A Myriad Museums

I am a fountain of knowledge. My brain is teeming with little known facts about museums, art, British trivia...seriously Rick Steves, wanna go?
So maybe I haven't retained quite that much information, mostly because there is not enough room in my little brain to absorb it all.
On Monday after class, Shannon, Alex and I went to the Courtauld Gallery located in Somerset House. This so called "house" would do better to be renamed mansion as it takes up a whole city block and has a giant skating rink in the football-stadium sized courtyard. The Courtauld houses a large exhibition of impressionistic art ranging from Monet to Manet, Degas to van Gogh. In the large rooms of the house that act as the gallery, pictures are hung around the room and not distanced from observers with glass or rope. Upon viewing van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, I had the most terrible instinct to touch the canvas that the artist's fingers had once graced, but I resisted.
Among the highlights of the Courtauld were the bronze statues of dancers crafted by Degas. They were so incredibly beautiful and life-like as he captured not only the physique of the person, but the spirit of the movement as well.

Yesterday my art class visited the Tate Britain (different than the Tate Modern) to see an exhibition entitled J.W.Turner and the Masters. Our assignment is to write on three of Turner's paintings, and yet I found myself more inspired by the masters he attempted to copy; artists like Rembrandt and Botticelli. Ah well. Good thing I'm getting a B.A. in B.S.-ing.

After the exhibit I visited an amazingly awesome bookstore complete with cobblestone floor and musty book smell before heading over to the Wyndham Theatre to see "An Inspector Calls". This play, a kind of who-dunnit, was a bit overly-dramatic, but made fun by the grade-school boys in front of us who were in hysterics. These kids, oh gosh, they were hilarious. Once they caught whiff of our American accents they started interrogating us! When they found out that we were relatively close to Six Flags, they got exceedingly excited proclaiming our roller coasters to be "dirty" (which apparently means good) and "sick" (another word for cool). Shannon will explain in more detail on this as I am not doing it justice.

Sorry this post is so gosh darn drab, but you see, I am absolutely exhausted. As you've probably given up on this boring tangent by now and stopped reading, I will not hesitate to end this ramble immediately with a portly British man's valediction. "Good Day, old chap!"