Day 19: Operating Theater & Southwark Cathedral

Down by London Bridge is the more industrial /businessy area of London.  We were down by Southwark and found a few little gems.

 

This is Southwark Cathedral.  It hasn't been a cathedral long but its been a Priory Church since the 13th century.  Note the flying buttresses along the right.  The funny thing about this place was it reminded me of one of those awful teenagers keychains with a billion stuffed cats and pictures but no keys.  Its like every inch of wallspace in the place has been taken up with some plaque or memorandum and the floor also.  Its like an old lady's house where everything has this big story to go with it.  I don't know if I'm necessarily all about that in a place of worship but maybe that's just what happens when something sticks around for a thousand years.

 I have got to get me one of these.

 This nice tour guide was showing me around and I guess she liked me cause she took me into a roped off area in the heart of the cathedral and then said that Shakespeare's brother had attended the church and actually been buried there.  I said, "really?!" and she looked at my feet and to my own surprise she was telling the truth and I was standing on him.

 A lot of the stained glass windows commemorate different things and this one is brand new.  It wouldn't even officially be there until Sunday (the Queen's Diamond Jubilee).  The stained glass window was for the Queen and has 60 diamonds in it.  The colors are magnificent and it is a really beautiful piece.  Now the Queen has her own memento in the cathedral

In the "Sanctuary." 
Also in Southwark is the old operating theater.  It dates back to about 1815 and is in the attic of an old church (which was actually built next to a hospital).  One might wonder why an attic seemed like a good space for operations, nothing like carrying recent amputees down stairs, but the answer is light.  A simple gaslamp won't really cut it for surgery so an operating theater needs to be on top of a building and have big big sky lights.  There is a small museum next to the theater where the old apothecary used to be.

 Ever notice that tools for saving lives look the same as ones to end them?

 Kidneys on the right, brain in the back left.

 This thing will haunt my nightmares forever.

 Charlie is the lucky rapscallion to have his leg amputated.  So they don't really use scalpels.  Each surgeon would have a set of knives made corresponding to their height and size.  Look at that sucker.  Its like seven inches long and it is the smallest one.  They would actually reach under and around the leg and cut downward.  As you can see the conditions are appalling. Everything is made out of wood and the surgeons wouldn't even wash their aprons, which were to keep their suits (they want to look good for this I guess) clean.  Rumor was the more stains on your surgeons aprons, the more experienced and skilled he was.  They wouldn't figure out about germs and bacteria a while yet and anesthetic wouldn't be invented until 1847, lucky Charlie!

Without any anesthetics you can imagine that the key in surgery is SPEED!  Good surgeons could do a full amputation in under two minutes.  There was one famous surgeon who had people watching time him and could apparently do them in 30 seconds. 

 The big thing to remember is at the time people are really, really either Catholic or Anglican.  So they have an important belief in the second coming and the resurrection.  So everyone is afraid that if they aren't buried properly, all body parts together, on consecrated ground that they can't be resurrected.  Now they are beginning to dissect bodies for science (they're still using leeches for pity's sake) but people aren't exactly lining up to donate their bodies to science.  So this (and a hundred years or two before) is the age of bodysnatchers.  People will dig up fresh corpses and sell them to medstudents.  Or doctors will give a family a coffin and they'll open it to find a bag of bricks.  Before this some criminals that were sentenced to execution, if their crimes were really bad, were also sentenced to having their bodies given to science.  That was considered a fate worse than death.  So when you get cut up by a noob they might have sat on the front row of one of these operating theaters a time or two if you're lucky.  Its really not shocking to see how little they understood about the human body.  People were giving each other TB and London wouldn't figure out the indoor plumbing scene for a while yet so they're still throwing their own waste into the Thames.
A fun fact of our theater is that it was actually a women's theater.  Cause its totally inappropriate I guess for genders to be mixed when missing limbs are involved.  It was considered indecent for a woman to be stared at by a bunch of male medical students unless she had a blindfold on (cause you know, if she can't see them its totally not happening).  Men just had to take it.  They might use gin or opiates or chloroform a little later on but as the below picture illustrates, you really just had to take it.

 This guy is a scary compendium of knowledge about diseases during 1800 London.  I wish I could remember more of his whole schpiel.  And doesn't he look so fantastically British?!  We learned about gin and poor waste management, black death, blue death, TB, and so much more!  Funny part was he finished his tour, we had a round of applause then he says, "do you want me to show you a prostitute's graveyard?"  "HELLS YES!"  "Woo!" *Assorted excited assent*

Apparently prostitutes used to be buried here and the city has since kind of expanded over it but they don't build on the space and people tie ribbons and jewelery on the gate and have a little service the first Friday of every month or something.  Tour highlight much?!

Day 18: Harry Potter Studio Tour

Okay so this was probably the best day of the trip.  After class we ate lunch and then got on a train out to Leavesden for the Harry Potter Studio tour.  So exciting!  We got on a special bus with Harry Potter business covering all of it.  And got to the studio.  So first you go through a line and get to see the actual cupboard under the stairs!  Then into a large theatre where you watch a short movie with some behind the scenes footage and the three kids.  Then the screen lifts up and you see the double doors leading to the Great Hall and the music from the Sorcerers Stone plays and you feel like little Harry on his first day and may or may not scream like a little kid.
 *Warning* The magic that follows may be too nerdy or awesome for some viewers.

 Me in the Great Hall

 The podium!

 Harry's first set of robes

 So was it just me or was this always mentioned in the books and never shown in the movies?

 All their costumes from the Goblet of Fire!

 They are even more beautiful in person

 Apparently what I desire is a trip to London with these guys.

 The common room!

 Gary Oldman's costume from Prisoner of Azkaban which was my favorite!

 Neato!

 The staircase for Dubledore's office was apparently one of the most complicated contraptions ever built for movies and it does actually move.

 The memory cabinet!

 Among other things the deilluminator, the crystal cup from number 6, the rememberall, Skeeter's quick-quotes quill, and yeah the SORCERERS STONE!

 Cool :)

 The pots really do stir themselves

 Door to the Chamber of Secrets, also complicated, not CG

 Hagrid's Hut

 The contraption used to make the brooms fly.

 Mrs. Weasley's Kitchen, knife and iron move on their own.

 Me looking evil in front of Bellatrix's costume.

 The Marauders Map

 Hold on!

 Number 4 Privet Drive

 Me drinking my Butterbeer in front of the Hogwarts Bridge.

 "As for me.  I'll be a knight."

 The basilisk from the Chamber of Secrets

 Me in Diagon Alley

 Where would a nerd be but in front of Flourish and Blotts?

 The grand finale!  A 1:32 model of Hogwarts castle.  It is unbelievably detailed.

My girls!  I would so be in Slitherin with them!

So what can I say about Harry Potter?  I mean it was a huge part of my childhood.  I remember getting the first three for Christmas and going to every midnight party following for the next installment and rereading them with my dad.  I went to most of the midnight premieres of the movies with my friends and family as I grew up and I have read the books an uncountable number of times.  I had poster books, Potter glasses, HP diary (I was in fifth grade), bookends (now passed on to my niece Sadie), and unauthorized guides aplenty.  What else can I really say?  Harry Potter was a cultural phenomenon that swept us all away and gave us a place to dream of.  I hope kids never miss out on getting to appreciate them but it won't quite ever be the same as having the date of the next book or movie six months away fixed in your mind.  I am so glad that I got to be a part of that and relive it :)

Day 17: National Gallery & National Portrait Gallery

Day 16 I took the day off.  I tried to go for a walk around Regent's Park but it was miserable busy.  So onward!
A classroom trip to the National Portrait Gallery actually ended up being more interesting than I thought it would be.  The portraits were organized by time period and it was really cool to see how the faces went from being all very similar looking to distinct.  And how portraiture went from being people sitting in chairs in their fancy clothes to something more liquid as representing less the physical features and more a person's...genaisequa (I have no idea how to spell this French word), personality, vibe, aura.  You know, their Themness. Wow, I'm a Creative Writing person and that went too far for me.
Okay so anyways.  Here are a few of the portraits that I liked.

 Lady Colin Campbell by Giovanni Boldini (1897) Wish I could show this one how I saw it, 10 feet tall.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (England's Poet Laureate) by Samuel Lawrence

Walter Richard Sickert by Phillip Steer (1894)

So then we went around the corner and I can't describe the experience properly.  The sheer spread of artists present overwhelms the mind.  I almost worry about having so many in such close proximity. I saw Gauguin, Manet, Seurat, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, Degas, Vermeer, Cezzane, Turner, Van Gogh, Warhol, Sikert, Rembrandt, and Monet (who is one of my all time favorites)!!

Some that I really liked were: The Feast of Belshazzar by Rembrandt.  It was referenced in a play I saw.  It depicts the event from the Old Testament (Daniel) where, after he blasphemes, a mystical hand from heaven writes on the wall of the wicked Belshazzar during a feast the words "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" 'you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting'.

This beautiful work is called "The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up" and it is by Turner.  Apparently I missed his exhibit at the Tate Britain and I intend to go back and see it.  It is an unbelievable painting, much like Monets', almost better viewed from afar.  I just couldn't believe the colors and beautiful hazy effect.

The Hay Wain, John Constable, 1821

 Sunflowers, Vincent Van Gogh

 The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein 1533
This one is kind of cool.  So we have these two great philosophers will all their tools for art, music, science, math, and that good stuff.  Then, if you stand to the far right in front of the painting the dark elipse at their feet becomes a skull.  Its supposed to be a reminder of the totality of death.  No matter how smart we get we still die.

After this I don't really know what else to say.  There was so much beautiful art there and I am so grateful that I was able to see so much of the greatest manifestations of human potential.  Absolutely stunning and lovely.