I'd rather be back in Soho - than down here on the farm

It's been about a week since I got back from London and the memories have all begun to slide into one another - did we go to the Tate Modern on Monday with Nicole? Or was it Tuesday? In any event we were there. From the outside it's a pretty ugly building, you'd guess it was a factory before you thought of a museum, but the second you step inside you know that there are some wickedly creative minds at work. You walk into this huge cavernous space - the ceiling has to be a good 150 feet over your head, and the room just stretches back forever. It's foggy and hanging in what looks like the horizon is something that looks like a sunset. It shimmers as you walk down the gently sloping floor towards it and eventually you get close enough to realize that it's just a semicircular yellow disc hanging from the mirrored ceiling creating the illusion of three dimensional space. Pretty wicked.

The rest of the museum was hit (Picasso, Pollack, and a few others) and miss (all completely erased from my memory). Overall it was pretty cool, but I'm still left with the feeling that half of modern art is made by people with genuine ideas and half is absolute crap passed off by hucksters. After the Tate we grabbed a pub lunch and Jason and I rode the London Eye which is a basically an enormous ferris wheel on the Thames right across from Big Ben. They load about twenty people to a car and it takes about a half hour or so to get to the top and back again. The view from the top is breathtaking, we went at sunset, but it was too overcast to really get a good look at the sun. Still, amazing.

Tuesday we went to the Imperial War Museum which was cool, but depressing (sidenote: if you ever go avoid the Elephant & Castle tube station - it's a nightmare). The museum is dedicated mostly to the two World Wars and they've got lots of cool weaponry and artifacts, but the World War I stuff (which exhaustively details life in the trenches) is just so depressing. I guess it's a testment to the power of the exhibits. One cool note: they had the clothes worn by Lawrence of Arabia. The movie is Jason's favorite and he got so excited I thought he might cream his pants. He didn't.

Tuesday evening found us at at a movie theater with Jason's TV friends to Watch Matrix Revolutions which incredibly made me nostalgic for the tepid second movie which at least had good fight scenes. Afterwards Chris and Nicole met us and we got good and sloshed. A good time was had by all but Nicole who went home with a Toothache.

My timeline is all screwed up because somehow I neglected to mention going out for Indian food one night, or as they said it there "having a curry." Anyway we did have Indian one night and it was really good and only made better by the fact that the maitre'd (surely misspelled) offered us a round of after dinner drinks on the house. Good stuff. Then it was out to a pub for more drinking that night, whichever night it was capped off as usual by about an hour or so of Ali G when we got back to the flat.

Overall it was an incredible trip. Sorry for the disjointed rememberances, but between going to Laura and Rob's wedding and being sick as a dog I haven't had much time to post. Hopefully, I'll have a post on the wedding tomorrow as it was quite excellent and yielded some good stories.