage, we were almost in kind of a pit, between the stage and the bridge. We were able to lean against the bridge while watching, which was really nice. Seriously, we had so much fun. The actors were great, the set was nice, the music was good, and it was just in general a fun show.
Unfortunately yesterday I had to settle back into the real world, where I have papers to write. I wrote and goofed off all day, was about halfway done by the time I stopped. We were going to a pub as a group, but most of the group pregamed so Lissa, Bill, Conor, and I left early and headed to the Bree Louise. We were there about an hour when the rest of the group showed up....and we left. Oh well. We were tired. And knew that we had to write papers today.
Unfortunately I have little motivation right now. I need to write about 700 more words to finish the paper due tomorrow. Too bad this blog entry can't count toward that, I'm sure I've written far more words than I need.
I go home on Saturday. Don't even want to think about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment