How I spent my Christmas Vacation

Tate for Tat--or--From London to Edinburgh: a study in the transportation of the Rosenberg Family

Tuesday the 27th was our last morning in London. We packed up, stocked up on the Savoy's toiletries, and headed out to the Tate Modern. Since the day we left was the only day museums and stuff were open (silly Christmas), we all had to pick the one we wanted to go to. Lynn had already done many of the tourist sites and museums on an earlier trip this semester and so the Tate Modern topped her list of where she wanted to spend more time. This was fine by me (though I would have liked to see Shakespeare's Globe, I knew I'd be alone in that endeavor and we had to be on the train to Edinburgh by early afternoon) and I believe everyone in my family besides my father likes modern art best (as opposed to eleventy billion paintings of the exact same creepy looking Mary holding creepier looking baby Jesus) so Tate Modern it was.

We walked, as we did most everywhere most of the trip, which was much more expected there than, say, Chicago, where the assumption would be that one would take public transportation anywhere more than 5 blocks away. We never actually took the tube after the first day coming from the airport. On the way we stopped at a tiny bakery/sandwich shop place on a wharf on the Thames that looked like it was probably hoppin' during the summer but practically abandoned during the winter. My stomach was still off, so all I had was tea.

The first floor of the museum had a very large exhibit of piles of casts made from the insides of boxes. My sister had mentioned seeing this on her earlier visit and described it as looking like a bunch of sugar cubes. Now maybe I would have seen it this way without her suggestion, but as we wandered around that's all I could think of. They did look like sugar cubes. I very suddenly felt very shitty and my mom came with me as I ran to the bathroom and puked up my morning tea. I can now add the Tate Modern to the list of impressive places I've thrown up. Swell. But I felt better having puked and who knows when I'll ever make it back to London, so on we went into the rest of the museum.

The collection was pretty impressive. If you have any interest at all, I recommend looking at the Tate's online thingy. It's shows most of the art categorized the same way it's up at the museum. I didn't actually make it through the Nude/Action/Body wing (stupid time constraints) but the rest is pretty much as I saw it. Reality is much better, but this will have to do.
I do want to specifically mention, however, that Francis Bacon creeps me out, I like pretty much anything Jackson Pollock touched, and Salvador Dali is still my hero. My favorite piece in the whole museum was a Dali sculpture, appropriately titled Lobster Telephone.
The picture doesn't do it justice, as it is actually an object and not a painting, probably just a telephone Dali had around his house with a fake lobster resting on the handle. That man certainly had a sense of humor. I managed to split off from my family to wander the museum (Mark and Lynn walked together and my parents were both together and apart at different points) which was a very good thing because I hate looking at art with my mother. She's very funny, but she tends to go through the room and say "that one's just ugly," "I could have painted that," and "that looks like a _____" to half the pieces in the exhibit. I prefer being a quiet little sponge when I go through and saving my snide and sarcastic comments for after I've digested everything. Personal preference, really.
We ended up taking a cab back to the hotel to save time. My dad asked us if we thought we should ask the cab driver to stick around and take us to the train station, since we would likely need two cabs anyway. We said we didn't know how long it would take to get our luggage out of the hotel's storage, wanted to go to the bathroom, didn't want to rush, and thought the cab driver would keep us on the meter, making it cost more. Plus, there were always cabs at the hotel so it's not like we wouldn't be able to find one. Three minutes later my dad started to ask the cab driver to stick around. We all jumped at him (verbally, though we would have liked to physically...) and he stopped and changed his question to the driver. My dad does that a lot: ask our opinion on something and then go ahead and do whatever he was thinking in the first place. Lucky for him we are all hyper-critical of him and yell at him whenever he does this, but he usually does it anyway. He was better this time.

We managed the unbelievable feat of getting all of our shit and all five of ourselves into a single cab. British cabs are bigger than their yellow American counterparts, but not by much. They look like what PT Cruisers try to be. Lynn had been gone all semester, so her shit quantity was particularly large. The train station was full of drama because, when my parents are involved, all travel is required to be difficult and stressful. My sister and I discussed the fact that, without the parents, trains, planes, busses and the like are really not that hard. With the parents, it's a huge fucking deal when and where and ohmigawd do we have everything and ohmigawd where is everyone and do we have enough food and no, you need to go get more food and if we aren't at the front of the line to board we might not all get to sit together (even if it's a huge freaking train with about 3 times the number of seats as there are people in the station) and then it will be the end of the world and we'll never see eachother again.

By the grace of God alone (because just reading the sign and getting in the right line and then walking onto the right train couldn't have anything to do with it) we ended up on a train to Edinburgh. I took Dramamine and fell asleep across two seats in the fetal position within the first half hour. I awoke several hours later to some loud annoying MIDI clip of electronic game triumph that played every minute or so for the last hour of the trip.

The queue for the cab was another Big Fucking Deal as my dad had to make sure we got one big enough to fit us back in and did we remember how we all sat in the last cab so it all fit and if the cab that comes when it's our turn is too small we'll let the person behind us go and the next and the next until there is a big enough cab and we all had to be informed of this 27 times and go over our positions in the cab and what bags went where 94 times. When the actual cab came, we only had to let one person in front of us and then getting in was (shocking!) not that fucking hard.


At last, we pulled into our Edinburgh Sheraton. Certainly not the Savoy, but still quite spacious and lovely, and they already had the cot set up when we checked in, so points for that. The funny thing about Edinburgh is much of it looks like a fairly average modern small city, except there's a HUGE FRIGGIN' CASTLE right in the middle of everything. Turn left to see the Gap, turn right to see the CASTLE. More to come on the castle...

We were hungry but it was late and nothing was both open and still serving food, so we ended up at a Chinese restaurant a few blocks from our hotel, even though the night before we'd been at the amazing Chinese place. I was actually quite happy because I was starving but still worried about digesting things so I got chicken fried rice and it was perfect. My brother wanted to go out and play but I just wanted to pass out so we went to bed with the promise of going out before the trip was over.

posted by Jill @ Tuesday, December 27, 2005