Up earlyish and off to breakfast. Two cups of tea to begin the day. I guess I could say something about a traditional English breakfast, which is actually quite revolting and is why I only get the continental breakfast. A regular English breakfast consists of various things like eggs, a muffin or croissant, some slice of bacon ham thing, baked beans and some sort of blood sausage link thing. Oh and tea of course. So every morning I always get one croissant, two mini blueberry muffins, a box of frosted flakes to eat later, and go through generally two cups of tea. I keep it simple and American I guess. Haha. Today’s destination was the Nation Gallery and National Portrait Gallery. Museum museums everywhere but not a drop to drink. I’m starting to almost get museum-ed out. Anyways, off to the subway to the National Portrait Gallery. I saw a few interesting photos I liked here, minus some Warhol portraits. I’m not the biggest Warhol fan. It’s like, good for him for thinking of what he did and doing with pop art what he did, but I generally hate pop art anyways and hate bright vivid colors, and that’s exactly what Warhol is. Plus he’s gay. HAHAH. No really I just don’t like his work. Unfortunately, they had an Irving Penn exhibition, but it was closed. I love Irving Penn, and was excited to see his work, only to be shutdown. How sad. After walking everywhere, I headed to meet the group at the café there. Had myself two cups of tea. Delish. Then it was off to the National Gallery which was not quite as large as the Lourve, but entirely booked with paintings and only paintings. I actually did see a lot of artists I’ve studied and a few I actually really like, namely Anthony Van Dyck and especially Peter Paul Rubens. Others I saw and recognized included Carvaggio, Monet, Manet, Surat, and many others that I can’t recall. After spending too long staring at a billion paintings, four of us headed out for lunch, and we could not have picked a more awkward place to eat. From the look of it on the outside, it looked like a simple sandwich and pastry shop, but once inside it turned into an incredibly cheaply decorated awkward looking restaurant with awkward waiters and food. The menus given to us after we were seated were like a foot by two feet and there were no words really, just pages and pages of pictures of what the food is. Easton and I split some pizza he wanted… it was like a tex mex pizza? It was the most mysterious pizza I’ve ever eaten. There were chunks of something on it that we were even daring one another to eat- that’s how odd it was. Hah. After eating we went back to the town where our hotel is I had some chill time and was again reminded how much I love my ‘Kacie time’. (In my journal I wrote “love kacie time” and I was like ‘what? Everyone decided to love on kacie time? I misread it and what I meant was ‘I love my personal, to myself, kacie time’ haha) Everyone else was either not back yet, or preparing for our critique in an hour and a half or so. Since I can’t really do anything for critique, I decided I could just count the number of rolls of film I had taken thus far. It turned out to be five, which having been abroad nearly two and a half weeks, that’s kind of pathetic it seems. But after thinking about it and doing some math, 5 rolls of film, each at 36 exposures equals 180 frames. 180 film photos is actually quite a bit. So I had to sit through the critique where I sit and listen to everyone talk about the supposedly few photos they’ve chosen from their collection thus far that are supposed to go along with the series aim and idea they pitched at the previous critique. Really all it ever turns out to be it people saying I have this, this, and this tell me what to do now. So odd to me, because I mean feedback is great, but I hate suggestions from others about how to change my work. I think everyone here really doesn’t know what they want to do- like they’re taking the photos and then deciding what they want their series to encompass, where as I prefer things to happen the other way around: choose what I’m aiming for, and then shoot following those set guidelines. It makes more sense to me, and also saves me a lot of time and editing I would assume in the end because I’m not taking a bunch of random photos of things that I think are pretty.
After a boring critique I had a crappy dinner at the hotel restaurant. Worst dinner I’ve had on the entire trip, not to mention crappy service. I was relieved to finally get back from dinner around 1045 so I could hit the sack and prepare for the early morning that would follow.
And by this point my knee is doing LOADS better, and I’ve been sleeping fabulously thanks to my ipod, with the exception of occasional waking up from snoring because one of the snorers keeps crashing in our room. That’s because it’s the community room. Whatever.
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