The Tube

You have no idea how amazing the Tube system is. The Tube (The London Underground Subway) simply works. Growing up in suburbs of Chicago and going to school in Peoria really didnt require me to use public transportation often. Once in a while I hop on the Metra to Chicago, and take the “El” when I’m in the loop, but it’s not really a fantastic experience more so than a necessity.

The Tube is remarkably accessible in London – the heart of London has a stop in almost every major location. Attractions, monuments, and museums are never more than a few minutes walk from a particular station. It is impossible to feel lost in this major city, since there are signs everywhere. A sign tells you where the nearest Tube station is. A sign tells you what train you need to take and how to transfer there. A sign reminds you where attractions are when you get out of the Tube. It’s so easy getting around London – which is great, since there is so much to do. I would rather my time be well spent at a museum rather than figure out how to get there.

Hopping on the Tube is a breeze – our Oyster cards allow us to merely press it on a scanner to let us into the station. We do not even have to take it out of the protective Ikea vinyl casing. The Oyster cards are good for a week at a time, and cover stops in the Underground Zones 1 and 2 - the most major parts of London.

Right before you get on and off the train, an electronic woman’s voice reminds you to “Mind the Gap” – a national catchphrase often appearing on souvenirs from boxers to shot glasses. (That just means to watch your step). Trains are clean and comfortable, and different lines have various styled cars. All of them have nice seats and railings for standing passengers to hold on to. Maps of the line and its stops along with an overview of the entire Tube layout are posted several times throughout the cars. A scrolling LED alerts passengers what stop is next along with a vocal announcement. The Russel Square station (the one closest to our hotel) looks suspiciously like the tunnel from one of the Matrix movies…

The Lion King Musical

Like everyone else from my generation, I have quite the soft spot for Disney. My favorites are Aladdin and the Lion King – so naturally I had no objections to seeing the Broadway Musical (in London) of Lion King.

The play itself was pretty damn good. It stuck with most of the same dialogue and songs, but added a few new things. The play did a good job of putting in the best parts, while memories of the animated movie supplemented their performances.

Though I wanted to be surprised, I couldn’t help flipping through the deluxe program with big pictures of all the cool costumes. They were elaborate and highly stylized for each character – which was awesome. There was also a mixture of African art and Eastern Chinese art. Some characters had vaguely Samurai-esque costumes, and Mufassa had a pair of Shaolin(sp?) curvey swords. The actor was not nearly as powerful as James Earl Jones, but Jones is busy acting in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Pumbaa had a full-body suit that turned the actor into the warthog, and Timon’s actor was painted green to let his life-sized Timon-puppet take the focus. He wasn’t quite as great as Nathan Lane, but he did okay. Adult Simba had a strange accent that sometimes took away from the scenes of dialogue.

Zazuu was the best at vocally mimicking the cartoon counterpart, but was the strangest to watch. The actor was dressed up and had makeup and a bowler hat, but he also had a lively puppet which he controlled and sometimes put on his head. At one point, the puppet gets separated from the actor, and he says “where’s my bird?” so what the heck is that about? Is the bird the character? Is the actor the character? I thought they both together were! He broke the fourth wall (or in theater terms, the fourth curtain) and addressed the audience once in a while.

I thought the coolest costume was the giraffes, because the actors walked around on stilts. There were those annoying bird’s on sticks flying around once in a while, but there were enough impressive costumes to make up fir them. It was a million times better than War Horse, that’s for sure.

Yo! Sushi

After writing an essay for the greater part of the day, I was getting a little stir-crazy. For dinner I decided to go to YO! Sushi down the street, since I estimated that Jesse wouldn’t quite be up for that. He was at Stone Henge anyway, so I took off to the Bismark Centre, which was like an outdoor mall, or four mini-malls arranged in a square around a courtyard.

YO! Sushi requires some explanation. Upon entering, I was greeted and shown to a seat where everything was explained. In the middle of the room, chefs/preparers placed color-coded dishes onto a conveyer belt. On the other side of the conveyer belt were the seated customers who would grab dishes as they passed by. Five colors corresponded to different prices ranging from 1.70 to 6.00 pounds.

Each seat had every amenity you could really want at a sushi place. There were napkins, soy sauce, and wasabi along with a jar of shredded ginger. There were plenty of chopsticks and most impressively, both a distilled and sparkling water tap right at the seat.

I was handed a menu, since the color-coded bowls were unmarked, it was impossible to know what exactly kind of sushi was on each one. As the pieces fly past you, you remember what it kind of looked like along with the color bowl, and flip through the menu hoping the picture looks like the conveyer belt counterpart.

The first one I grabbed looked like a good one to me – two large rolls of sushi. I looked them up after snatching it up to find out what it was before eating it - some chicken thing. Then I began to study the menu to pick what I wanted to eat next. I grabbed the octopus – It was real good. Soft and chewy (obviously) but it was almost refreshing. Not at all fishy. I got some of the tamago-sushi – a yolk-based topping on rice, and a special shredded duck roll (I cannot get enough duck!) For desert, I ate a custard-filled Japanese pancake with raspberry dipping sauce.

The meal was fantastic and fun to pick and eat, but it wound up being very expensive. It’s not too filling, but perhaps because it was my first time I didn’t know which foods to get to maximize my meal. They also charged for that water spigot at each seat, which seemed odd to me…

The Staple

Though I am not the protagonist of this story, (Jesse is) I was there with him at the time that this tale took place. With his permission, I have taken the liberty of recounting his experience from his own eyes. Therefore, the narrator from this point forward refer to Jesse.

There was nowhere else to eat on a Sunday night besides more tourist-friendly chains since traditional British pubs were closed early. Khalil and I walked by Ultimate Burger once already that night, but ignored it since we ate there on our first night in England. Khalil insisted on trying new things, but all I really wanted was another good bacon cheeseburger, so I convinced him to try Ultimate Burger again (since it was a sure thing. I reminded him of the large menu and with little resistance, he caved in. It was nice to eat at a more familiar and American-like as to the dark and foreign pubs.

I stuck with the old favorite – a bacon cheeseburger – despite the wide selection of sandwiches ranging from intricately topped beef burgers to no-less than three kinds of lamb burgers. Khalil got onion rings and a peanut-satay burger. Good thing Kim wasn’t around – I like my girlfriend and everything, but she just cant handle the peanuts well…

The meal was eaten in our typical way – we ate, talked, but I did deviate from my usual beverage of the free distilled tap water and ordered a Sprite. I was almost done with my burger, about two bites worth away, and I stopped chewing. Khalil was droning on and on about God knows what (probably art) and I instantly tuned him out and focused inward, concentrating on the bite in my mouth.

Something was wrong. There was a different feeling in my mouth from the previous bites. I felt a slight pinch, something hard amidst the ground beef and cheddar cheese and English bacon (trust me, its not like American bacon). Was that pinching sensation a fluke? I explored my mouth and felt it again. I began to isolate and separate what seemed to be the problem from the rest of my food. I felt my eyes glaze over and was vaguely aware that Khalil stopped talking and was probably watching me, watiging for an explanation for my detached stare. Careful not to swallow anything, I reached inside my mouth to pull out a surprisingly long, thin piece of what looked like metal. I looked around for anything that could have broken off into my food but found nothing.

Khalil was staring with a look of growing concern as If he were imagining the possible journey the mystery metal could have taken. We both lightened up after a while – because I had caught it in time and was perfectly fine. We decided that it was a metal staple from the slightly bent middle and pinched endpoint. The waitress eventually came over to ask how our food was, and I had to respond. I simply informed her of my stapled-food and she said I wouldn’t have to pay for my burger as she walked away. In her absense, I asked Khalil if that meant I still had to pay for my Sprite – and he said probably not, since there were no staples in there.

We began our scenario game, trying to figure out exactly what happened for this staple to find its way into my mouth. Maybe the chef kept his office supplies close to the grill and was flamboyantly flipping his burgers when he knocked the jar of loose staples into the meat. Maybe the chef was seasoning the burgers and has a salt shaker, pepper shaker, and then a staple shaker. Maybe he wasn’t a real chef at all- and maybe he was just some guy who cooks on a George Foreman grill at his desk job.

Oh well. I figure I’m okay now, and since then I have had several staple-free meals.

The British Science Museum

I can’t remember the last time I went to the museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, but it cannot be half as grand as London’s. London’s British Science Museum is comprised of several themes such as space, energy, and mathematics. Every exhibit could exist as a stand-alone museum somewhere else; they are that massive. I don’t even like boats or nautical things, but was impressed by the sheer number of display models.

The best exhibit however was on the top floor almost hidden away in a seemingly boring section having to do with the history of audio, telephones, and radio communication. It was called the Listening Post. The award-winning display is in a darkened corner of the theme, and intrigued Jesse and I. At one end of the room, hundreds of small 3x6in LED panels displayed green text. Ambient music was playing in the background. Jesse and I initially skipped the explanation panel, so we went back to the room entrance to find out what was going on.

The LED panels display text typed out by people in various chat rooms in real-time. The display initially starts with an opener, such as “I Am” or “I Love”. As people type something that starts with the opener, such as “I Am 17” it is displayed and read aloud by the robotic voice. If a second response appears, it is read in a different tone, so that the voices begin to harmonize with each other. Because of the nature of chat rooms, the exhibit is never the same thing twice. Some responses are very bland and normal, and a good 40% of them are sexually explicit in some way. It is really something to see the spirit of the age (zeitgeist) display itself in such a multimedia fashion.

At some points, it is overwhelming – responses layer on top of each other for information overload. At other times it is calm enough to let each part speak for itself in a sobering way. The robotic voice is emotionless, and reads responses in the same tone from “thinking about killing myself, need advices,” to “any straight h0rny guys here wanna get sucked? discreet guy here”. It’s hilarious, sad, informative, and genius. I could probably sit for quite some time watching. There is always the possibility that it uses Omegle for its database…in that case I’m sure it has seen plenty of strange things from yours truly and friends. There was displayed at one point, a bunch of usernames – one of them jwagner. I don’t think we have to worry until we see King Jesse on the board.

The Tate Modern

The Tate Modern is yet another free museum in London, but focuses on what would appear to be the antithesis of what you would think of as one of the most historical cities in the world. I like some modern art – I really do. I like the interactivity between a contemporary piece and the viewer where you really have to figure out what you are supposed to be looking at. I like taking simple, well-known objects and looking at them from a different viewpoint. I like patterns arising from repetitions of strange objects. I like some pieces where you actually have to do a double take after you see the picture, then look at the title, and then look back at the picture to make some sense of it. That’s the good kind of interactivity.

The Tate Modern art museum has some pieces like that. But my kind of modern art (really the only kind I can tolerate) seemed very few and far between. In rooms with dozens of pieces, I found myself only appreciating and accepting one or two. The museum has an uncomfortable layout, seeming as if it is a giant airplane hanger or warehouse with paint on the walls. Rooms have themes I guess, but they simply lump one or two artists’ pieces together. Many pieces follow a similar style – some guy took a bus and dozens of sleds equipped with his idea of survival kits and shipped them all to an art gallery. One guy took a big uprooted palm tree, painted it a dusty bronze, and laid it on the ground of the art gallery. One guy threaded a few hundred bars of soap on a string and hung it up in an art gallery. Another guy took a mirror and stuck it on a canvas and hung it in an art gallery. Does this mean if it is in an art gallery, it’s art? I don’t’ really think so.

There were of course, some Picassos, A Monet, Pollacks, but those did not stick out as much as the performance videos they had throughout the museum. There were casual warnings that there was explicit material that ‘may not be suitable’ for children written on the walls, but that of course could mean anything. In this case it meant nudity, blood, self-mutilation, writhing, and other bodily functions. I just flat out didn’t care. It wasn’t really the fact that it was a little sickening; it was the fact that these ‘artists’ got even the least bit famous. I don’t think it is artistically ignorant or uncultured to get sick of seeing twenty or so pieces utilizing this stuff.

I still had a blast looking at the pieces and making of them with Jesse – but that’s not really due to the art museum itself; we just know how to have a good time. It’s a good thing London has plenty of other museums to remind tourists that it is still a culturally and artistically rich places in the world. It’s still definitely worth checking out – just don’t go expecting real art, and go with an intention to have fun anyway.