A quiet weekend in London
Nov. 13th, 2000 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lillibetIt's Monday and it's not raining! Actually both yesterday and today have
been dry. We had a pretty quiet weekend, with Jason recuperating from his
cold.
On Friday we stayed in all day, except for brief errands to get apple juice
and ginger ale. I went and got Chinese take-away around the corner--hot &
sour soup (good for what ails you), very nice (somewhat gingery) dumplings,
tofu in minced beef & chili, king prawn with fried noodles and chicken in
black bean sauce.
On Saturday Jason stayed in all day. Barbara and I went out to do some
errands in the early afternoon and then I went for a nice long walk down
Kensington Church Street and along Kensington High Street. It started
raining harder than I wanted to walk through when I'd been gone about an
hour, so I took a bus home. I made chicken with artichokes, mushrooms and
capers in a lemon, white wine & sundried tomato sauce over spaghetti and we
wolfed it down and then went up to Sadler's Wells in Islington to see the
Paul Taylor Dance Company's final London performance.
They were wonderful! They did three numbers. The first was Cascade to a
piece by Bach. (I don't have the program in front of me, sorry.) It was
fairly balletic in form, but Taylor's choreography really plays with the
traditional gender roles of dance and includes a lot of fluid transitions
from floor to foot to air that make for a very dynamic performance. The
second piece was chreographed to Igor Stravinsy's Rites of Spring,
performed by two pianos. It was a narrative piece about a private eye and a
crook and the private eye's baby. None of us really followed the narrative,
but the dance was fascinating, very stylized with positions that frequently
reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphics and lots of stomping. The third
piece was set to tangos by Astor Piazzolla and was our favorite of the
three. The lighting and the costumes were wonderful and the choreography
was stunning, incorporating the vocabulary of the tango without ever
becoming tango. I think my favorite part was performed by two men playing
drunks, falling all over each other. They did this one amazing thing: a
series of cartwheels where one man was upside down, gripping the other above
the knees, using the other man's legs as his arms, over and over. It was
very passionate and sexy and energetic. A great performance.
On Sunday I went out and got bacon and made us all BLTs. Then Jason got
dressed and we went for a walk. We walked through Kensington Park, past
Kensington Palace where Diana lived, and down Kensington High Street, with a
detour along Kensington Church Walk and around the church. We walked back
up through Holland Park to Notting Hill Gate. We stopped in the
grocery store and picked up stuff for dinner. We came back and had some
cheese and crackers and smoked peppered mackerel to tide us over. Barbara's
landlord came by to sign the new lease and then I made dinner, chicken stir
fried with courgette (zucchini), broccoli, mangetout (snowpeas), peppers,
carrots, mushrooms and bamboo shoots with ginger, scallions and garlic in a
black bean lemon sauce. For once I made something insufficiently salty, but
a little extra soy solved that problem and I thought it was quite tasty.
Barbara had embarked on a project of cleaning and rearranging her bedroom,
so I helped with that for a bit and then we went to bed.
Today Jason went off to Cambridge to get some work done at the office. I
meant to get out and see something of London, but got sucked into the book I
was reading (The Terrorists of Irustan by Lousie Marley) and didn't come up
for air until almost four. I went out to run some errands and came back to
read email. We're talking about trying a sushi place tonight for dinner
that's been recommended to Barbara. Tomorrow we're hoping to hook up with
Seth, who is in town for a day on his way back to the States.
been dry. We had a pretty quiet weekend, with Jason recuperating from his
cold.
On Friday we stayed in all day, except for brief errands to get apple juice
and ginger ale. I went and got Chinese take-away around the corner--hot &
sour soup (good for what ails you), very nice (somewhat gingery) dumplings,
tofu in minced beef & chili, king prawn with fried noodles and chicken in
black bean sauce.
On Saturday Jason stayed in all day. Barbara and I went out to do some
errands in the early afternoon and then I went for a nice long walk down
Kensington Church Street and along Kensington High Street. It started
raining harder than I wanted to walk through when I'd been gone about an
hour, so I took a bus home. I made chicken with artichokes, mushrooms and
capers in a lemon, white wine & sundried tomato sauce over spaghetti and we
wolfed it down and then went up to Sadler's Wells in Islington to see the
Paul Taylor Dance Company's final London performance.
They were wonderful! They did three numbers. The first was Cascade to a
piece by Bach. (I don't have the program in front of me, sorry.) It was
fairly balletic in form, but Taylor's choreography really plays with the
traditional gender roles of dance and includes a lot of fluid transitions
from floor to foot to air that make for a very dynamic performance. The
second piece was chreographed to Igor Stravinsy's Rites of Spring,
performed by two pianos. It was a narrative piece about a private eye and a
crook and the private eye's baby. None of us really followed the narrative,
but the dance was fascinating, very stylized with positions that frequently
reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphics and lots of stomping. The third
piece was set to tangos by Astor Piazzolla and was our favorite of the
three. The lighting and the costumes were wonderful and the choreography
was stunning, incorporating the vocabulary of the tango without ever
becoming tango. I think my favorite part was performed by two men playing
drunks, falling all over each other. They did this one amazing thing: a
series of cartwheels where one man was upside down, gripping the other above
the knees, using the other man's legs as his arms, over and over. It was
very passionate and sexy and energetic. A great performance.
On Sunday I went out and got bacon and made us all BLTs. Then Jason got
dressed and we went for a walk. We walked through Kensington Park, past
Kensington Palace where Diana lived, and down Kensington High Street, with a
detour along Kensington Church Walk and around the church. We walked back
up through Holland Park to Notting Hill Gate. We stopped in the
grocery store and picked up stuff for dinner. We came back and had some
cheese and crackers and smoked peppered mackerel to tide us over. Barbara's
landlord came by to sign the new lease and then I made dinner, chicken stir
fried with courgette (zucchini), broccoli, mangetout (snowpeas), peppers,
carrots, mushrooms and bamboo shoots with ginger, scallions and garlic in a
black bean lemon sauce. For once I made something insufficiently salty, but
a little extra soy solved that problem and I thought it was quite tasty.
Barbara had embarked on a project of cleaning and rearranging her bedroom,
so I helped with that for a bit and then we went to bed.
Today Jason went off to Cambridge to get some work done at the office. I
meant to get out and see something of London, but got sucked into the book I
was reading (The Terrorists of Irustan by Lousie Marley) and didn't come up
for air until almost four. I went out to run some errands and came back to
read email. We're talking about trying a sushi place tonight for dinner
that's been recommended to Barbara. Tomorrow we're hoping to hook up with
Seth, who is in town for a day on his way back to the States.
