London - Day 9

First - dinner at Hakkasan last night was fantastic.  The restaurant is in the basement of a building down a dead end street, very small entry with a door monitor making sure anyone entering has a reservation.  Down a long flight of stairs and you enter into a huge space, totally unexpected, and very modern and contemporary.  The food was Chinese, but with a modern flare, and very very tasty.

 

 

Today we started our day at the Natural History Museum.  An huge complex of buildings right next to the Science Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum.  The museum is separated into 4 zones, the Red Zone(Earth Lab), the Blue Zone(Dinosaurs, Reptiles and Mammals), the Green Zone(Birds, Fossils and Minerals) and the Orange Zone(the new Darwin Center).  We spent most of our time in the Minerals and Earth History sections, spending a brief amount of time in the fossils and mammals section.  You could spend a full day at the museum and still not see everything.  Admission is free except for the new Darwin Center exhibit, and be prepared for a lot of school aged children.

Our next stop was the Tate Modern to see the Pop Life art exhibit.  We are both fans of Pop art by artists like Warhol and Haring so we were excited to see the exhibit.  The building housing the Tate is quite impressive.

The galleries are housed in the former Bankside Power Station, which was originally designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Battersea Power Station, and built in two stages between 1947 and 1963. The power station closed in 1981. The building was converted by architects Herzog & de Meuron and contractors Carillion, after which it stood at 99m tall. The history of the site as well as information about the conversion was the basis for a 2008 documentary Architects Herzog and de Meuron: Alchemy of Building -  Tate Modern.

There were quite a few pieces by Warhol and a lot of pieces from his magazine Interview.  Keith Haring's Pop Shop from Manhattan was duplicated but there weren't many of his pieces of art.  We were not impressed with the rest of the exhibit, just not our taste.

When we arrived in London at our hotel we asked the concierge to try and find us tickets to see the Priscilla Queen of the Desert musical based on the movie of the same name.  I had heard it was a great production and seats were hard to find.  Because Clark has a hard time bending one knee we can only sit on the right-hand side aisle, an impossible task for the concierge, but I thought we would try.  I was very excited when I heard they were able to get us tickets in row 5 on the aisle, I'm not sure how he did it but I was very happy.  The show was fantastic, great songs, great costumes and sets, we had a great time.

Link to video clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwQXk8R9uzI