My Artsy Day

Hello all! I had a great day today. I woke up this morning and did a bit of homework. A few of us (Chelsey, Kinsey, Amanda, Jordan, and I) then went to the Mamma Mia theatre to see if we could get tickets. The man was helpful and we have decided to go see the show a week from tonight. I am SO excited!! Next, we went to the Phantom theatre and I bought tickets to see Phantom of the Opera for when Katherine comes. Yay! After that, four of us went to STA travel to ask a little about Paris and things. I'm a bit stressed trying to plan our trip to Paris, but eventually everything will be ok. The lady at STA was extremely helpful, though, and we were all glad we talked to her. After STA, we walked to Trafalgar Square to eat the lunches we had packed for ourselves. It was a gorgeous day and it was nice to eat outside. After that, we had plenty of time before we had to be at art class, so we decided to walk down to see Big Ben and then walk along the Thames River. It was so nice! Big Ben was incredible and it was fun to see the London Eye and all the fun things along the river. I saw this sphinx statue that had been slightly damaged by bombs from WWI. There were indents and things where shrapnel had hit it. It was really cool. We walked down the river all the way to Millennium Bridge, where we crossed to get to Tate Modern (an art gallery).

Our art class today was held at Tate Modern. We talked about contemporary art and saw all sorts of crazy, fun things. My favorite was this exhibition of photographs of a tavern. The tavern was real but the artist had reconstructed some of the rooms entirely out of paper. Then, he photographed the rooms. They looked so realistic! It was awesome. Some of the pieces we saw in the gallery were absolutely ridiculous, in my opinion. On a whole, though, I thought the Tate Modern had a great collection of artwork and I'm so glad we went there.

After art, Kinsey, Amanda, Jordan, and I got dinner at a place called Pizza Express. It was reminiscent of California Pizza Kitchen, but a bit more Italian. It was so good! We had a very smiley waiter who didn't speak much English. We all treated ourselves to gelato for dessert. It was delicious and it was fun eating in a restaurant looking out on the Thames.

After dinner, we had to hurry to play #2 of the week, Over There. It was a shorter play about two twins reunited after the Berlin Wall came down. Our teacher warned us that the director liked to shock his audiences and there were many surprises. It was definitely an interesting show. I thought it was extremely creative and the messages were good. It wasn't at all what I expected, though.

We headed back on the tube after the show and got off at Paddington. We walked from that station to our flats. It was a nice little walk because the night wasn't too cold and there was some funky laser light show out in the distance. Very fun! Now, I just finished making some hot chocolate and I'm going to start my mountains of school work (ew). Wish me luck!