Saturday afternoon I went down to London for a brief weekend getaway. There were two plans for the weekend: see the production of Arcadia on Saturday night, and go salsa dancing on Sunday night. Everything else was incidental.
I got in uneventfully, checked into the hostel relatively uneventfully although there were some problems with the specifics of which bed I was in, and then went out for a shop/wander. My hostel was literally right up the street from the salsa club for Sunday night, so that worked out nicely for me.
I went to Waterstone’s Piccadilly, because it calms me and because I wanted to check prices on a few things and because what else am I going to do at 5:30 on a Saturday night in London? I restrained myself from buying any more books. I can’t buy any more books until I have an income of some kind. Then I bought some food from the Tesco Express at Trafalgar Square and sat on the grass outside the National Gallery and ate and read and people-watched. Trafalgar Square was packed – not only is the plinth project still going on – although I still find it more interesting as a web feed – but there were also some acrobatics/break-dancing/magic performances going on. There were also a few protests – I saw one guy in a Polska shirt making what I assume will be a YouTube video about the political situation in Iran, and there were some Falun Gong supporters handing out leaflets just past St. Martin-in-the-Fields. I felt a little bit guilty brushing them off, but one person can only care about a certain number of causes before exhausting themselves, and I’d rather support someone I actually know.
I wrote about the performance of Arcadia here. Suffice to say, it deserves every good word that it has gotten, and I have a few new actor crushes.
Back at the hostel, I remembered why I don’t look for hostels first when planning weekends like this one. You can’t beat the price, and when all you need is a bed for the night, it’s fine – but everyone is so young: they’re on a gap year, or just spontaneously travelling, and if they’re not a current student then they’re ‘actually a college grad!’ as one girl smugly said. I know I was the same way when I was 20, 21, 22, 23 – and to some extent still am. Doesn’t mean I can’t mock it when I see it.
I tried to sleep in Sunday morning, since I knew I would be staying up incredibly late. I made it to 9 o’clock, which is not really sleeping in when you don’t go to sleep until 1 or 2 am and are planning on staying up until 6. I had seen a poster on the Tube for an exhibit at the Wellcome Collection about ‘Exquisite Bodies’ – mostly anatomical models: it looked interesting, and I’d never been, so I decided to see if I could find it. The Wellcome Collection is near Euston, so it wasn’t a horribly long walk (I was staying near King’s Cross), and I picked up some food at the train station to have for lunch. The museum was fantastic. The special exhibit was indeed full of anatomical models, quite a lot of which featured pregnancy which reinforced my “ADOPTION!!!!” belief. The rest of the museum was also quite interesting – exhibits from Wellcome’s own collection, one case of which made me want to research and write about death rituals across cultures/time periods. Somehow I wasn’t quite as fascinated by the collection of amputation saws and obstetrical forceps. Then there was a section on different aspects of research that they do – I found the genome stuff quite interesting, malaria less so, but that’s just my personal interests and research. Each section – there were four, I think? Human Genome Project, malaria, obesity, and the body/health – had an area of artistic representation (sculpture, painting, writing, etc.) connected to it. There was one print in the genome section called Twenty Three Pairs by an artist called Andrea Duncan, where she represented the 23 human chromosomes as socks, which I thought was very cool, and a poem in that same section called “To John Donne” that I liked a lot as well. (I should do a Poetry Day again….any suggestions?) Anyway, the point is that if you want a different museum to go to in London – not that there’s any lack of them – The Wellcome Collection is very cool and well-done. Interactive parts that aren’t just for children, as well, which is nice…..
Then I ate my lunch in Green Park and tried to decide what to do next. I ended up walking around the shopping areas, including a browse through Carnaby Street and a return to Waterstone’s Piccadilly where I unexpectedly found out what my absolutely least favourite teacher of all time is doing now. At this point it was mid-afternoon, and I still had several hours before I was meeting people for dancing, so I went to the V&A – my original thought was to go to one of the Proms Concert Music series, but I didn’t want to spend more money than I had to and didn’t want to have to deal with a schedule and whatnot. I may come down some other time in the next few weeks specifically to do one of the Proms. So I went to the V&A instead, and admired the plaster casts of the Plantaganet tombs. Fontevrault is so on my list-of-places-to-visit someday.
There’s not a lot else to do on a Sunday afternoon for an hour or so before meeting people, especially when you’re wandering by yourself, so I went back to the hostel and packed up my stuff and put it in a place that I could grab it easily when I came back in the morning (a good thing as it turned out, since due to the aforementioned confusion over beds, when I came back this morning there was someone sleeping in the bed that I would have collapsed on. But as it was 7am already, and my stuff was all ready to go, I didn’t care so much). Then I wandered through the Russell Square area, talked to my sister (and drained my cellphone battery, oops), and reminisced about early visits to London.
Met my fellow dancers with no major problems, and went to a weekly salsa event that, as it turns out, is at the hotel that we stayed at one of the first times we were in London. Danced, danced, danced….then went to find food which is not easy to do at 10:30 on a Sunday night. We ended up getting a takeaway and eating it in the waiting area of King’s Cross. We also did some impromptu salsa and rueda in the waiting area of King’s Cross, to the amusement of the night staff and people waiting for the last trains. Finally – after about two hours of eating, everyone else drinking and trying to find ways to put off going to the big salsa club, we made it to our – well, my – main destination. Where we stayed until 6 am. There was never a point where I wanted a dance and had to go more than a song to be asked to dance. But, then, some of the fun for me at major salsa events is watching everyone else and admiring how good they are. But still – lots of dancing, lots of new people whose names I’m either never going to remember or never knew in the first place (and a very few for whom that is a Good Thing – my creepy-guy-repellent WAS NOT WORKING. Grinding is not salsa. Grabbing my arse is not an appropriate salsa hold. And kissing my ear before you’ve even made eye contact, without saying a word, IS NEVER OKAY. SHUDDER.) But anyway, I got lots of good dances, some with people that I knew and most with people that I didn’t, and the only dark spot (other than the creepy guys) was the total vanishing of the friend that we’d gone there to meet, sometime during the last song. I hate incomplete evenings like that, without even a chance to say goodbye.
The crew of us that had gone together then went to McDonald’s to fortify for the rest of the day – they were all going to Notting Hill Carnival, but I knew that I would just freak out if I went, so I instead caught the first train back to Nottingham (thank goodness for bank holidays and no off-peak restrictions) where I came home, charged my phone, checked facebook, and slept for a whole three hours. I’m surprised I’m not more tired now, actually. I think I may be able to make it to midnight fairly coherently.
And then it’s back to work for me. I only have a week to whip the dissertation into shape, but after the getaway it’s all seeming more manageable.
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