20 November 2014
We missed the installation by a week. At the Tower of London, for Remembrance Day (England's more solemn version of our Veteran's Day), 888,246 hand-made ceramic poppies were placed around the Tower, one poppy for each soldier who died in World War I. The poppies were all sold for charity; the exhibit began to be taken apart about a week ago.
Fortunately, our friend Mazz saw the whole thing and took lots of pictures, which she sent me so that I could post them here.
One poppy per soldier. Just reminding you.
Mazz is brave; she's cool with letting me post a picture of her. Her son, a videographer, took the photo.
Jack and I went down to London yesterday to look at the poppies. There was a traffic jam outside of London; our 90-minute bus ride took two hours. By the time we finished our pub lunch and saw the poppies, we barely had time to get across the city to the British Museum for an exhibit called "Witches and Wicked Bodies" before the museum closed. We wanted to get back to Oxford for the Lowbrow Film Club, a series that one of the visiting fellows is hosting; tonight would be Young Frankenstein. If we could catch a bus now, before 6:00 p.m., we'd get back in time for dinner before the 8:30 movie.
That didn't happen. An X90 bus to Oxford, one of two that leaves every 15 minutes from London, was just pulling away when we arrived at Marble Arch. Jack has a multi-ride ticket for the X90; he can get both of us on his pass. In the 45 minutes we stood waiting, three Oxford Tube buses came and went without any X90s pulling in. When the fourth Oxford Tube arrived, we got on and paid for tickets. Then we hit traffic, and the bus driver took an alternate route. We'd left London at 7:00. We got back to Oxford at 9:00 p.m. It was nearly 11:00 when we got back to the house after dinner.
Today we're going to be smarter about our trip to London. We know what we want to do, when we want to do it, and how we're going to get around. I'm also going to stop blogging, like, now, so we can get out of the house at a reasonable time.
I did take a few pictures yesterday. Here's the Shard, one of London's new skyscrapers on the south bank of the Thames.
Poppies being removed:
The wave of poppies is all that remains:
Accidental street art near the British Museum:
No comments:
Post a Comment