London, Day 7: Tasty Tate

Saturday was our check-out day at the hotel. So we got up early, packed like crazy people, and left the hotel around 10 am to go visit the Tate Britain. With our extremely full bags, yep, cause we really like to cram stuff (no pun intended) into every second of vacation. We must be absolute loons.

Still, we packed lighter for London than we did for Paris; we're getting better at this all the time. Took the subway over to the Tate, checked our mess into the cloakroom, strapped Henry on in the carrier and got ready for some fierce rapid-fire art digestion.

I hate doing a whole museum in 2 hours, cause really, I could have spent all day there. But it was still incredible. And that being said, when I know I'm in a rush I make sure to take a better look at each thing and commit it to memory. In a museum like the Tate, this makes for a very intense experience, one that I can only compare to drinking orange juice concentrate instead of orange juice.

We started in the Elizabethan rooms, where you can see some amazing technical skill from the painters and some fairly impressive corset-wearing skill from the models. Both are nothing to sneeze at. Speaking of sneezes, these women looked like they probably couldn't have inhaled or exhaled enough to perform the act.

Here's a picture I (illegally) took of a Rubens sketch from one of these earlier rooms. Notice how I say sketch, because he whipped this thing out for his assistants as part of some rich guy's ceiling design.

It's hard to pick one room or artist I liked the best; it's way easier to narrow it down by what I didn't terribly appreciate (for example, Francis Bacon turns out to be a much creepier person than previously anticipated and you can just feel the toxicity oozing from every inch of his work.) But if I had to choose a really good one I guess I'd go with John Singer Sargent. Holy crap, that's all I can say. We saw the rough draft for his Madame X painting, and even the rough draft was just unbelievable.

Then, of course, there's that guy that British folks just can't get enough of : Joseph, Mallord, William, TURNER. You can't pronounce it any other way, you have to insert a reverent pause between each syllable. Everywhere we went in London, he got there first. Whether it be his memorial statue in St. Paul's or a huge poster on the side of a building or the giant Tate exhibit featured in splashy advertisements all over the subway, he is unavoidable. Not bad for a dead guy.

From what I could tell, the British are sort of obsessed with Turner. He's got this awesome backstory where he worked his way out of the slums and fought against adversity and overcame his humble beginnings and so on and so forth, and I think they really feel like "Yeah! That's an Englishman for you!" So cute.The Tate had a huge feature exhibition with Turner next to Poussin, Titian and all the other "greats" against whom he pitted himself.

Stock photo of a Turner for informational purposes:I have to agree with critics, Turner is the ultimate painter of light. Thomas Kinkade fans, drop your Twinkies and come get some real food. Turner can make paint look like silk. And don't even get me started on his ocean waves, cause I might fall into a swoon and I'm sure you'd rather have me finish this achingly self-absorbed blog post instead.

After devouring the Tate Britain whole, we took a boat down the Thames to go see what the Tate Modern had to offer. Here's Henry living it up on the boat:


And here's a super-quick picture of Parliament and Big Ben that we took through the boat door:

The Tate Modern proved an equal match for the other Tate. Our favorable impression got off to a good start with our first stop: the museum restaurant for lunch.


The Tate Modern was even crazier than the Tate Britain, so much Picasso, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali...Gilbert and George...some really cool stuff. Marcel Duchamp and Braques. Joseph Beuys. Minor head explosion! I didn't like their Andy Warhol selection, but on the whole it was a fascinating museum and we only got through half of it.

Pictures weren't permitted, but I tried anyway, despite being frequently interrupted mid-act (which is like not being allowed to chew and swallow, highly annoying.) Hasn't anybody heard I'm already going to Sneaky Photo Taking Hell and should be left alone to take my illicit photographs in peace?

In any case. Here's a couple pictures of the Tate Modern I managed to get that aren't too out of focus. They had some chronological wall murals of art movements. Anyway, we were having a good romp through the Tate Modern until all of a sudden it became quite apparent that Henry needed a change, so Dustin went in to change him while I waited. The minute he came back out with a petrified look on his face, I knew something was up. "He blew out big-time," Dustin announced. He was really in shock, and Henry smelled convincingly alarming (he also had a somewhat evil grin on his face as further evidence of a job well done.)

So, we cut our Tate Modern visit a little short to deal with that, then hustled off to get our baggage back out of the cloak room (a ten minute process, I might add) and catch the late afternoon train back to France.

Traveling with a baby is definitely more complicated, but we wouldn't have it any other way. Seriously, how much less satisfying would life be without those enormous leg-rolls to squish whenever I feel like it? It turns out there was a large void in my life before Henry was born. And fat-squishing fills that void. And it certainly wasn't going to be Dustin's fat, so it's going to have to be Henry's.

The train ride back was fabulous, because every now and then European travel companies feature these extreme discounts--to which Chrissie can attest, having flown to Ireland with her daughter for 4 pence. As luck would have it, we got 1st class tickets for less than 2nd class tickets, thanks to one of these deals.

And I'm not gonna lie, it was way nice to have dinner served on the train, even if we did get some odd looks chilling in the huge 1st-class armchair seats with a rambunctious baby. Oh, and my hair. After a day of Tate followed by Henry's WWIII blowout, the sight of me is enough to put you off your hors-d'oeuvres. Good thing those tough 1st-classers had their Est Republicain and their Bordeaux to help them through.

So, we hopped off in Calais, checked into our grungy hotel (a definite step down from London!) and that's the end of that. One more day to go before we're back in Bar-le-Duc, and it's the best story yet. Stay tuned.