Vikings and Lichens

While my office mates are scattering south in search of beaches and tans, I’m headed north for some freakin’ midnight sun and glaciers.

Norway is, in a word, intense.  Take a ferry through a fjord and count how many times you say, “wow”.  The water is literally green – something to do with how the sediment reflects light.  Lines of silver-white waterfalls tumbling down the cliffs, shorelines speckled with red-roofed cottages, and glaciers, people.  GLACIERS.

It’s MAGICAL.

Don’t even get me started on the Viking Museum in Oslo.  The ships are legit – curly ends and everything.  The ships were found buried in mounds, the tombs of elite Viking people.  That the graves were unearthed and (ahem) raided to create the museum was a bit of irony.

At this time of year, you can wander around fjords and gather lichen well past 10:00 pm, bathed in the glow of the Nordic sun.  It was something I never got used to, falling asleep in lingering light, only to have the sun rise again around 3:00 am!

So, lichen.  It’s what grows in the wild tundra of Norway’s exquisite mountains, above the tree line.  You might just spot a glacier while you’re up there, gathering your lichen.

Why lichen, you might ask?  Well, to make Lichen Bread, of course.

Pot full ‘o wild lichen

Wholewheat flour, lichens, loads of milk, cultured milk, oatmeal, water and salt. Some magic happens, then it’s cooked for a couple hours. It’s the thickest, hardiest bread I’ve ever eaten.

He was there all the while

On a rare day of sunshine, I drop by the British Museum to visit my old friend, The Rosetta Stone.  I take a moment to absorb what mysterious vibrations could escape the thick glass enclosure from the ancient stone tablet of wonder.  A loud, squeaky tour guide makes her way to the stone, drowning out the vibrations with her squeaky tour guide facts.  I stand for as long as I dare, then plunge into the crowd huddling furiously around the glass, sprinkling “sorry’s” as I elbow-jab through.

Now wandering, I find myself drawn with a strange gravity toward the Africa room.  All of the sudden, he is there.

Hoa Hokananai’a.

His hollow stone eyes meet mine.  He is glorious.  I approach with reverence, oblivious to the other mortals buzzing around me, transfixed in his hollow stare.

His shoulders are slightly tilted, arms akimbo, hands tucked in as if in stone pockets, giving him an air of casual grandeur.  Carvings of loopy things, tattoos of the birdman cult are all up and down his back.

He is an Easter Island man.  I’ve recently read a book about catastrophic ends – Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive which featured the Easter Island statues.  I can’t believe there’s one here in London!

I rush home to look up when the British Museum acquired my new friend.  Apparently, it was many years ago.

He has been there all the while.

I wasn’t looking for Hoa Hokananai’a before, but after reading about him, he found me.

He is my hidden friend.

p.s. Dear readers, I apologise for not posting last week; I was on holiday in the Highlands with scanty internet.  I’ll throw in a couple bonus posts this week to make up for it :).   With love,  G

year of the snake

It’s Sunday, 10:00am, 3 degrees with a persistent, grey drizzle splattering the winter-weary ground.  Dude, let’s go to Leicester Square and watch a parade!

The Chinese New Year parade is bound to be amazing, right?  This is freaking LONDON, and they have their own China Town, so I’m expecting Incredible Sights here.

Ha!  Look, a snake!  It’s the Year of the Snake, that’s awesome.

Snake parading down Charing Cross road

What’s this?  A bus with some nicely-dressed people in it.  Hm.  Ok.

Oh, cool, martial artists!  No, wait.  Those are fencers.

Um…

This is making less sense as the parade progresses.

Oddly reminiscent of the Olympics Opening Ceremonies…

I’m pretty sure none of this is Chinese related.

Dude, Morris dancers?  Are you kidding me, London?

See those badge-thingys on their backs? They also had them on their nipples. Dancing to an accordion.

We try for the ‘fireworks’ at Trafalgar Square.  Dodging umbrella jabs to the eye, weaving through the hoards of people, we’re rewarded with a couple minor spurts of fireworks and some British announcers making lame jokes about speaking Mandarin.  Some stuff probably happened on stage.  But at 5’2″, I can’t see any of it.

Trafalgar Square

We go for Dim Sum at the New World.   A dragon appears outside the door as we go to leave, accompanied by drummers wearing tee-shirts that read ‘Shaolin Fist’.  This is all second-hand knowledge.  All I see are backs and bums.

“I ordered that dim sum 15 minutes ago. You bring it here or it’s a cabbage in the face!”

“What’s happening out there?”

“The dragon is throwing cabbage at the people.”  A tall man informs me.

“Why would the dragon do that?”

“It’s lucky.  Cabbage is for luck.”  Tall Man shrugs.

Once, in Camberwell, someone threw a lemon at me.  It missed, fortunately.  “I don’t think I’d like to be pelted with cabbage.  That doesn’t sound lucky to me.”

Tall Man makes a non-committal noise.

The dragon moves on, we jostle through the crowd, under the red paper lanterns, brolly-fighting as we go.  We pass a store with cabbage hanging from the doorway.

Tall Man spoke true, I think.

I keep my eye out for dragons.

Inappropriate Shoes

January….that dark void of London winter.  I’ve taken to the usual hibernation habits — social withdraw, sleeping in to the last possible second on workdays, 14 cups of tea daily, marathon reading sessions of Tudor era mysteries in my pj’s.   I know it’s unhealthy, all these carbs and lounging, letting my brain rust.  So I let Sal talk me into adventuring to Canary Warf for the London Ice Sculpting Festival, to get the blood stirring again.

Five minutes out of the tube station and we’re nearly blown over by wind from the river.  Teeth chattering, we lean in, weaving through the crowds and snapping photos of some amazing ice sculptures.

Ten minutes in and I literally cannot feel my toes.  Sal’s forgotten his gloves.  Maybe we will freeze here, at the Ice Festival.

I look down at my Converse.  They are about a million years old and the tread is nearly gone.  What was I thinking?   I chide myself, miffed at my inappropriate footwear.  I live here!  I know  better!!

I look up to see a woman in a knee-length dress, high heels digging into the soggy mess of grass as she passes.  Nonchalantly, casually.

I look around- some people aren’t even wearing scarves, some with light jackets, chattering away happily, pointing at the ice art.  Totally oblivious to the bone-chilling cold, the breath-stealing wind.  Having a great time.

England!

Ice princess on stilts!
*Photo courtesy of Sal

The entry from ‘Merica
*Photo courtesy of Sal

reflections on a British Pyro-manic Holiday

When I first came to this country, I naively thought Guy Fawkes Night was, like, a night.  I had a very unformed and vague impression that it had something to do with burning and rebellion, and anarchy.  This is entirely based on my watching V For Vendetta.

Guy Fawkes Night (or Bonfire Night) actually goes on for several nights.  Random fireworks are popping outside my window as I type.  They go on for days and days.  Then on 5th of November (Remember, remember) people will gather in parks and burn things.  We made the mistake of going to one of these gatherings last year.  I think it was in the Battersea area.  We spent 2 hours – I kid not – in the food queue for a hamburger, and missed the lighting of the bonfire.  We ate our crappy, overpriced hamburgers as people were leaving, the fire slowly dying with our spirits in the cold, pointless night.

Friday we attended a gorgeous fireworks display at Brockwell Park in Southeast London.  A British friend explained her people’s strange need to burn something in November to me as fireworks shook her apartment.

“It’s about that bloke who tried to burn down Parliament,” she said, “and we were so glad he got caught and was executed that we have bonfires and light fireworks every bloody night to celebrate.”

So break out your best effigy, grab a match or something explosive, and get ready to celebrate the execution of a 1600’s traitor!  Happy Guy Fawkes Night, everyone!

underground concert

There’s no better way to ring in cold and flu season than spending a late Autumn evening in a dark, dank underground concrete shaft.  That’s right, we went back to Rotherhithe (Rotherhithe!) to check out the Brunel’s Museum’s autumn underground concerts series inside the Thames Tunnel Grand Hall.

Photo courtesy of Sal

Seated on a metal folding chair inside the dome, it’s hard to imagine anything filling the hollow, deep space but damp air or (shudder) torrents of water.  But from the first peal of the violin string, I’m convinced nothing can fill it so well as music.  Kosmos Ensemble underground is an ethereal experience.  Technically brilliant trio – 2 violins and 1 accordion – Kosmos is  creative and unafraid.  A dutch tango gets a boost from Jewish folk, then glides into a melancholy Polish piece called the ‘suicide tango’, onto a Romanian tango (there were lots of tangos).

Just as a tango is really lighting up to a feverish crescendo, a train rumbles in a low thunder under our feet.  Magic, timing, or happenstance?  On a night like this, I’d go with magic.

It’s not too late to catch the last of the Brunel Museum’s enigmatic underground concerts – there’s a Welch band playing next week, with a (!!!) harp.  While you’re there, grab a pint at The Mayflower pub.  So close to the river, it had flooded a little just hours before our visit.  The atmosphere is just right – quirky / nautical, with quotes from people like Ghandi written in your booth.  And the food – 2 steps above standard pub fare, at standard prices.

You know you’re going to get a cold anyway.  Might as well have a story to tell about it!

Birthplace of the Tubes

1. Are you an architecture or history nerd?

2. Do you like the words ‘free’ and ‘adventure’?

Yeah?  Then check out Open House London – a magical weekend of free entrance to old, quirky, significant, or artsy buildings around Londontown.  If you hurry, you can catch the tail end of this year’s tour, which ends today.

Sal and I went to the Thames Tunnel  near Rotherhithe Station.  (Rotherhithe.  I like saying it.  Rotherhithe!)  They’ve opened the Grand Hall as part of the Brunel Museum, which was worth waiting in the 40 minute queue to see.

One by one, we duck inside a hobbit door and wind around a narrow metal stair into the belly of the earth.  It’s cold, damp and echo-y, and a bit eerie, with black scorch marks on the rounded walls.

 

“Six men died in here,” the tour man’s voice echoes.  He draws our attention to a ‘light and sound’ art installation commemorating the miners that died in a flood while digging the tunnel.  Shouts and industrial noises emanate from illuminated bodies of buried miners.

The structure, he tells us, was built above ground and sunk into the earth – a technique pioneered in the Victorian era with the construction of this very dome.   It once lead directly to the Thames Tunnel, where aristocrats had posh banquets, Victorian city folk walked under the river, and browsed underground shops.

And if that ain’t enough history for you, it’s also the birthplace of the tubes.  Every so often, the cement floor rumbles with a passing train below our feet.

The Midnight Apothecary

 

We’re coming back to for an evening underground concert and perhaps a mint julep or blackberry martini in the pop-up fairy garden bar, the Midnight Apothecary.

Damien Hirst

‘A whole week where I don’t have to think about death!’  I say to Sal at the start of my staycation (holistay?).  ‘So, want to go to that Damien Hirst exhibit at the Tate?’

I don’t know what possessed me.  I just wanted to see what the fuss was about.  After some begging, Sal finally caves.  He doesn’t like Damien Hirst.

‘He doesn’t do his own work, you know,’ Sal begins as we enter the first room. ‘He has these ideas and then gets interns to make the installations for like minimum wage, and they don’t get any acknowledgement, and blah blah blah…’

There’s a photo of a young Damien grinning next to a big dead guy head.  I can’t take my eyes off of it.  It’s horrible.  Should I turn back now?  Dare I venture further into the darkness of my morbid curiosity?

The next rooms have big paintings of coloured dots on them.  Sal is muttering, ‘probably stole that idea from the Kusama exhibit…’

Eventually we get to the room with the cow head with live flies.  Honestly, this isn’t that disturbing – growing up in the country, you see a fair amount of animal parts lying around with flies.  But there’s something unsettling about it rotting there behind glass, in the Tate Modern, with no pretty meadow to avert your eyes towards.

The embalmed animals begin around this point.  I think.  It’s all kind of a blur.  There are some brightly coloured paintings with dead butterflies embedded into them.  Beautiful and sad.

Then Mr Hirst provides us a meadow, of sorts.  A room buzzing with butterflies!  Living ones!  Also some weird brown streaks on the wall.  But also butterflies!!

Then a room set up like a medicine cabinet or pharmacy, coloured pills lined up in a glass cabinet.  Then more stuff in formaldehyde, like lambs and sharks.  None of this matches up.  What is the theme here?  Was this a Best Hits Album?

A little girl tugs at her mum’s sleeve.  What?  They let kids in here?!

‘Look, Mummy, a lamby!  Baaa!  So soft!’

‘No, not a lamb.  That’s the deception of living without acknowledging death and one’s own mortality, sweetie.’

Somehow I end up trapped inside a sagittal-ly sliced cow.  These ladies talking excitedly in Portuguese, pointing at grey cow parts ahead of me, some guys behind me.  I start to panic.  I didn’t know I had a phobia of being trapped inside a dissected cow.  I whisper to Sal, ‘I HAVE TO GET OUT OF THIS COW.’  Someone hears me and moves aside.

The next room is better.  Swirling colours and a suspended beach ball.  My emotions are getting seasick.  Am I disturbed?  Happy?  Grossed out?  Confused?  It gets choppy after this:

Horrible, horrible dead flies matted into a dark vortex of doom.

A diamond room!  Shiny, shiny diamonds!

More dead butterflies, arranged like stained glass.  So pretty!…?

An angel carved in marble…with dissected parts (‘Probably had his interns carve that, they did a good job, too…’ Sal grumbles).

The end comes (finally) with a dove suspended in flight in formaldehyde.  It’s beautiful and sad.  Hope and death.

I don’t get Damien Hirst.  That’s ok, I tell myself.  You don’t have to get everything.

‘Right,’ I turn to Sal as we run for the exit. ‘Who’s hungry?’

juxtaposition

You know where the cool kids hang out on Friday night?  Galleries.

If you haven’t been to the National Portrait Gallery‘s Thurs/Fri night Late Shift, freaking go already.  I mean, Trafalfar Square is like, right there, all lit up with Olympic fervour, and the Gallery’s open late with drinks and live music.  Plus there’s that special Diamond Jubilee exhibition of portraits of the royal family.  So I invited a friend to join me Friday night, thinking how very posh we would be, sipping wine as the gallery fills with Mozart under the approving gaze of Her Magesty.

Um.  This is not what happened.  I don’t even know how to describe this music the band (called Circle of Sound) played.  Someone said ‘jazz’, but it ain’t no jazz I ever heard.  Fusion?  Maybe if I could sort out what was fused with what.  One of the songs was oddly reminiscent of ‘Dead or Alive’ by Bon Jovi.  Do you know what a Sarod is?  According to the Circle of Sound’s flyer, it’s a ‘rare Indian fretless instrument’.  There was a British Bengali guy playing that, which was super cool, and this British Austrian dude on the drums.  Then the Austrian dude started beatboxing.

!!!

I want you to picture this.  Looking straight at the audience, he just breaks out in weird sounds – bleeps and ‘pacchews’ and ‘pshp-pshp-pshps’.  An audience with an average age of 45, perched politely on their stools, clearly trying to sort out when and whether to applaud.  The mouth sounds start out randomly, accompanied by some casual drumming, then increase in frequency and intensity, until the fretless strumming and mouth percussion burn a sonic hole in the universe.  And all of us – the Sarod, the beatboxing Austrian, the polite and confused Brits on stools – surrounded by dead MPs glaring at us from wall-to-wall oil paintings in the National Freaking Portrait Gallery.

Awesome.  And how was your weekend?

self aware

Once you set foot inside the densely-packed warehouse off of Brick Lane in Shoreditch, something in you snaps.  The self-awareness courses through your veins like a shot of fair-trade, Ethiopian espresso (with citrus notes.)   You’re at The London Coffee Festival, and it’s offiical.

You are a coffee snob.  (And dangerously close to hipster.)

That’s right, I went to The London Coffee Festival with a couple of like-minded friends.  We waited in the cold, splattering rain in a queue that wrapped around the warehouse for 20 minutes just to get in.  You can judge all you want, judgey McJudgerson, but it was freaking awesome.  Booth after booth of coffee samples, carefully prepared from shiny espresso machines.  Barrista contests!  Not one, not two, but THREE espresso martini bars.  Places to lounge and sip your excessively delicious sustainably-sourced fifth shot of espresso in bean bag chairs, the live acoustic guitar music mellowing out your electric caffeine high to a pleasant buzz.

My lactose-intolerant friend found a new soya product especially made to froth in her espresso machine.  I almost bought a reusable coffee cup designed to look like a disposable coffee cup.  Is this madness?  Or genius?  I don’t care!  I want it!  We stopped at a booth and waited for 10 minutes for this guy to magic us some coffee I couldn’t pronounce.  We wanted to see what ‘gamey’ coffee tasted like.  Give me 100g of that, that stuff I can’t pronounce!!  It does taste ‘gamey’!  I believe you!  I can taste the ‘hint of apple’, I swear!

Are we coffee snobs?  Yes.  But self aware snobs.  And that makes us better than other snobs.