Europe Tour Blog

The National Gallery

The dark gloomy clouds hung over us as we waited for the National Gallery to open. Everyone penguin huddled in a circle to keep our bodies warm from the harsh blizzard set upon us. Icicles started to form on the lids of people's eyes. Quickly we were becoming more and more susceptible to frost bite. Mateship was the only thing that allowed us to hang on to our dear lives. Then suddenly the doors started open, we were saved.

Ok so I might have over exaggerated a bit. Our visit to the National Gallery started like any other day. We caught the underground to Trafalgar Square and waited for the museum to open. When it did everyone seemed to enjoy the fantastic ride on the revolving doors. Some of the well-known paintings that we viewed included Baptism of Christ, Monet Snow in Argenteuil and The Rokeby Venus. After admiring the pieces we sat down for bite to eat in the gallery's restaurant. There we indulged in some beautiful food that made our taste buds say, "thank my bountiful master/mistress for allowing us to party with such food".

We went to the opera house to see Don Giovanni. This was problematic as the opera is Italian and the subtitles were in French, meaning that no one knew what was happening despite our overflowing knowledge on the subject. However, neglecting these small cons, it sounded good. And the seats were comfortable.

From Hannah ^.^

We went to the Palace of Versaille in Paris and it was magical. There was gold everywhere and the garden was magical. We arrived at the garden at about 11 am and we went through the garden first and we all felt like royalty as the classical music played. The fountains display was amazing and I'm sure we all would want to live there; the secret café, the statues in the caves and the square trees made us feel so lucky to be inside. The palace itself was giant; there were massive painting/murals, amazing mirrors and really big windows. I'm pretty sure we all spent heaps of money in the gift shop to try to be like royalty but the best part was all the pictures we took.

Bread for the Win!

The Paris Norm

Monet's Garden

This is the very same scene from the famous painting. It's better live.

The Gardens of Versailles

The View from The Eiffel Tower

Mia's Party in Stratford-upon-Avon

Europe Blog - Josh

On Tuesday, 17th April, our 14th day on the trip we began the day with a visit to the Musee D'Orsay. After a long and annoying wait in the pouring rain being forced to listen to 'gypsies' yell "umbrellaumbrellaumbrella!" repeatedly we finally made our way inside the vast building that was formerly used as a train station. The walkways through the sprawling central space was fill with sculpture carved from different stones and occasionally done in metal. The galleries were trough doorways that lead off of the walkways around the edge each into their own individual exhibits one of which was on Van Gogh. It was also interesting to find that one of the galleries was filled with wood carving, the majority of it assorted furniture but at the back there was an animal section with a polar bear carved out of what looked like marble, it seemed a little bit out of place but it looked wonderful.

The sculptures were definitely the standout of the Musee D'Orsay and after collecting possessions from the cloak-room and a small adventure through the two-story gift shop I think that most of us left satisfied with what we had seen.

Victoria and Albert museum

Hi everyone,
 
Today we woke up like zombies, all looking really tired and unattractive from our 6 hours sleep after watching The Tempest by the Royal Shakespeare Company, except for Dr Irving who looked 35,
and caught the tube to the Victoria and Albert museum (V&A). The V&A is the largest museum of applied arts in the world and we went on 2 seperate tours of the museum, the first an interactive of the history of performance and the second a general tour.
 
The performance tour taught us of the roles of the producer, promoters, stage designers and costume designers. We saw a recreation of Kylie Minogues dressing room and tried on some traditional acting costumes, not hers. We looked at the apsects of promotion and the effectiveness of these factors. Costumes on display included The Lion King, Adam Ant, Elton John and Mick Jagger. There was also dioramas  of set designs of Sweeney Todd, Don Giovani (which we are seeing later in France), Hamlet and many more.
 
The general tour of the museum took us through galleries filled with artifacts ranging from Tudor to Victorian eras. There were many prints, ceramics, furniture, clothingm jewellery, relics, stained glass, paintings and metalwork on display.
 
A highlight of the trip for many of the girls was the jewellery collection and the costumes.
Other galleries we explored included the Chinese, Japanese, and Middle East sections.
 
Jack
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Photo, Shoreditch

This is just a sample of the streets of Shoreditch

At Shoreditch, Photo

Note: Sorry about poor quality of photo - it's a photo OF another photo.

This was the day with the shopping, you may call it what you like, as the itinerary demonstrated, "retail toursim" or "exploration" and whatnot. We were going to do some Marxy gravy thing at Highgate cemetary, but nevermind.

 

Shoes.

 

In any case we went to spitterfields markets, where Londonian Hipsterdom unfurled itsself in front of us in all it's glory and knitted sweaters. Seriously, the amount of small, half-grown moustaches that looked like they'd been squeezed out in about three minutes was both surprising and frightening on the most primal level. Like a skinny-chinoed lovecraftian horror was always behind us, prepared to devour both our bodies and nice jackets should we ever look it in the eye. We were going to go to Camden markets for the entire day but that was too mainstream, this was the point that we realised tht we ourselves had also turned into hipsters, and the slow erosion of our souls began. Also I bought some hats, hats are nice.

 

It was quite amazing really, there were bangladeshi peacock feather salesmen lining the streets (or rather there was one) and people trying to get all the passing hipsters into their restaurants and at the same time trying to out do the other restaurants, each trying to get people in with more and more ludicrous deals, ranging from a "buy-one-get-one-free thali" to a "come-inside-our-shop-and-we-will-give-you-the-shop." For some this was their first experience with heckiling, some people were so inexperienced with the affair that they ended up paying more than what they started out with, not really, that was not true, from now on I'll be honest. I bought some coat tails, coat tails are nice.

 

After this we went to Camden markets, which as it turns out, had been burnt down in 2003 and converted into a tourism district. There were a large amount of touristish things but tucked away in the alcoves were some nice shops that looked as if they were unchanged since 1880, which is how all things should be in my opinion, and we should all be wearing beaver hats, coat tails and cavalry boots.

 

Pablo El Cid

(Hayden Cooper)

 

Photo, Day 3, london eye 3

Photo, Day 3, London Eye 2

Photo, Day 3, London Eye

Front of the British Museum, Photo, Day 4

St Pauls

Photo, Day 1, On the bus away from the airport