Half-term break

On a two-hour train ride from Paddington to Bristol Temple-Meads with no Internet connection, clearly the thing to do is update the old web-log.  This train ride concludes my visit to London for half-term break, to do the standard tourist things with my dad.  It has been a relaxing and reparative four days, especially since the London city air ironically seems to have done a great service to my growing cough over the last couple weeks.  It is also nice to be see some family again, and not have to cook.

The week began with my journey to Canterbury to retake the Physics GRE.  Somehow, I managed to make almost every conceivable mistake in getting there and back, I can only hope that this offsets any stupid mistakes on the exam itself.  Three trains – Bristol to Paddington, King's Cross to Ashford International, Ashford to Canterbury West – with a tube ride in the middle and a taxi at the end got me to the hostel nearly an hour later than I meant to be there.  I also tried to save 5 pounds or so by finding the hostel on foot, and failed, which introduced further delay.  Fortunately, the staff were perfectly welcoming and helpful.  I then managed to get lost trying to find the test center the next day, only to find it had been moved to another location, and arrived just in time to find out they had no record of me.  It seems my confirmation from ETS that they would "take care of everything on [their] end" was false, and it wasn't until I had shown the less-than-pleasant administrator there my email correspondence with ETS that he would let me sit the test.

Oh, also, I didn't have a chance to get #2 pencils before leaving Bristol, so I had to use souvenir pencils from the Ashford station with union jacks on them.  Classy.

After finally completing the exam, I was promptly lost in the beautiful, historic city of Canterbury, in the rain, with no umbrella.  A couple hours of wandering later, I found the train station and bought the wrong ticket to get to London, costing me a few extra pounds on board to actually make it.  To top it off, I had forgotten the name of my dad's hotel and had to find a way to check my email to look it up again – I managed this only by using a display iPhone at a vodaphone store at Paddington.  All was fine when, at last, I made it to my dad's hotel and found him.

Over the week, we visited Bristol (sadly, no one was around to introduce), the London Eye (to my acrophobic father's nervousness), the Churchill War Rooms, the British Museum's Shakespeare exhibit, Covent Garden, and a West End show.  The highlight was certainly seeing Twelfth Night at the Apollo theatre, produced by the Globe theatre.  We managed to pick up the tickets last-minute from a store across from the British Museum, for a pretty good price.  When we got to our seats the actors were finalizing their makeup and costumes on stage, showing how male actors were dressing as the Countess, Viola, etc., as musicians onstage played traditional Victorian instruments – in what I understand to be the first time they'd been used in a show on Shaftsbury Ave in centuries.  We were also more than pleasantly surprised to find that Stephen Fry, of whom my dad and I are big fans, was playing Malvolio.  He did not disappoint in his cross-gartered yellow stockings.

Though I had hoped to find a physical theatre or contemporary circus show to take my dad, a couple of street performers at Covent Garden at least gave a sense of it.  The street performance style, as one of the performers commented, is honest and pure.  The routines themselves were incredibly simple, as far as tricks were concerned – one did an escape act from a bunch of chains, another did a slack rope walk while juggling knives – but each filled easily 15 - 20 minutes of time just building up to it.  I hope to get a chance to read Bim's book on street performance.  It's unfortunate that I won't be around in the spring, when there is a big street performance intensive, culminating in presentations in Bath.  It is something I have a little amateur experience with, but there is a science to it – conjuring a crowd and keeping its attention, pushing volunteers' comfort limits, improvising with – that takes experience and practice to learn.

Now, as my train pulls into Temple Meads Station, I can close by saying that it has been an enjoyable break.  I've gotten to see some of the sights and some of the performance England is famous for, and much of the countryside from train windows, and the Physics GRE is, at last, behind me.  I look forward to resuming training without that worry anymore.