Okay, so we didn’t get an earlier start Thursday morning! In fact, breakfast was more like lunch. Then we had to veer off course to get discount tickets in Leicester Square for that night’s performance of Chicago. After that, Katie and Brad were up for some blood and gore since they couldn’t fit it in yesterday for Halloween, so we went to the Clink Prison Museum. All of us agreed that it was just as bad as the books said it was.

From there we walked along the Thames, past the Globe and on to the Tate Modern. Louise Bourgeois’s Maman was outside (I’ve seen her spider in three places now--Ottawa, Bilbao, and London). I will go back to see their special Louise Bourgeois exhibition at a later date when my schedule permits. Today we just had time to see a few of the floors.

We checked out the Unilever Series installation in the Turbine Hall--Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth--which was a huge crack across the length of the concrete floor of the massive Turbine Hall. Now how many museums will go to that extreme for an installation? It was actually pretty cool, even if one doesn’t get all of the symbolism, about the separation of one people from another, one time period from another, or, for the artist, “the crack reveals a colonial and imperial history that has been disregarded, marginalized or simply obliterated… the history of racism, running parallel to the history of modernity and… its untold dark side.” The booklet continues. “Gouging open the very ground that we walk on, Salcedo reminds us that these wounds can not be simply consigned to the past. She encourages us to confront discomforting truths about our world and about ourselves with absolute candidness and without self-deception.” Yes I got it. But only because the booklet told me. So, what I want to know is, are there people who actually get the symbolism and messages in pieces like this WITHOUT having it spelled out for them? I certainly don’t. At any rate, even those visitors who didn’t get it, or didn’t read the literature, seemed to have a good time, following the crack from one end to the other, crossing over it and sometimes straddling it.

We then went up to the fifth and third floors, but couldn’t finish. Katie was having a wonderful time, reliving her college art history classes and would have gladly stayed until closing except that we needed to get back home to eat and to freshen up before the play.

The play was better than I was expecting. The person filling in for Kelly Osborne did a much better job than I think Kelly would have done, and only one character flubbed some lines and let her English accent come through occasionally.

Today (Friday) we did manage to leave fairly early. While Gord was teaching, Katie wanted to see the house we lived in when we were here in 1996, as well as the school she attended during that time. So Katie, Brad, and I took the subway up to Swiss Cottage to our place on Buckland Crescent, and then we walked down, through Primrose Hill, then skirted the London Zoo, to Gloucester Avenue. The school was still there, looking exactly the same. We grabbed a bite to eat in a Lebanese restaurant and then walked through a bit of Camden Town before heading down to Bloomsbury to meet Gord at the British Museum.

We saw more of the museum today than I have ever done at one time before--we did all of the highlights and then a whole lot more. We saw ancient Greece and Egypt, Rome, Assyria, Asia, the Pacific, North America, and I’ve probably missed something. We didn't do Africa. Katie would have stayed until they closed at 8:30, but the rest of us had reached our saturation point, and, besides, there was more on today’s list of activities.

So we left there and went over to a hookah bar near Bond Street. Actually the woman waiting on us corrected me. She doesn’t call the water pipe a hookah, preferring to call it a shisha instead. I’m not sure but she said something about shisha is the Turkish word for it, I think (and hookah is Egyptian?). If anyone out there wants to clarify this for me, I would love to hear from you. Of the three flavour choices (strawberry, apple, or grape), we tried grape. It was a very mild taste and fun to do once, but my curiosity is now satisfied. And it was pretty expensive too (twenty pounds).

We then made our way home for dinner and now Katie and Brad are out checking out the hip hop scene in Brixton.

I just might post a photo of me using the shisha, but it is in Katie's camera. We'll see.