Saturday did not go quite as smoothly as we had planned. Annie was supposed to arrive at Newark from Los Angeles an hour after our flight from Paris, except that her flight was delayed three hours. This pushed everything back and we didn't get home until 11:30 that night. But we are home and that's all that matters. I don't know how Gord stayed awake to drive the rental car to Saratoga, but he did.

I feel grateful for the past four and a half months, and to have had the opportunity to see so much. Here is my list.

Museums, Galleries, Historic Places
Tintagel Castle
Tintagel Old Post Office
National Portrait Gallery x2
Foundling Museum
British Library
Imperial War Museum North, Manchester
Manchester Art Gallery
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
Manchester Museum
The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire
York Minster
Castle Museum, York
York Art Gallery
London Canal Museum
Parasol unit foundation
Jewish Museum
Ben Uri Gallery and Museum
Tate Modern x2
2 Willow Road
Pump House Gallery
The British Museum
Inner Temple Hall
Museum of London
Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy
Fondacione Bottari Lattes, Montforte d'Alba, Italy
Victoria & Albert Museum
Pretty Green Store, Art in a Corner
National Gallery
Spain
Wallace Collection
King's Place
Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garrett
Strawberry Hill
Hunterian Museum
Leighton House Museum
Sotheby's, Bowie/Collector
Halcyon Gallery, Bob Dylan, The Beaten Path x2
Royal Academy of Arts
Royal Geographical Society
Canada House, Floe Edge
St. Martin in the Fields, Portraits in Character
Tate Britain
Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace
In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes walking tour
Covent Garden Comedy Club
Handel & Hendrix in London
Southbank Centre
18 Stafford Terrace
Design Museum
Wellcome Collection
Newport Street Gallery, Gavin Turk
Sutton House and Breaker's Yard
Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Whitechapel Gallery
Somerset House, Courtauld Gallery

Concerts
London Concertante, Southwark Cathedral
St. Mary Abbotts Church
St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Parks/Squares
Battersea Park
Joseph Grimaldi Park x3
Russell Square
Woburn Square
Gordon Square
Regent's Canal Towpath
Lincoln's Inn Fields
Camley Street Natural Park
St. Pancras Gardens

Markets
Bourough Market x3
Spitalfields Market x2
Leadenhall Market
Portobello Market

Plays/Musicals
Nicholas Nickleby, Minack Theatre, Cornwall
The Entertainer
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Kinky Boots
Secret Theatre Project
Cymbelline
Julius Caesar
Lazarus
Matilda
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
Wicked
The Tempest
King Lear
Nice Fish

Spain
Barcelona
Sagrada Familia
San Pau Art Nouveau Site
Park Guell
Cathedral of Barcelona
Picasso Museum
Madrid
Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Prado
Royal Palace
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
Toledo
Toledo Cathedral
Santa Cruz Museum
Granada
Nasrid Palaces, Alhambra
Alcazaba fort, gardens, Generalife, Alhambra
Albayzin, Plaza San Nicolas, Great Mosque
Seville
Flamenco
Murillo Gardens
Virgen de Valme pilgrimage
Seville walking tour
Seville Cathedral
Church del Salvador
Royal Alcazar
Church of Santa Maria la Blanca
Cordoba
Mezquita
Museum of Al-Andalus Life
Jewish Ghetto
Cordoba Synagogue

And countless restaurants.

Update: Our box of clothes arrived yesterday. The delay was not due to the tea after all. The agricultural hold by the U.S. Department of Agriculture was apparently because of my shoes, I think. They found a contaminant in the shipment, and the shipment either had to be treated, re-exported, or destroyed. Fortunately, they opted to treat it and then release it for delivery. I guess London's streets are not very clean. What a surprise.

It took seven hours to get to Paris, door to door, yesterday. The Eurostar would have been so much better. We were picked up at noon, it took 1.5 hours to get to Heathrow because of traffic, our flight was delayed (someone missed the flight and the airline had trouble finding their suitcase to remove it from the plane), and it took 1.45 hours to get from Charles de Gaulle airport to our hotel because of traffic. The "taxi" charged way too much because it wasn't a real taxi. We knew better, we knew it while we followed him to his car and we knew it getting in, but for some reason we let it happen. The good news is that tomorrow we have a shuttle picking us up and it is one-quarter the cost of the taxi.

The hotel recommended a nice little restaurant for dinner. I had a list of some that were a little bit further away, but it was late and we were tired. Le Volcan was perfect, and our waiter was delightful, so we were happy. We walked a little after dinner.

We had a full day in Paris today, despite a very problematic knee. It has bothered me the entire time in London, but more as an annoyance than anything else. This morning, however, was different. I'm not sure if it was because of hauling my suitcase and heavy carry-on bag, or the very inadequate leg room on the plane, or a combination of the two, but I was a limping mess. It didn't stop me, however, it only slowed us down.

First we had to stop for coffee and croissants.

Then we walked to the Louvre.

Close-up of an outside section of the Louvre

We took in as much as we could in the short time we had allotted.

Botticelli

Fra Angelico, The Coronation of the Virgin, circa 1430-1432

Close-up of the ceiling in the Grand Salon Carré

Madness around the Mona Lisa

Barnaba da Modena, The Virgin and the Infant, circa 1370-1375

Eugene Delacroix, Young Orphan Girl in the Cemetery

Giuseppe Castiglione, View of the Large Salon Carré in the Louvre

Detail of the above. Note this is a painting of the room I photographed (see 4 photos above).

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, An Odalisque, 1814

Auguste Renoir, The Lecture

Frans Hals, Jester with a Lute, circa 1623-1624

I know Gord could have stayed all day, but he graciously acquiesced to my request that we also visit the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. We left the Louvre accidentally via an underground shopping mall. We initially thought it was an immense museum shop, but the Apple store made us realize we were wrong. We eventually found our way out to the rue de Rivoli. And to Angelina's for lunch and the all-important chocolat chaud.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and in the 50s, and I took quite a few photos on the walk to the second museum.

Installing cobblestones

A pair of knockers

The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was good, although there was confusion when we tried unsuccessfully to enter through an exit, then had to go back outside and climb even more stairs, only to climb down another set of stairs to end up at the exit through which we had tried to enter. Maybe I was just grumpy because of my knee, but I didn't see the point in this. It wouldn't have been so bad if there hadn't been a number of other stairs throughout the visit and if we hadn't already walked a couple of miles and if we hadn't seen the guard let other people in that way.

Matisse

David Altmejd, Les Noix, 2014

Auguste Herbin, Femmes et enfants, 1914

Robert Delauney, Tour Eiffel, 1926 

Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 1995

We got another recommendation for dinner from our hotel, and it was good (and, more importantly, it was a short walk). This was my starter dish. How else would you serve Rillettes de sardines maison except in a sardine tin?

We have to get up early tomorrow to be ready for our 7 AM shuttle pick-up. I'll try to get this posted so that I can get to bed at a decent hour. Our visit to Paris was too short. I love this city.

I still have one final entry before I can put this blog to bed. I doubt I'll be able to do it tomorrow, but probably on Sunday.


Update: One of the boxes (the box of books) we shipped on Monday arrived in Saratoga safely on Wednesday. The box of clothes didn't, at least not yet. It was late leaving the UK because it was awaiting clearing agency review, but it left on Tuesday and got as far as Louisville, Kentucky. It was still in Louisville today due to an agricultural hold. The only thing I can think of that would fall under agricultural would be the unlabeled jar of jasmine pearls that I threw in there at the last minute. This was tea I brought with me from home in August. At any rate, I'm guessing they've opened the box and have gone through everything in it. Hopefully it will all work out and we will receive the package anon, with or without the jasmine pearls.

I spent the day cleaning, packing, and working on a list of all the places I visited on this trip. I haven't finished the list yet as it requires rereading the entire blog. As I read, I realized there were a lot of things I had planned to do, but I ran out of time. I could make an equally long list of the places I didn't visit on this trip. London is a treasure trove of things to do.

At some point after lunch, I walked over to Joseph Grimaldi park again and did find the art installation by Henry Krokatsis, An Invitation to Dance on the Grave. It was in the same annex of the park as Grimaldi's grave, but in the opposite corner. I danced on it, but most of the tiles no longer played notes. The two casket shapes of the installation were inscribed--the casket on the right with Joseph Grimaldi and the one on the left with his mentor, the English dramatist Charles Dibdin.

We left the flat some time after five and headed to Picadilly Circus and the Harold Pinter Theatre to see Nice Fish. We first had dinner across the street before the play but were in our seats with about thirty minutes to spare. The couple next to us struck up a conversation when they heard our accents. It turns out they are history professors from Ontario, one teaches at McMaster University in Hamilton and the other teaches at the University of Western Ontario in London. They were here for two weeks doing research on a joint book project about love letters that were written almost daily from 1911 to 1919 between a Canadian man and an English woman.

But I digress. The play Nice Fish was written by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins (a Minnesota/Oklahoma prose poet), and directed by Claire van Kampen. It stars Rylance and Jim Lichtscheidl, as well as Kayli Carter, Raye Birk, and Bob Davis. It was originally commissioned by the Guthrie Theater in 2013, and played last February/March in Brooklyn at St. Ann's Warehouse (where we tried to get tickets, but waited too long and then they were sold out). The set, designed by Todd Rosenthal, was very cool, but I can't imagine how he pulled it off in Brooklyn, given that space. The entire play is set on a frozen lake in Minnesota. It grew out of a collection of poetry by Louis Jenkins. It is funny, yet serious, with some wonderful observations about humanity. And it is always interesting to watch Rylance's delivery.

Tonight is our last night. I've showered, the towels have been washed and are in the dryer. (I didn't run the extra rinse cycle with the fabric softener and I hope they don't notice.) The alarm is set for 7 AM so that I can wash the sheets before we leave for the airport at noon. We'll leave only one towel that will have to be laundered by the land-people.