Best day EVER

Last Friday was a really good day for me. Somehow, there was an extra ticket to London for 11 pounds that included public transport for the entire day, and I managed to nab that ticket and go to London for a day. I'd been really tired from the trips to Bath and Brighton, so I just wanted to relax for a bit. I ended up going to Tate Britian and the Sir John Sloane Museum.

I was a little disappointed with Tate Britain--there was a lot of modern art, and I just missed the pre-Raphaelite exhibition, which is the one I was most interested in. There were a lot of sublime pieces, though, which were just as good. I love it when the painters pay so much attention to detail that the painting looks like a photograph. The Ashmolean at Oxford actually had a better collection of paintings, and they were all sketches of the beautiful Italian countryside, which made me want to go there (but hey, Rome in the last week yay!). I really should go to the Ashmolean and see their entire collection sometime--they have everything from Asian art to Roman statues.

Following that, I decided to go to Chinatown, because I was craving Chinese food. Come on, I haven't had anything good since coming here! This is the start of a happy day: I got some pretty good 四川擔擔麵 and 姜汁菠菜. Then, I walked to Covent Garden, which I didn't realize was such a huge shopping complex, with open-air markets, performers, and a giant plaza with the major brand name stores. On the way, I saw a froyo place called Snog, and I got froyo with real passionfruit (!!!!) and rasberries. Yum. <--this day is the main reason I went to badminton today, haha.

Isn't this the coolest froyo shop ever?

As for the Sir Sloane Museum, the only way to describe it is as a cabinet of curiosities. Every nook and cranny was filled with some Roman relic, or some nickel vase filled with glass, making it look as if it were overflowing with water. There were sarcophagi in the house, Asian vases, medieval shackles, paintings, etc. He built columns in the house to make it look Roman, and rooms with stained glass windows. Some rooms had at least 100 mirrors to capture the little light coming into the house, and the basement contained the memorial tablet for his wife...unless it also contained her grave somewhere. And that's creepy.

Creepy, of course, being the main event of the day, the play "A Woman in Black," which is a horror play about as lawyer being haunted by a woman in a deceased aunt's house as he goes through her papers looking for her will. I had my doubts about how well a theater could put on a scary production, but those were dispelled pretty quickly. I screamed at least three times during the movie, and at one point I jumped and grabbed onto Shannon, who was sitting in front of me, causing her to jump up and scream, too. Oops? I had difficulties sleeping that night; I kept thinking the woman would pop out and kill me. And it doesn't help that people had to remind me of the Grudge and the Ring at the same time. Ughhh, damn you horror movies!