An Artsy Week

This week started with what my roommate Liz deemed "the artsiest day possible." Picture 15 photo students with cameras attached to their eyes following our professor who resembles a 5 ft. tall version of Santa. We took a boat down the Thames to Tower Bridge and essentially worked our way back up the south side of the river stopping at places my teacher thought were interesting. To be honest, I didn't get the best pictures out of the trip (partially because it was a cloudy, gross day and partially because I had loaded the film in my camera incorrectly...) but I really enjoyed it. The first place we stopped was the Merchant Marine Memorial, which is a really beautiful monument dedicated to the men who died during WWI and WWII who worked on merchant ships, and people come and leave flags in the ground there in remembrance. We continued on stopping at the tower bridge, the OXO building, a pub (where our teacher bought us drinks!), and Borough Market. Borough Market is literally under London Bridge and has every type of food you could ever want. Liz and I both got chicken sandwiches from this funny man who made us do Jazz hands before he would give us our sandwiches. Strange, but worth it. It was quite possibly the best chicken sandwich I had ever had. We finished up the day walking the south bank of the Thames which is where the Globe and National theaters are. Here are some of my pictures from the day:

View from the OXO builiding

Along the river ThamesSundial in front of Tower BridgeMerchant Marine MemorialView of Parliament from the River Boat

I had plans to visit the Tate Modern on Saturday, but it was such a nice day that some of my flatmates and I decided our time would be better spent paddle boating on the lake in Hyde Park. It's only open until the end of October so it was at the top of our priority lists. For anyone planning on visiting London, I would definitely recommend doing this, even if the paddling was a little harder than I had originally anticipated. We only rented the boat for half an hour so after that we got the most delicious waffles from a cart (you can tell how delicious they were by how big my smile is in the picture haha), walked around the park, and visited the Princess Diana memorial fountain.

The rest of my week was pretty average until Thursday when I visited the Frieze Art Fair in Regent's Park. I was required to go for my business of art class and I didn't really know what to expect, but I ended up really enjoying it. It's one of if not the largest art fair of the year so art galleries from around the world bring pieces to try and sell at this fair. Some of the stuff was really strange, but I liked most of it. Even more interesting though were the other people who attended the fair- it was everyone from high end art dealers to foreign tourists to punks with mohawks and funny colored hair. I could've spent days in the fair and still not seen everything, but eventually I forced myself to leave and I wandered around the park. It's finally fall in London and the trees were just gorgeous. Here are some of my favorite pieces from Frieze and the view from my bench in the park.
Friday I went to Hampton Court Palace through a Syracuse field trip and Saturday I explored Camden town, but I'm too tired to post about that now- maybe I'll take a study break tomorrow (midterms are next week) to write a quick post!