CaBiNeT WaR RoOmS & tHeBLuEs

Thursday, December 11th

Today was the last day of art and paper class. We had a cumulative critique, and then went over by the Tate Britain to see a smaller studio by a paper artist. The work was all small paper pop-up art with incredibly intricate detail. It reminded me of some of the exacto-knife cut-outs that I did for scrapbooking when I was younger, but at a much higher level.

I had lunch and then worked on life drawing for quite a while, as I needed to turn in my portfolio soon with the quickly approaching end of the semester.

After working on my drawings for a while, Cody, Rachael, and I went to Whitehall to see the Cabinet War Rooms and the Winston Churchill Museum. It was really cool and I learned quite a bit about the war effort and Winston Churchill. I have always been fascinated by WWII and it was interesting to see it from another perspective other than the United States. I cannot stress enough how inspired I have been on this trip to learn so many new things and how much I want to research in the future. This will definitely be added to the list.

We got to go down into all of the underground tunnels which held the cabinet war rooms and military planning bases during war, and I actually told Cody and Rachael to go along because I wanted to spend more time here. Absolutely fascinating- the whole thing. Rooms were setup with switchboards and typewriters for all of the communication units, bedrooms for Winston Churchill, his wife, and the other commanding officers, rooms with maps and planning units, assembly halls, and others. There were even wax figures (much more realistic than the Sherlock Holmes Museum, mind you) re-enacting what it may have been like in the rooms.

I breezed through the gift shop and bought something for my cousin and then booked it a block or two away to Westminster Abbey where the three of us were planning on seeing our last Evensong. It was sad knowing that it would be the last time I would ever be in that beautiful chapel what had become such a big part of my daily life.







Another dinner of PB&J, and then Cody, Luke and I all went to the Aint Nothin But the Blues Bar. What a crazy evening.

We got there early so that we could get a good spot, but unfortunately we didn’t get there soon enough. We quickly became friends with an overly excited Israeli boy who was traveling Europe by himself and obviously wanted to take lots of pictures with him and girls to show off to his friends. Oh well, we got a spot to sit down because of it.

There were also these other crazy older men who kept coming over and trying to talk to Cody and I. We talked to them for a while, and it was funny at first because they were rather tipsy and said lots of funny things, but it got old fast and we soon looked for ways to blow them off.

Our evening filled with interesting individuals continued with a short, crazy old man in a Marlboro jacket, dancing and going crazy right in front of us. Ive never seen someone with such enthusiasm and endurance (with the exception of Wurzer skanking for the LIC’s back in the day). We watched him the entire evening and took lots of good videos…

In addition to this distraction, there was another crazy standing right next to us, more specifically Cody. He was a large man with long curly brown hair, and looked strikingly similar to Hurley from the tv show ‘Lost.’ He kept edging nearer and nearer to Cody the entire evening, leaning in and sniffing her hair. Absolutely creepy. Yes, she absolutely freaked out.

And here, all of our crazy characters become linked in a crazy evening of absurdity. Cody, freaked out by the crazy sniffer man decided to take advantage of Isreali’s longing for bragging rights to his friends back home. She decides to sit on his lap and dance and flirt super lots and lots in order to deter attention from sniffer man. Meanwhile, we spend the remainder of the evening all sitting in our crazy group of accumulated people, watching Marlboro Man bust a move to some awesome music.

Only in London…