January 7, 2012

The London Eye and Benjamin

So the first day in London we took a quick walk around the surrounding area. We got to see the London Eye and Big Ben from far away. Nicole told me that London would feel a lot like a set from a movie or like it's fake, and it really does. It reminds me a bit of the scene from "Inception" where the city folds up around itself. It all just looks so unreal because I've never been around something like this before. The buildings are huge and look like something from out of a movie set.

Those little boys had NO idea what was going on

We go on lots of "London Walks" for a one credit class I'm taking. The class is basically a field trip class. On this particular trip we got to walk around the Central Market, a place littered with shops and places to eat. I stopped off and watched a street performer get ready to do a show. He had a huge build up for his show, setting up his props and getting these four little boys to lie down in a row. He also spent a lot of time warming up the crowd and trying to get them to clap for them (which was like pulling teeth). In the end the show just consisted of some boring juggling. It was interesting to watch the crowds reactions to him, because they hardly gave him any applause or feedback when he was trying to drag it out of them. I wonder if this is a British thing (maybe it goes along with not being as loud as Americans and not being as enthusiastic). Overall I really liked the market and I went back later with some girls to get food at a small outdoor waffle place.

I'm really starting to love London...

Ahh, here's a sweet chance picture of a freaking model randomly on the street. Well done sir.

The National Gallery

After the market I stopped off for a bit at the National Gallery. I got to see some fantastic originals, including some from Turner (my FAVORITE), Monet (SUCCESS!), da Vinci, Cezanne, Seurat, Rubens, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Raphael, etc. Basically all the famous artists in the world. It was cool too, because I recognized many of them from my humanities classes.

Kensington Gardens at night

On my way back home we walked through Kensington Gardens to get back to the center, because we live right next to it. I'm going to do my morning runs there. The park is HUGE. Basically that's all I can say for it right now. Just HUGE. Especially for London, because everything here is so squashed together because they hardly have any living room. A bishop came and spoke to us later that week and he told us that the island of Britain can fit into Utah 3 times, but it contains over 62 million people. Utah has around 2 million. So basically the people here live really squashed together, and it's really rare to see so much space. So anyways, we walked through the gardens around 5 PM, but it was already dark. It gets dark so early here! The sun starts setting around 4 PM, which is really annoying when I'd like to go on night runs or go hang out at night. Guess I'll just have to do all my sight-seeing and running during the light hours and save my homework for nighttime.

I was just waiting for him to do a Voldemort impression the whole time

Oh, and the night before we got to see Ralph Fiennes give a lecture on his upcoming movie, "Coriolanus" that he stars in and directed. Basically I was exhausted and had major major jetlag and it was basically 3 AM my time that we went to see him. Throughout the theater I could see people's heads bobbing from our group. We love you Ralph, but if you wanted to keep us awake you should have done your Voldemort impressions and re-enacted scenes from the Harry Potter movies.