July 8 – London, England. Today I am up early, funny how your definition of early changes with time. Sleeping in until 7am would have been a luxury when I was working, now it's early. By 7:30am I am at the laundry turning in our clothes for a real cleaning, not just sink dunking. I am also heading to Victoria Station to pick up our tickets to Oxford tomorrow. I found a great web site for British trains. You make the reservation online, including your reserved seat selection, and then pick the tickets up at an automated machine in a station. Since I know Diana won't be ready for breakfast until about 9:30 I've got time to kill and I like to get started or I don't feel like doing anything. The walk should have been about 15 minutes from the hotel but they have a huge construction site with pedestrian detours between the hotel and the station so it took about 30. Because of the construction fences It was impossible to see the station as you went through it and I made several wrong turns, uncommon for me, on the way.
It's rush hour so the station is really busy with people coming out. The congestion was made worse by the fact that the construction has some of the exits blocked and the people that usually used them had to divert to other already busy exits. I had to work my way inside like a salmon swimming upstream.
Once inside it was easy to find the machines, they are almost always located near the main ticket counter or the information kiosk. All you do is select 'I want to pick up a purchased ticket', the machine prompts you to put in the credit card you used to pay for the tickets, then it prompts you for the reservation pick-up code the web site gave you (and emailed a copy to you too). It then displays your reservation and if it's correct you select 'Print' and out come your tickets and a receipt. Tickets here are about credit card size but much thinner. When you want to get on the train there are turnstiles as the platform entrances that you put the ticket in, it reads it and pops it out a slot in the top on the reader. You pull it out and that opens the gate. You're in!
Having completed my mission I decided to go out of the station on the far side from the hotel in the hope that I could avoid the construction on the hotel side. It worked!! Even though I walked much further, the trip only took 20 minutes. The trip was valuable for a couple of reasons, the main one being the tickets but the secondary one was that I found the place to buy tickets to the HoHo bus for London and it's very close to the hotel just across the street from the entrance to the Royal Mews.
So it was back to the hotel and up to the room where I found Diana almost ready for breakfast. Soon we were in the restaurant and I was a happy man.
After enjoying both the egg and sandwich course I almost always eat when traveling we headed back to the HoHo bus stop and hopped on the bus. We rode around Hyde Park, past the Marble Arch, over to Green Park and hopped off the bus at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a three story, red brick Renaissance style building that houses a very nice collection of art and decorative arts objects from around the world.
It's free to enter but the special exhibits require a ticket. They had a special exhibit on the relationship between England and Russia during the time of Peter the Great and since we've recently heard the Russian side of that story we thought it would be nice to see how the English perceived it. No pictures inside the special exhibits. Let me sum it up by saying that the stories were about a close as you can get from two sides to an event. Peter came to England to learn how to build ships and went home and created the Russian blue water navy so the trip was a success. Trade agreements had been in effect long before this time and it was interesting to see how things progressed.
After we had viewed this exhibit we started to take a look at the permanent collection. Right next to the Russian exhibit was a hall of religious statuary. The very first piece was the most interesting. Called 'The Lamentation over the Dead Christ' made in Florence in about 1510. It shows Jesus on the ground, his head and shoulders supported by the disciple John, Mary caressing his head and Mary Magdalene at his feet with her hand on her chest expressing sorrow. The statues are about half of life size. It was made in the workshop of Andrea della Robbia of the Terra cotta wreath with fruit fame.
Pieces this large were very difficult to make to it was probably produced as an object of adoration for a chapel in the Tuscany area or around Bologna. Terra cotta was very popular in those regions. Each of the figures was made separately and then joined to the base when completed. The manufacture of the figures of Mary, John and Jesus apparently went smoothly but Mary Magdalene cracked on the first (biscuit) firing. She was repaired but that made it impossible to fire her the second time to secure the glaze coat so she was painted. This is obvious when you look at the group because all the others are still vividly colored while Mary Magdalene is almost the natural color of terra cotta. A testament to the durability of fire glazed pottery.
I'm afraid we jumped around the museum a bit so things we saw were not in their proper order. There was absolutely gorgeous furniture and household objects. Vases, statues, carvings, tableware, cabinets, tables, chairs and all sorts of household goods but executed with extraordinary style and design. It was a nice visit.
We went back out to the HoHo bus stop and boarded to finish the rest of the loop around London. I always love to drive by Trafalgar Square with its tall monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson and Parliament Square is gorgeous with the sun low in the sky. The Parliament building has a golden glow at that time of day. Really nice.
When we got to the Royal Mews stop we got off the bus and walked the two blocks to our hotel. Have to pack tonight to get ready to leave for Oxford.
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