Hello, London

London. One of my favorite cities. Others include New York, Paris, Milan, Boston and San Francisco. Austin might make the list if I were to spend more time there.

But, blimey, London is right there at the top. I love this city because I can communicate with very little trouble. I always say that we (Yanks and Brits) read the same language but we often don't speak the same language. 

That maxim was made quite clear on our second day here when we chanced to meet a local in the elevator of our rental who was a practitioner of the Hackney variety of English. I could understand him, certainly, but I did have to attune my ear to his brand of the tongue. The day before, the rental agent for our flat spoke to us in a gentle Australian accent polished to softness from many years spent in the UK.

While we still struggle with Italian and are completely at sea with French, English in its many nuances is comforting. We can read everything in a flash; no translation or guesswork required. Street signs, various kinds of warning signs, ingredient labels, museum brochures -- all are totally comprehensible to us. As long as announcements on the public address systems are in BBC English, we understand everything.

As much we truly love visiting France and Italy, England is a comfort zone. And so, here we are for seven weeks in the land of our native language.

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We arrived on Tuesday, February 26, to the first snowfall in London since Christmas of 2010. There's only a couple of inches on the ground, just enough to make the sidewalks slippery underfoot. In our home territory of the northeast, a couple of inches is just a nuisance, but here it is a catastrophe. 

The local press is calling it "The Beast from the East". It's a weather pattern from Siberia that has blanketed all of Europe with snow and howling winds. The local free paper, the Metro, made quite a splash on their front page and went on inside to say that "Trains ground to a halt, schools closed and dozens of vehicles crashed as the blast from the east tightened its grip".

Hundreds of schools across the country were closed, though at the school around the corner from our flat, the school kids out on recess were whooping it up in raucous fun in the new snow. I would suspect that most British kids don't remember snow unless they spent winter holidays in the Alps.

I have to say that the whipping wind and the 27F temperatures make this city feel quite a bit inhospitable right now. From our 14th floor flat, the wind whistles past us and seeks entrance to the flat from any available tiny opening around the windows. On our last visit to London, four years ago, we left a gray and rather bleak New Jersey with two or three inches of snow on the ground on the last day of February and arrived at our flat in South Kensington to brilliant sunshine and masses of daffodils in every corner of the city. Although the weather did turn a bit chilly for our first couple of days, the rest of our month-and-a-half long trip was typical springtime. Now it feels like early January outside. The newspapers are warning of a second blast of cold, this time coming from the Atlantic side.

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As usual, our first whole day in anywhere across the Atlantic consists of groggily  getting to our rental, meeting the agent or owner for the orientation to the apartment, sleeping for a few hours to make up for lost sleep on the plane, and finally, laying in a few supplies for the next few days. As we get older, each trip seems to leave us a bit more tired than the last -- or maybe it's just that the passage of time renders us forgetful.

So, the first day is always a wash in terms of this business of being a tourist. By the second day, we have recovered enough to venture out. 

On Wednesday, we went to a small museum which was not at all crowded, probably because it might not be well known. The Fabric and Textile Museum was on my list of possibilities because they have an exhibit of scissors, which I thought might be interesting. 

It turns out that the scissors were just a small afterthought and the primary exhibit was a continuation of their theme of clothing throughout the mostly modern centuries. This is the kind of museum that does not actually own objects, it curates exhibits from other collections. 

The current exhibit is T-shirts which began their life as work shirts. In the 1930's the Athletic Dept of UCLA decided to print "Property of UCLA Dept of Athletics" on the T-shirts to keep them from being stolen. That plan backfired and the T-shirts not only became very popular, but they set off an entirely new fashion style.

Of course, the words and pictures printed on subsequent T-shirts promoted musicians, causes, companies, vacation locales and just plain nonsense. The most provocative of the T-shirts was the punk designer Vivienne Westwood whose designs were so risque that she needed to open a shop just for them. She called it "SEX", for very obvious reasons. She took Georgia O'Keefe's images to another level.

Well, after all that, we needed something more uplifting. The London Philharmonic was just the ticket. Our seats were in the rafters and since the attendance was a bit thin, we were invited to move down; but once up there, we decided to stay. After all, the music is the same no matter where you sit. 

Notice that some people were sitting around and in back of the orchestra. I've never seen seating like that. I think that sitting in back of the orchestra would be very interesting because then I would see them from a totally different angle. The sound, however, would not be as good. In fact, in a large orchestra, the players in the back can't hear the players in the front. They get a very distorted sound. As a chorus member, I often saw the orchestra from the back. Here's a secret: when they have long stretches of not playing, they read.

The program was wonderful. It opened with Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto (a fiery virtuoso piece) and finally Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe suite. It was a very well balanced program that was performed very well.

Today is Thursday, March 1. We were not thrilled about venturing out in this high wind and low temperature combination, but we didn't come to London to sit in our apartment, so off we went. This time we went to the Tate Britain to see an exhibit of Impressionist painters (mostly French) who painted in London.

I am not well informed about French history and therefore did not realize that much of the bleakness of art and music from the 1870's was due to the siege laid on Paris by the Prussians. There was tremendous starvation as a result of the siege, brought on by the foolishness of Napoleon who thought that he could wage war against the Prussians and actually win. He was, of course, greatly mistaken.

Anyone who possibly could, left Paris for London or America for the duration. With London relatively close to Paris, many painters spent some years of exile there. I always wondered why Monet moved to London for a while. 

He must have liked painting in London because he returned later in life when he was wealthy and famous. For Impressionist aficionados, his time in London was well spent. Here are some examples:

And, these are a tiny sample of his output. He painted Parliament many, many times usually in the fog.

After the special exhibit, we went to see some of the paintings in the permanent collection. This one is a rather famous painting of Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse (not exactly a household name).

And this one is one of my favorite paintings by one of my favorite artists,  the American, John Singer Sargent. This is Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

I just love that painting. I could look at it all day.

Here is a portrait of the actress Ellen Terry in her role as Lady Macbeth, for which she gained considerable fame. This is also by Sargent. Although he painted many different subjects, he is perhaps best known for his portraits. 

So, that was our afternoon at the Tate Britain (as opposed to the Tate Modern).

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Back we went out into the bluster and back to our flat for a simple dinner while I wrestled with my new SIM card.

We have found that our easiest mode of transportation is by bus. Our rental is just outside of the transit zone, which means an extra fare if we go by tube, but not by bus. Besides, the buses go right past our flat, run frequently and have stops near to where we need to go. A bonus is that we get a view of the city as we go along. 

This weather is far too chilly to venture out for wandering around, so tomorrow it will be another museum.