For our final day in London, we decided to take in a couple of galleries. The two we chose were the Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum. They couldn’t have been more different!
We set off to the tube station and made our way to Southwark (the “w” isn’t pronounced). We’re feeling pretty confident underground now and have learned how to read the route map. However, Eve told us of the best app for navigating called citymapper. It does all the work deciding the best route and by which means of transportation. It gives you the time the next vehicle will arrive, how long the ride will be, what the stops are along the way, and then if walking is necessary, it maps out your directions. It’s really amazing!

The Tate Modern is a huge building, and getting bigger, along the Thames directly across from St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Tate is a rather ugly building, all industrial-looking, but it is bright and airy inside.
The Alexander Calder exhibit is subtitled Performing Sculpture. Calder is widely celebrated as the originator of the “mobile,” not the phone, but the thing that hangs from the ceiling. It amazed me that he was one of the first artists to think about art in motion. This was in the 1930s. He overturned many assumptions about sculpture. His early work involved wire sculptures and he made lots of portraits. These I liked very much because they hang and so the light and shadows behind them project various images on the wall behind. Calder also was enamored by the circus and so for years he created all kinds of acrobats and circus performers from mostly wire and then he figures out how to attach motors to make the figures move. I was disappointed with these objects because the motors no longer work so the objects did not move. That’s technology for you.
Calder’s mobiles are very interesting, some more than others. Unfortunately, there was no photography permitted in the gallery. I walked around all these very large mobiles hanging down wanting to blow air or flap my program so I could get them to move. I was surreptitiously successful on one or two occasions.
After the Tate, we went back underground and travelled to the Victoria and Albert Museum. This is a classic British museum and bills itself as the world’s leading museum of art and design. It’s brochure states, “the V&A enriches people’s lives by promoting the practice of design and increasing knowledge, understanding, and enjoyment of the designed world.” It is a very impressive museum! Just the building itself knocks your socks off.
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s collections span two thousand years of art in virtually every medium, from many parts of the world, and visitors to the Museum encounter a treasure house of amazing and beautiful objects. You would need several visits just to get through all the exhibits.
One of the reasons Christine wanted to go to the V&A is so she could eat in its café. Now, I know that sounds crazy, but I’ll tell you that it was the swankiest café I’ve ever eaten in. And the food was really excellent.
Since we only had a couple of hours, we trotted through several areas. The tapestries were awesome.
Here are some other pictures of things we saw. I thought my brother Grant would be interested in the scenery exhibit showing model sets.
I loved this image over one of the doors entering the museum.

I could spend a lot of time in the V&A Gallery. It was wonderful. But other things beckoned so we made our way back to our Airbnb room and spruced up before meeting Eve for a tour of her school, the American School in London. We then met up with one of her colleagues, Chris, and went to a lovely Thai restaurant, the Banana Leaf. Yummy food! We then walked back to the school to see a student performance of the Heidi Chronicles. Some of it was a real walk down memory lane for Christine and me. The students did a phenomenal job and we enjoyed the production very much.
And that brings to an end of our time in London. We packed up Wednesday night and arranged for a taxi to Victoria Station to pick us up at 6:00 a.m. in the morning. We are catching the Gatwick Express train for our flight to Barcelona Thursday morning.
What a fun time we had in London!