England: Day III (London)

Wednesday, July 13^th:

Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery:

            Today we got to see some really cool art at the National Gallery of London. We woke up (late, again) and grabbed some lunch at a little cafeteria near our local train station, Edgemore Road. We rode the tube over to Trafalgar Square where we got to see the countdown clock to the London 2012 Summer Olympics, as well as check out the National Gallery. The National Gallery contains art inside it from the 13^th until 21^st century. Nearly all of it is paintings or Altar-work from the gothic times. A lot of the early stuff is mostly Christian art, depicting scenes of Jesus and Mary, and the stories of the bible and the Christian saints. It is not very big on Renaissance or Baroque art like some of the Italian art galleries we hope to see on this trip, but it does have a few works from famous names such as Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Raphael. It also contains a great collection of modern art, including lots of works by pointillist artists, Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Manet, and Gauguin. I particularly enjoyed this section, but the whole museum was impressive, and it took us over four hours to walk through!

Charing Cross:

            We left the National Gallery starving, and found a nearby Italian restaurant to feed the craving of Italian food that Max had. I had some tasty truffle oil risotto and we headed back home to take a nap—that museum really took a ton out of us, as it was a lot of standing and walking. I never really slept, but got in some good rest and spent a lot of time uploading some of my photos to my computer and to the internet. We grabbed dinner at a local Turkish Kebab place before heading to Piccadilly Circus and to Oneill’s again (the only late-night, no-cover place we found). We hung out there for a while before getting fed up with the scene. We walked around back towards the tube station before a guy tried to persuade us to pay ten pounds each to go into his club. We saw that it looked fun, haggled him to five pounds each, and went into Bar Rumba for the rest of the night. We laughed at the crowd in there as well as the four-foot martini party-drinks they served, but we had a good time and didn’t make it home until around 3am again.

A Lion Statue in Trafalgar Square: