Heavenly Raphael, Delightful Transportation

The London Coliseum


Westminster Cathedral, not to be confused with Westminster Abbey

We left the hotel bright and early on Friday morning to make sure we got to the National Gallery before it opened. I wanted to see the Raphael exhibit.

We were surprised to see that the entrances to the Underground at Victoria Station were closed. This was around 9 a.m. Clumps of people stood at the closed-off entranceways, patiently waiting. Every now and then someone would exit, but no one was allowed to enter. We were perplexed, yet no one else seemed at all perturbed or surprised. Rather than wait with the Underground commuters we decided to hop on a bus. I'm glad we did. We got to the National Gallery in plenty of time and enjoyed the view from the top of the double decker.

We arrived ten minutes before the museum was due to open, yet entered late because we were waiting outside the wrong building. The Raphaels were exhibited in the the newer Sainsbury Wing next door to the main building. No worries; we waited patiently and politely in the queue with the other patrons and managed our way through the crowded gallery. We saw some exquisite works by Raphael and also appreciated seeing other works on display by artists who had inspired Raphael. After the Raphael exhibit we viewed an intriguing exhibit on Degas. The exhibit featured x-radiographs of several of Degas' works, showing earlier versions hidden under the paint.

We had lunch at the Cafe in the Crypt at St. Martin in the Fields, a great little lunch spot. Then we made our way to Leicester Square to see if we could pick up any half price tickets for a show. There were lots of half price tickets on offer, but none for anything we were hankering to see.

On the way to Covent Garden we passed a fantastic map/book store and popped into Muji, a store we remembered from Japan. We were shocked to see that an item priced at 350 yen in Japan was now priced at 3 pounds 50 pence. They were effectively doubling the price of everything in the store.

In the afternoon we hit the London Transport Museum, another sheer delight of an exhibit. A very manageable museum filled with vintage buses, subway cars, train cars, taxis and every kind of paraphernalia you can think of that pertains to public transport. The museum was filled with goofy looking mannequins standing in as bus drivers, ticket takers, etc. We were both startled when one of them began to speak to us in the exhibit about the construction of the Underground. It was a real person dressed as an Underground labourer. He was there mainly for the kiddies, I suppose, but I was fascinated and appalled as he recounted the conditions suffered by the workers who gave us the world's oldest subway system. It was from this fellow that we learned why the Underground entranceways had been closed in the morning: there are just too many passengers for the ageing subway system to cope with. Hah! They oughta send some white-gloved attendants from the Tokyo subway system. They'll pack 'em in.

We finished off the day browsing the trendy shops of Oxford Street then took the bus back to the hotel. On the way to our hotel we passed by Jenny Lo's Teahouse. Brad had read a good review, so we popped in for dinner. Delicious food selected from a pan-Asian menu.