DAY SEVENTEEN

Hello all!  Yes it is I, still alive and kicking.  I’ve decided not to post on weekends (including Fridays), because we mostly just wander aimlessly around.  The last post dealt with Bath, last Wednesday, and today I’m picking up about yesterday: Monday!

It’s the penultimate Monday we have here in London (officially, anyway) and everyone’s getting a little frantic about not having done any work.  I’ve done SOME of it, but by no means all of it.  That’s what this Friday is for.  Took a river boat to Greenwich Monday.  For those of you who don’t know:  the London that we think of as LONDON is really a bunch of small cities a bit like how New York is really the Bronx, Brooklyn, etc.  Greenwich is another city within the city and is, most famously, the site of the Prime Meridian.

The Royal Observatory is located there, but you had to pay about 10 pounds to go into the complex proper and see all the neat stuff.  Highway robbery. Something like the Prime Meridian should be free.  My friends shelled out the pounds to get their picture taken straddling longitude zero, but I, being the frugal person I am, struck out on my own and wandered around Greenwich.

It’s a nice, quaint little town on the Thames with lots of little taverns and such along the way.  There were sections by the river with stairs where you could climb down to the actual banks of the river and so I did.  I had heard that in past trips students had found quite interesting things on the banks of the Thames (I mean, there’s about 2000 years of history floating about in that muck)  but I guess I picked the bad section.  All I found was a whole bunch of bones.  It was kind of creepy, the amount of bones.  I picked one up and brought it back with me, but I don’t think I’ll be keeping it.  Watch it turn out and be the shattered femur of some poor, lost child or something.  That’s just what I need going through customs.

A lot of the stuff in Greenwich was closed because the whole of London is gearing up for the Olympics next summer.  For instance, we couldn’t see the Cutty Sark, the famous tea clipper that’s dry-docked in the city, because it was under refurbishment so that Greenwich doesn’t look the slob for all the foreign hordes attending the games.

In other news, we saw a play called The Holy Rosenbergs at the National Theatre last night.  It was in this little blackbox theatre called the Cottesloe Theatre, which was very intimate and nice.  We were seated up in these gallery seats and had to lean over to see the action going on in this central pit area.  A lot of people complained about it, but I thought it suited the subject matter very nicely.

The play focuses on the plight of a small Jewish family living in London who are brought together for the funeral of Danny, one of the family’s children.  He died fighting for “the Homeland” in the Gaza conflict (it is a very contemporary show).  Meanwhile, Ruth, the Rosenberg daughter, is working as an international lawyer for the U.N. investigating war crimes on the part of the Israelis in Gaza.  Naturally this causes a lot of tension in their very tight-knit community who are all in favor of the Israeli forces, and some people are threatening to protest Danny’s funeral if Ruth attends.  On top of all this, the father and mother Rosenberg run a Kosher catering service that is about to capsize financially.  The last hope for their business lies in the publicity they will get by catering the wedding of the daughter of their close friend and synagogue chairman, Saul Morgenstern, but find that Ruth’s new infamy has tainted all of their allegiances.

It was a very well-acted play with a lot of heavy emotion, but suffered from some snags in the writing.  I would recommend it if it ever makes it to the States.

Tomorrow we’re going to see War Horse which is supposed to be excellent!  I’m very excited about it.

Cheers to plays and blog-brevity.

— Henry