Home again!

I'm home safely and happily, if a bit jet-lagged.  I'll do a few end of trip posts in the next couple of days.

Conflict resolution my ass

I think almost all of my five readers have heard about the unbelievable roommate drama I've been dealing with.

For others: it involves a psychic, several drunk 20-something Spanish kids, an alleged drugging, and me having to put the smack down on some bullshit at 5am two nights ago.

Turns out that teaching college for nearly seven years has taught me how not to take shit from self-important 18-24 year olds.  I feel handled the bullshit efficiently and effectively, though with rather a lot of (totally warranted) voice-raising.

Will fill in later, but I think the new roommate is convinced that I will in fact follow through on getting her ass kicked out (I suspect she's unaccustomed to being held accountable for...anything), as last night was perfectly lovely.  She went straight from work to pj's, and everyone was nestled all snug with their laptops by 11pm.

Done as I'm gonna get!

Well, I finished out my time at the Museum today!  I met with two curators and had a marvelous and lengthy cup of tea with the grad student research assistant, with whom I had a lovely chat last week as well.  What are the odds that I would hit it off with the other grad student kicking around there?  But we really did get on well.

My final interviews/meetings were excellent.  I did some last documentation of the gallery and finally made myself leave when I realized I was just rephotographing things I had already done multiple times before.  So I guess I can say I'm done with the research portion of the trip.  It seemed massive, and I have a massive amount of information to process.  But I think I've gathered all the research I'm gonna gather.  I could easily put together a substantial additional trip; I hope at some point I'll get the opportunity to do that.  

What will I do with myself, you might wonder.  Tonight: forage food, assess what size additional bag I'll need to get everything home, and probably go on a short walk (the nearest tube stop was closed today, adding an extra mile and a half or so to the already extensive daily walking routine).  Tomorrow: A museum or two, some shopping, packing, and early to bed.

Home soon!  Yay!

What I've been doing

Well, for the last fifteen minutes, I've been using MS Paint's spray paint can to fuzz away any identifying information and the paint bucket to remove any physical context (terms of use for photos.  It may seem silly but the people it matters to matter to me, so there we are.)

But this is most of what I've been doing for the last two weeks:

I think a couple of boxes were being used when I snuck this pic, so it's not all but it's close.  Yay archival research!

At the end of today I was handed 296 pages of photocopied material, had a shit ton of pictures taken of both the galleries and miscellaneous documents, and an emailed pdf of the detailed layout of the part of the exhibit I'm working on.  These people were amazing.

I have 1.5 interviews on Monday, and I'll be done with I think everything I can do without broadening the scope of my project.  The idea of being "done" with this seems absurd, and I will admit that I did at least three "just in case I missed something!" reviews of most of those boxes, but I have to stop at some point.  I put in many, many hours and most definitely overstayed my welcome at the library.  (All those boxes had to stay out for upwards of two weeks.  My mother and my spouse are both cringing in sympathy for the librarian, since their homes are both like that...except ad infinitum.  Actually, my mother is probably scoffing at the idea that those measly well organized fourteen boxes are something to be concerned about.  She would kill for fourteen well organized boxes!  But they weren't stacked so nicely.  They were more spread out over a couple of sections of table, surrounded with bits of paper.  Trust me--those boxes were annoying.)

Yeah.  So, that's what I've been doing.  Hopefully that helps explain why I've emerged from the museum cross-eyed, dumb, and exhausted every day.  Now I have to spend the weekend getting ready for that last big interview, digging through my 290 pages to make sure I really didn't miss something, etc.

My first foray into serious archival research has been extremely productive.  I can't speak for certain about  success yet, but it was definitely productive.

More on that later.

Another quick(er) update

Just working like crazy at the Museum.  Aside from that, I take long walks, transcribe notes, prepare for next meeting/day of research, write, and attempt to eat dinner.  Most boring awesome international trip ever, guys.  

Quick update

I am tired like a mofo.  Also fighting off a head cold, which would be totally unacceptable at this point.  I got some great work in at the Museum today, met with the director of collections and she is AWESOME in the extreme.  Her name could be Max Power-Curator.  I think we got on splendidly.  I'll find out tomorrow if she likes everybody that much or if I impressed her with my preparation and prowess.  She gave me several boxes to dig through.  I dug for several hours.

Then I came back, had small snacks from the grocery b/w work and the tube stop, and was so hungry I had to succumb to dinner.  I tweeted this:


dinner: vegetable lasanga (=corn, peas) on toast w/ what could only be a slice of spam. Q: what is that? A: "pate? i don't know." *facepalm*


then this:


for the record, i declined the toast and spam, but did choke down HALF a piece of lasagna. #reason85icantwaittogethome


I think that speaks for itself.  At least it was barely edible, as opposed to fundamentally inedible.

Now I am going to bed early and will sleep relatively late.  Because being exhausted, under-nourished, and living in a flophouse is no way to fend off a cold.  I'm tending to the exhaustion now, will tomorrow eat more of the super cheap healthy fast food that is sweeping across the UK, but there's not much to be done about the flophouse (though I plan to pick up some hand sanitizer at first opportunity).  All the same, I WILL NOT GET SICK until I get home.  Look forward to that, spouse.


The research is going great.  Everyone at the Museum is wonderfully supportive, and I found just what I was looking for, and more.  I may spend the rest of my nights going to bed early, which would be unfortunate, but I've done a lot of fun stuff already and if I get sick, it'll kill the last days of research I have, and that's why I'm here.  So I'm NOT GOING TO GET SICK.


That's all.  
x
cat

A pretty fantastic day

Since I was so very tired on Thursday and I didn't have any meetings scheduled at the Museum for Friday, I gave myself a day to recharge.  It turned out to be a pretty fantastic day.

First of all, the weather was marvelous.  Everyone assures me that the weather usually sucks, but when I was in London last summer, it was gorgeous every day until the very end.  So far it's been sunny or brightly overcast more often than rainy.

I slept in, which was a great idea.  I headed off for the Tower of London, which I've heard is worth the insane 15# entry price.  It was.




I'm where the history happened.



Inside the tower, you can get a free tour from a beefeater (aka Yeoman Guard) and mine was especially good.  Also, during the tour, a private tour guide nearby was using a microphone, so our Yeoman asked a nearby Yeoman to "take care of it."  I would hate to have been the d-bag who gets chewed out by a freaking beefeater.  I looked over in time to see the tour guide sheepishly remove his headset.  Ha.





After kicking around the fortress (which the beefeater emphasized was NOT A PRISON but a palace/fortress in which people were often held against their will), I was done with history for the day and made for the primary egress.

I took the Thames side walkway toward the Tate Modern.  My plan was to walk in that basic direction and cross the river at some point.  It was a nice aimless walk.



Note to self: take a different route home after dark.

After a stroll in the gorgeous weather, I found myself at the Tate Modern.


Thanks to a recommendation from a trusted friend, I went specifically to check out the Turbine Hall, which is amazing.  First picture from the bottom up, second from the top down.

I hung out in the room for quite awhile, but eventually, I figured I ought to check out some art as long as I was there.  Not long after, I tweeted the following: "Perhaps i could learn to appreciate modern art if i didn't have to wade through all These goddamned hispters to see it."


This picture is me deciding that today is not the day to learn to appreciate modern art.  So I left.  Yay for free museums! (See how strained and irritated I look?  That's b/c of the hipsters.)   



Wandered along the South Bank until I found this lovely little Italian place.  I had a big plate of mussels in white wine garlic cream sauce.  'Nuff said.



At night, the South Bank is lit with marvelous blue and white xmas lights in the trees.  It is indescribable, and definitely unphotographable.  Of course, I tried anyway.



Walked very slowly along that path, pausing at various benches to appreciate the evening, then crossed back to the north side of the river.  This is me on the bridge.  This camera is a game day player.


That's all.  Friday was pretty much fantastic.

Autumn in London

I'm skipping a few days in the narrative to show how lovely Hyde Park is with the leaves starting to change.  Also, the intervening days are going to be about the Museum, and it will take some effort to make that interesting to non-ubermuseum nerds.  I know most of my readership self-identifies as nerds, but we're talking hard core museum specific nerd, but with history crossover potential.  Will just take a little doing.  [Edited for specificity.]







And...I look like hell.  I know.  I thought the first picture of me looked pretty lousy, so I assumed it was poor angle or something and tried several more.  Nope.  I really look tired as hell today.



So, there's that.  I'm really, really, really, really tired, so I'm going to sleep in and skip the Museum tomorrow. There's nothing to do there that I can't do Saturday or Sunday, and I've put in really intense hours this week.  Brain is full.

Here.  I'll end with some urban pastoral.

Do other people do test runs?

Crappity crap I’m letting the days get away from me!  

Sunday the main event was a test run of using the bus system to get to the places I would need to go on Monday during the tube strike (HostelàCity HallàMuseum).  It went pretty ok.  Well, I cheated on the first part and took the tube to London Bridge and walked to City Hall.  I ate lunch in a little café (Prix Fixe FTW) in a square that I’m sure has a name that was posted somewhere prominent but I just didn’t see it. 

Stepped out of the café toward the river to see this: 






Then this:



This is me having recently seen that:



This is City Hall.  It is modern architecture, in case you were wondering.  I was in there on Monday for a lecture, and the view from the ninth floor is amazing.




After a terrible bout of being lost trying to get to the Museum from City Hall, I found my way, but didn't bother with going in.  It was just a test run, after all.

I cheated and took the tube back to the hostel, on the belief that finding my way back was less crucial b/c I really just had to get to the Museum on time (spoiler, didn't happen, I was late) (double spoiler, it took me two hours to get home on Monday, but that had only a very small bit to do with my failure to test the route).

I needed to go to the grocery store, so I went one tube stop further than usual and got miserably lost trying to find my way back to the hostel.  I was of poor humour about it, but I took this picture before I got lost.  It's a lovely little community, much more diverse and active than the area right around the hostel, even though this is about a ten minute walk away.



That's Sunday.  I'll try to blog about the Museum tomorrow.  I think it's pretty much the only thing I did all week, until today, when I went to a delicious little Lebanese restaurant for dinner, which was interesting.  But more on that another time.

Friday and Saturday or "How I learned to stop worrying and just post the damn thing"

So, trying to get my blog post "just right" is evidently a recipe for just not posting.  So some bits from last week:

On Friday, I started out at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Applied Arts, which turns out to mean “Museum of Stuff and Other Shit People Do.”  It has collections of all kinds of crazy things, including fashion (surprisingly interesting!), ironworking, glass, etc.  Just a couple of highlights:

This next I found really interesting.  Artist's commentary follows.

So, having made it safely to the event, I got my first glimpse at the revamped Museum of London (the raison d'etre of this whole trip).  More on the galleries later (spoiler: they're AWESOME).  

To coincide with the opening of the new galleries, there is, in the lobby, an installation called “London Wall,” in which the digital artists watched a twitter hashtag—I think it was #molwall—and combined the tweets into a representation of a slice of London in a large installation.  I’m going to photograph some more favorites when I return to the Museum, but here are a couple that I thought were great.  They probably weren’t the best, but they are where my amusement and my camera intersected.

"This week your assignment is GAGA."

"Ich bin de makdaddy"

So, following this lovely event, I had yet ANOTHER wacky public transport adventure, but this time I was much more impatient about screwing stuff up.  That said, I am a big fan of taking the bus, if only because you get to see so much of the city.  It’s really a nice way to travel.  This is one bus stop where I spent rather a long time waiting. 

Made it back, passed out.  Fin.

Saturday I had to check out of Hostel 1, kill a little time, then check into Hostel 2.  Here’s the view out of my window from Hostel 1.  Lovely, right?  That said, it was loud and very hostel-y.  Had to pack everything up before leaving, tiny showers, etc, but it was good for what it was. 

To kill time, I thought I’d go check out Portobello Road Market, which is at its most bustling on Saturday mornings.  And bustle it did! 

I got lost trying to find Hostel 2, had packed my backpack poorly on the reasoning that I’d be carrying it only a very short way, so I was super uncomfortable, etc.  Thankfully Chris didn’t mind waking up at a ridiculous hour to guide me with google maps (thanks, honey!), and I got there fine.  Unfortunately, getting lost ate up the extra time I’d allocated for getting to the 2pm talk I wanted to attend, and I missed it.  Boo.

In the interest of actually posting this here blog post instead of endlessly fretting over it, I'll just end with this proof that London was made for me:

"Hi Catherine.  I've been expecting you!"

First couple of days

Upon arriving, I dropped off my luggage at Hostel #1, but I had to kill several hours before I could check in (read: nap), so I walked down the road to the Natural History Museum, which is awesome. 

 

The NHM has a new “Darwin Center” which is pretty much everything a tech-forward museum can and should be.  Really lovely.  Here’s my favorite part of it:

 

 

Pics from today.  I started out in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), but it was too sunny and pretty to spend the day indoors, so I walked up to Hyde Park, where I wandered around for awhile. 

 

After some deliberation, I took the tube out to Temple, which is an old monastery turned lawyer center.  The old monastery is what intrigued me, and the gardens is what compelled me to go today.  It was way more cool than I could have hoped.

It’s a little walled in city down by the river.

 

So I walked up along the Thames as I began the wacky public transport adventure.   

More on that tomorrow.  Am collapsing into bed.