Sloane's Rooms and Show Tunes

On Wednesday we got lunch at The Barbary, which is another delicious tapas style restaurant in our area. This particular place draws its inspiration from the Barbary Coast (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya). We got naan with black tahini and beetroot with labneh, chicken, cauliflower, and burrata. The food was so good that we got too full for dessert!

The restaurant was down a small alleyway in an adorable courtyard--a common feature of our neighborhood.

After a very satisfying lunch, we went to Sir John Sloane's Museum. Photos were not allowed (I also had to carry my purse around in a plastic bag. I'm still not quite sure why), so I've included links throughout this entry if you would like to see relevant images.

John Sloane was an architect who collected a lot of cool antiquities and paintings. The house was quite warm and featured a lot of narrow hallways, so it's certainly not for the claustrophobic. The architecture of the house itself was really interesting, featuring skylights that shone down through two floors of the house. My favorite element of his collection was the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti. How does one even go about procuring an Egyptian king's sarcophagus?? Not a problem for Sir John Sloane.

More images and info on the sarcophagus can be found here.

We learned that John was friends with our old buddy JMW Turner; one of his paintings was in the house. There was also a temporary sculpture exhibit sprinkled throughout the house: Marc Quinn's Drawn from Life. I'm not normally much of a sculpture person, but I found the hollowness of the figures and the isolated arms pretty visually stunning.

At 4:30 they open the panels in the Picture Room (pretty much what it sounds like) to reveal Even More Paintings, eight of which were part of William Hogarth's series A Rake's Progress. Our guide explained that the paintings tell the story of a young man who learned that his family was super rich after his father died, and once he got his inheritance he became kind of a jerk and ultimately ended up in Bedlam (this is an incredibly simplified version of the story; click here for the full narrative, accompanied by images of the paintings!). The story definitely added a layer of interest to paintings that I probably normally would not have looked twice at.

That night we saw Dreamgirls, which we had heard was amazing. We were disappointed to learn that it was Amber Riley's night off (she played Mercedes on Glee and usually plays Effie). Her stand-in was still talented, but in general we found the show underwhelming. We weren't terribly invested in any of the characters, and there wasn't sufficient spectacle to make up for that. I would have probably preferred to watch a concert performance of the best songs from the show and saved some time. The design was pretty--so many sparkles!--but again, not in a way that made up for our general disinterest.

After the show we had dinner at a tasty French restaurant called Balthazar. For dessert I had a Grasshopper, which is a cocktail that I've only ever heard my friend Cass order. It turns out it's a lot like drinking mint chocolate chip ice cream, so a pretty perfect dessert beverage.

For the colorblind among you, that is green.

I like that London has a lot of small museums dedicated to preserving old things and the homes of notable British people. We have a few more of these types of places on our list; this trip has made me want to look into similar things in New York. I need to do better at taking advantage of living in NYC!

xo
Hannah