LONDON (II)

After leaving the suitcases in a room, we started the London tour! The first day, we moved on foot around the city, and the first stop was the British Museum, which wasn’t very far from the hotel. It was a very interesting place, with objects from many cultures and civilizations like Egypt or the Roman Empire, with mummies, jewels, sculptures, mosaics and so forth. It was easy to get lost there because there were many rooms and some floors. Especially I liked the Egyptian collection, with big sculptures and objects like sarcophagus (At first, we saw one and we didn’t know if it was a sarcophagus or a bathtub because it didn’t have a lid and there were some holes in the bottom but, after reading the description of the object, we knew that it was a sarcophagus). We also found the busts of some philosophers in one of the rooms (the perfect place to take a photo near Socrates). One of the things I want to mention is that, in the museum, there are cards to explain each piece, but it’s also full of cards which say “don’t touch the objects”. The problem is that, when you want to find the first ones, you always see the others, because their print is bigger. That was quite annoying.

After visiting the British Museum, we went to the Trafalgar Square, near the National Art gallery. I spent most of the way counting Chinese or oriental people and I don’t remember it very well, but I think we counted more than 50 in less than five minutes. After that I knew that we had walked near the Chinese District. It was lunch time and the teachers gave us free time to eat and to visit the city until the afternoon.

There were some pubs in that zone and, after that, we had the choice to go to Covent Garden or other nearby places. I didn’t want to leave London without having eaten “fish and chips”, but the first day I didn’t taste that but I discovered the “jacket potatoes”: it’s a big potato with other ingredients that you can choose. We were four people and all of us chose the same: jacket potato with tuna and cheese. It was delicious and we got full, but there was a bit of space for dessert. The girl who attended us said that they didn’t have a typical dessert from London because everything is very international. I chose a good cake. After eating, we asked to the waitress whether she could help us with some of the questions of a “quiz” we had to do for school. She said some answers but they didn’t fit the answers that our teachers expected (this fact happened to us many times...). For example, she said that Londoners celebrate the welcoming of the New Year in front of the London Eye, not near the Big Ben.

We had some time and we went to Covent Garden. It wasn’t so far from the restaurant and maybe it was the first time we had to get our bearings in London. I had brought a map of the city (The map was more than fifteen years old but the main streets hadn’t changed, the monuments were in the same place and the underground stations were in the same places.) and we used it to know the routes we could take. It was nice to walk through the streets, to look at the houses or the cars (I was thunderstruck when I saw two Porsche in the same street). I realized that we were in Covent Garden because of the atmosphere, the people. It’s difficult to explain, but that place has got something that I had never seen anywhere. There was a man with a t-shirt printed with “I’m a show boy” who was singing and livening up people that were having a coffee or going down to there. Further on there was a big skillet where a good meal was being cooked. There were also many shops. We went for a walk and we returned to Trafalgar Square.

While we were waiting the others to enter into the National Gallery, I could observe the atmosphere in the Trafalgar Square. It was full of people, maybe because it was Saturday, and there was a great mixture of tourists and Londoners lying around the big fountain, on the stairs or on the grass near the Gallery. But not everybody was having a rest: there was a woman holding a microphone which was connected to some powerful loudspeakers and her voice could be heard from each place of the square. As I could understand, she talked about behaviour, about God and many other things; she was expressing her ideas and trying to convince people, to change their thought. I don’t know if it’s typical or it only happened that Saturday, but it was very curious. Near the National Gallery, there were some groups of artists painting on the floor with chalks. But it didn’t seem like an act of vandalism but a very original kind of street art. The first one had just started when we arrived and he had only drawn some lines (but he had had time to write some unpleasant sentences to the photographers who weren’t going to give him a reward in exchange for a snapshot). Beyond him, there were two men drawing a great picture of a dog, a guard of the Buckingham Palace and a bird which was being started. And behind them there was an old man who wasn’t doing a picture but he was writing a text. He had painted the letters of the words with one different colour per letter. I couldn’t know the end of the text because he hadn’t finished it when I went to the Gallery.

The National Gallery is very famous, there are many important works of art inside of this museum and, very important, the entrance is free! (Like in most of the museums we visited in London). I have to admit that I’m not an expert on art and this Gallery wasn’t the most exciting place I’ve ever visited. Maybe those paintings were very important but, in my opinion, most of the paintings we saw dealt with God and were very dull. We had to find some pictures for the quiz and we could find them thanks to the high kindness of the watchmen in the rooms. But when I thought I was going to leave the museum without having seen anything interesting we saw the teacher and some of us followed her (the sofas of the museum were really uncomfortable). One of the pictures we hadn’t seen was “The sunflowers”, by Vincent van Gogh. I learned that he painted some famous pictures called like that, but that wasn’t the best one. Then, we went to a very different room. The paintings were smaller than in other rooms, the topic wasn’t related with Christianity and most of the authors weren’t very famous, but that has been my favourite room. I learned what in Spanish is called “puntillismo”, which consists of making a picture without lines, only with small dots; thousands of dots which must be watched a bit far from the wall to see picture. I fell in love with one of the pictures: It was very small, the colours were bluish and I could see a cold winter morning near a river, with a London at the backside. The visit had been worth the effort.

After leaving the Gallery, a man had replaced the woman of the microphone and I could hear the word “God” a few more times. Some floor painters had finished their works and the most unpleasant of them had added some messages to those who wanted to take a photo of his painting (which, in my opinion, wasn’t the best one) like “if you want to take photos but you don’t want to pay, I ask you to go to another planet”.

It was time to return to the hotel all together. Night was falling and we travelled across the illuminated streets. The hotel was quite far, but finally we could find it. I was starting to join the pieces and to place myself into the city, but I was still very lost. Once inside the hotel, we picked up our suitcases from the room were we had left them and we went to reception to wait for the keys of our rooms. We had to sign some documents and we received two cards per room (one card per room) which were the keys. Then, we went to the lift in order to find our room. The hotel had more than seven floors and we were in the number six.

The room was the number 630 and it was quite welcoming. There was a small bathroom (Even though, it was bigger than the bathroom of the hotel where we stayed when we went to Italy in 4th of ESO, where the shower was nearly on the toilet). There was also a small wardrobe in the corridor and, after that, there was the room. It had two beds with a bedside table (which contained a hardback edition of the Bible), a TV, a phone, two paintings stuck into the wall (there are many thieves at large), a radiator and a window. Some rooms had got other things like armchairs or a thing to iron the clothes, but it wasn’t our case. Moreover, there was a tray, with two glasses, tea, coffee, milk and a machine to heat that, but we didn’t use it. In the room and everywhere, indoors, the temperature was very high. That was unbearable and we had to open the window, in the depths of winter.

We had time to have a shower and to watch the TV after going to eat. We watched a program called “The Colour of Money”. It is a game show where there are some “machines”, each one with a colour and an unknown amount of money. The contestant must choose a colour (a machine), which starts counting from 0, and he must say “stop” before the machine exceeds the money that contains if he doesn’t want to lose. After ten machines, he must have won more than a sum of money if he wants to get it. It was quite good, a bit stressful. We saw two contestants: the first one won a lot of money but the second one returned home empty-handed.

The supper was good, very varied. In London, most of the dishes were cooked using butter instead of oil, which gives a different taste to food, and you can like it or you can hate it. Personally, I think that wasn’t bad. Luckily, there was some bread, butter and ketchup to fill up the stomach if you didn’t like anything.

We met in the hall, where there were some sofas, and we decided not to go anywhere that night because most of people were very tired. Then, we stayed into the hotel, waiting for the following day.