{"id":1889,"date":"2009-09-14T15:09:37","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T19:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=1889"},"modified":"2009-09-14T15:24:02","modified_gmt":"2009-09-14T19:24:02","slug":"the-big-five-themes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2009\/09\/the-big-five-themes\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Big Five” Themes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although I have blogged, to some extent, about most academic things I have done in London, I feel that I have a better impression of most things now than I did at the beginning of the stay.\u00a0 Along this vein, I feel the need to revise, or just plain state, my opinions on the “Big Five” topics\u00a0– parks,\u00a0churches, museums, theatres, and pubs.<\/p>\n

I have now been to five of the Royal Parks<\/a>\u00a0in London.\u00a0 Green Park, Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, and St James’ Park are all very similar and yet very different in their own ways.\u00a0 I found Green Park, situated very close to Buckingham Palace, to have the most unfriendly atmosphere of the five.\u00a0 There is very little to Green Park.\u00a0 There are trees, benches, grass, the ever-popular lawn chairs for rent,\u00a0and beautiful ornate gates facing Buckingham Palace.\u00a0 I think the reason I found the park so cold is that it was, well, too green.\u00a0 There were no flowers or water features (except for one fountain commemorating the Canadians), just trees, grass, and benches.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is vastly different from the other four parks I visited.\u00a0 St James’ Park, Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, and Kensington Gardens all were beautifully landscaped with brightly colored flowers, clean fountains, scultpures, and\u00a0natural or constructed water\u00a0features.\u00a0 In Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, and Kensington Gardens it was easy to forget that you were in the middle of a pollution-filled city.\u00a0 As\u00a0I am not much of a city person,\u00a0it was extremely refreshing for me to not\u00a0be able to hear\u00a0or see traffic for a while.\u00a0 With Green Park and St James’ Park, I couldn’t shake that feeling.\u00a0 However, I am a firm believer that parks, whether or not they are within city limits, always make people feel healthier.\u00a0 For this reason and the sheer beauty that the parks portrayed in their different ways, I understand why I did not only see tourists, but the people of London as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Gates

Gates towards Buckingham Palace from Green Park<\/p><\/div>\n

Churches and other places of worship are an integral part of societies throughout the world.\u00a0 Throughout our time in London, we have been fortunate enough to visit Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, a Sikh gurdwara, and a Hindu temple.\u00a0 Of these four I enjoyed St Paul’s Cathedral the most from a purely historical standpoint and the Hindu temple most from a cultural perspective.\u00a0 St. Paul’s is one of the most recognizable and interesting buildings in London.\u00a0 It not only houses some of the most important military remains in the country (the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson), but it was one of the most iconic images of WWII Britain.\u00a0 I also found it to be less like a museum\u00a0where I felt like hop-scotching around graves\u00a0in the floor (Westminster Abbey) and much more like a place of worship.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I enjoyed the Hindu temple for very different reasons.\u00a0 Although there was a definite sense of it being a tourist attraction, with the gift shop in the lobby and the interpretive centre with tiny models of Hindu gods, the temple was still very obviously, well, a temple.\u00a0 Before going there, I had no idea what Hinduism was like.\u00a0 I knew that there\u00a0are multiple gods and that one is an elephant, but I didn’t know about their dedication to peace and volunteer work.\u00a0 What really struck me about it was that the intricate carving and craftsmanship of the facility was all done by volunteers.\u00a0 I think that this cultural experience was only heightened by being able to observe a service in the sanctuary that was so unlike my own Roman Catholic faith.<\/p>\n

\"St

St Paul's Cathedral - a symbol and a place of worship<\/p><\/div>\n

I had very mixed experiences with museums in London.\u00a0 Some, like the Victoria and Albert, I just didn’t seem to understand in the amount of time I spent there.\u00a0 However, I think that if I went back and dedicated a day to the facility, I would appreciate how the seemingly-random exhibits link together much better.\u00a0 (I did enjoy the items on display in the V&A, I just had an issue with the layout of the museum.)\u00a0 Other museums, like the Museum of London and the Docklands Museum, were put together in a very fluid and informative manner that I enjoyed greatly.\u00a0 My two biggest museum issues were with the British Museum and Sir John Soane’s Home\/Museum.\u00a0 Grace and I wrote extensively on our thoughts on the British Museum<\/a>, so instead of repeating everything, I’ll just give a brief summary: why are all of these amazing artifacts that have no connection to Britain in the British Museum?\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Sir John Soane Museum is a completely different story.\u00a0\u00a0I appreciated that the museum was free and displayed an extremely eclectic collection, but please never make me go back there ever again!\u00a0 It was the single most claustrophobic place I have ever been in my entire life with possibly one exception.\u00a0 Call it a personal thing, I do not like it when random pieces of monuments are mounted on the ceiling directly above my head.\u00a0 I am also not a big fan of walking into a room in a house and having literally hundreds of sculpture eyes staring at me from every surface around me.\u00a0 I disliked it so much that I could not even finish going through it, and anyone who has been in a museum with me will know that I read and see as much as I possibly can.\u00a0 I don’t understand why that creepy building perfectly-suited to be a haunted house at Halloween is called a museum.\u00a0 (Please if you can attempt to explain it to me, go right ahead!)<\/p>\n

Theatre is a subject I have talked about in a couple of different posts (Observations on Accessibility<\/a> and Blood Painters and Pitmen Brothers<\/a>), however, I have not discussed theatre in general.\u00a0 I was lucky enough to see Troilus and Cressida<\/em>, All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/em>, Arcadia<\/em>, The Pitmen Painters<\/em>, and Blood Brothers<\/em>.\u00a0 Each of these theatre experiences were extremely different, but all valuable in their own ways.\u00a0 Troilus and Cressida<\/em>was shown in the Globe Theatre and we had groundling tickets that forced us to stand for the 3 hour performance.\u00a0 The actual standing wasn\u2019t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, but the best thing about the show was being quite literally three-to-four feet away from the actors on stage.\u00a0 (Actually, it was slightly amusing when Hector died and was lying 3 feet away in our line of sight for the last 20 minutes of the play!) The staging of this Shakespearian play was vastly different to All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/em>, which was put on in the National Theatre.\u00a0 In the Globe, the sets are quite minimal because they have to perform four or five different shows on the same stage in the space of a few days.\u00a0 The set for All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/em> was much more elaborate and specialized for the show. \u00a0Rather than the reliance on the actors and the costumes that the Globe used to tell you where the play was occurring, All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/em> used a dark set with elaborate staircases to add to the mood of characters and the dialogue.<\/p>\n

Much like with Troilus and Cressida<\/em>, the set for Arcadia <\/em>was also pretty simple.\u00a0 Although the play took place in two different years, it was set in exactly the same room with almost all of the same props.\u00a0 This was a very effective way to stage the show and allowed for the writer, Tom Stoppard, to do some very interesting things with the characters from both time periods, like when he had them all in the room at the same time, oblivious to each other.\u00a0 I particularly enjoyed the way that this play was set and how basic it was.\u00a0 It was vastly different from the more complicated sets of The Pitmen Painters<\/em>, which included projection screens, and Blood Brothers<\/em>, which had lots of windows for the Devil\/God character to peer creepily out of.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This final subject I have not blogged about at all.\u00a0 Pubs are an integral part of British culture.\u00a0 That said, pubs are also an integral part of Irish culture, so I experienced pub life when I lived in Ireland.\u00a0 British pubs and Irish pubs have a lot of similarities and differences.\u00a0 In both places, you must push viciously up to the bar in order to get your food and drink, you have to be 18 to have alcohol, smoking must be done outside, and there are usually way too many people in the pub for you to feel comfortable.\u00a0 Oh, and you always pay way more than you think you should for your drink.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been to a couple of pubs in London and have found that they are all fairly similar.\u00a0 The bartenders are nice, but kind of frantic; the food is good, and usually relatively cheap; and the music is God-awful 1980s or techno playing at volumes that are way too loud.\u00a0 The first two are cohesive with pretty well every Irish pub I\u2019ve ever been in, the third is not.\u00a0 Irish pubs play good music\u2026 or at least much better music than I\u2019ve heard here!\u00a0 There are a lot of pubs that have a band playing traditional Irish music in front of you in the pub for pints and there are also a lot that play modern music at volumes that make my ears want to cry \u2013 but at least the music isn\u2019t a Cher and Meatloaf duet <\/a>accompanied with the weirdest music video I have ever seen in my entire life.\u00a0 (This particular musical masterpiece was played in The Court the other day.\u00a0 I never would have thought of that particular combination, but oooooookkkkkkkkkk.)\u00a0 Truth be told, I just want to find a comfortable pub with some good music and that will make me just as happy as George Orwell\u2019s fictitious Moon Under Water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although I have blogged, to some extent, about most academic things I have done in London, I feel that I have a better impression of most things now than I did at the beginning of the stay.\u00a0 Along this vein, I feel the need to revise, or just plain state, my opinions on the “Big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,744,77,92,78],"tags":[1088,1067,1453,905,1123,1455,1452,1027,1454,961,969,962],"class_list":["post-1889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-churches-and-cathedrals","category-kelley","category-museums","category-pubs","category-theatre","tag-alls-well-that-ends-well","tag-arcadia","tag-claustrophobia","tag-green-park","tag-hinduism","tag-irish-music","tag-john-soane","tag-royal-parks","tag-sets","tag-shakespeare","tag-st-pauls-cathedral","tag-troilus-and-cressida"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}