My last day in London I decided to stay on the West End and finally see the Frank Gehry structure I spotted on the drive in my first day. I wandered down to Hyde Park and entered via Marble Arch and Speakers Corner:
Then across the Parade Ground where the brisk fall day created some moody lighting. A quick stop at Reformer’s Tree:
And then off to the Serpentine:
I love parks and meandered about, on and off the paths, looking down to spot patterns like these:
And up to spot patterns like these:
I came across a group doing Tai Chi under a grove of low-hanging limbs:
And wandered over to the Fountains at the Italian Gardens
where I had a great view of the Long Water:
Two swans preening (all swans are property of the Queen!):
The Peter Pan Statue:
The Albert Memorial (the thing is massive):
And the Princess Di Memorial, a fountain that forms a ring:
And after all this orbiting I landed at the Serpentine Gallery to see the Frank Gehry Pavilion:
From the side:
From the front:
From the other side (trying to line people up in the clear glass triangles):
And inside:
Sun!
Ann met me here with a new friend, Tom, a friend of a friend of ours, and we went in to the Serpentine Gallery to check out Gerhard Richter’s 4900 Colours. It felt a bit anti-climactic, all these 49 grid paintings of the same size with a random distribution of the same colored squares that could be combined to form one single massive work or all these smaller individual similar works. Perhaps that was part of the point of it, this display of never-ending randomized pattern and endless repetition.
We wandered over through Kensington Gardens and past Kensington Palace up a fancy street of mansions and embassies and into Notting Hill, joining the massive crowd making its way up and down Portobello Road. The afternoon ended at a pub (typical thing to do on a Saturday afternoon) where Ann, Tom and I grabbed some grub and downed a few pints:
We walked back to my hotel, past the Paddington station and then my driver picked me up to take me to Heathrow. Since the trip was for work I got to fly business class, or “Upper Class” as Virgin Atlantic so blatantly calls it. It was pretty empty, and I wondered if it had anything to do with the markets crumbling around us. I wrapped myself up in my duvet cover and cozied up with my pillow and spent the flight home watching movies and reading and thinking about how much I didn’t want to leave and what I needed to do to transform my life back in New York to gain those social aspects outside of work I found so fulfilling while in London.
All in all the trip felt like a vacation, and a much needed step outside myself and world in New York and the States to gain that perspective one can only gain when they are abroad. The UK is a much smaller country than the USA, but I was refreshed by a dual sense of intimacy with the local events of their own country and yet their eye to the global issues of the world and where they intersect with those issues. The country, its news, just about every person I met had a sense of not only what was going on at home but also abroad which struck me as refreshing and highlighted the isolationist navel-gazing the USA is so fond of: everything, all those problems, people dying, etc., is “over there”. Perhaps this is just part of the sheer size of the USA and its geographic distance from Europe and the Middle East and Asia. Still, there seemed lessons that could be learned here and I started entertaining dreams of mandatory trips abroad for all US citizens that were not military maneuvers.
So now I’m back in New York which to me is its own country anyway. I messed up two Customs forms when asked “country” and I wrote “New York City”. And who knows, maybe some of my new London friends will be State-side soon enough for a visit and I can return the favor of local tour guide.