In September I traveled to Paris and London. See part 1 of my travelogue here, part 2 here and part 3 here.

Another visit to the Phoenix garden resulted in this sketch in my Etchr lab sketchbook. I love the paper so much – even a super quick sketch pops on it.

I had a coffee at the Monmouth Coffee Company. I love their coffee, but the place was both packed and super hot and stuffy so I made this quick sketch in my Pith Kabosu sketchbook and didn’t bother to add watercolour to it. It’s the first time I tried a POV sketch, and you can see the weird way I oftentimes hold my pen. I got to talk to a super nice young South Korean woman, as I shared the table with her and a young Japanese father and his 4 year old son.

Lunch was at Wagamama again. I tried their pho for first time (it’s new on the menu) and really liked it.

In the evening we went to see My Neighbour Totoro. It’s a lovely play, very well considered and beautifully acted and puppeteered.

On Sunday my family went to Greenwich and I went to the Saucony Run Shoreditch 10k race. It was bright and cold, perfect running weather, and the route was pretty flat – but chock full of speed bumps, which really hampered the race flow and caused a few nasty spills.

Here’s the route:

And the starting line:

And some of the entertainment on the way:

We ran a lot of loops, mostly through pretty dull residential streets. Only in the final kilometre or so did we get to see a bit of Shoreditch high street etc.

Overall the race was fairly well organized, and not overly crowded (about 6,000 runners), but I didn’t enjoy the route mostly due to the speed bumps. They seem to have taken the worst out of the local runners, as people pushed, jostled and shoved to avoid running over them (I just started running over them from around the 3rd kilometre or so).

Here’s the medal:

After the race I went for a celebratory meal at Wagamama. I hadn’t had breakfast and I was parched so I had a ton to drink and tried one of their new curries. Jesna, my server, was really curious about the sketches and we got to talk a bit.

On Monday my dad and I went to Tate Modern to see a Picasso and the Theatre exhibition. We arrived early so we sat at Paul’s and sketched.

I also sketched the statue and part of the modern building across the street.

The “Theatre Picasso” exhibition was hands down one of the biggest disappointments of the trip. Never have I felt my intelligence or interest in art more insulted than in this exhibition, and I left after about 20 minutes.

Here’s a Picasso dove to relax for a bit:

I was in a bad mood when I left and I didn’t know what to do with myself so I made my way to Green Park and sat and sketched there for a while:

The final sketch:

Thankfully the best exhibition was still ahead of me – Marie Antoinette Style at Victoria and Alberts. The thought, curation, staging, flow, items – everything about this exhibition was perfection. You saw Marie Antoinette as a style icon, as a woman trapped in a role, as a doomed queen, as a harried and slandered victim, and as a larger than life figure. Her foibles, her eye for fashion, her courage, her very flawed life and her terrible death made her immortal in a way she likely could never have imagined.

We don’t have robins here, so it was nice to get to see a few of them at Hyde park during my morning runs and at the Phoenix garden.

There were surprisingly few Halloween decorations out but the Christmas shops were on full blast in all the big stores. Of course I had to buy this red fountain pen ornament from Liberty:

We then got to see Penn and Teller’s 50th anniversary show (and first West End tour). They were funny, surprising, and wonderful, and it was an overall delightful and very memorable evening. I even got a signed poster of their show!

On one of the last days of the trip I went to see the new Victoria and Albert East Storehouse museum. It’s a unique experience, and it’s worth the visit – but I recommend planning to go there well ahead of time and ordering items to interact with. It’s not a standard museum by any stretch of the imagination – it’s more of a museum about museums and how they handle their collections.

While I found many of the explanations to be overly politicized, it nevertheless is a place that I’d return to – provided I manage to book a “meeting” with an item (Order and Object at the study centre). It’s also interesting to see what other people ordered and how they interact with their chosen objects.

I had lunch at the nearby Wagamama for the last time, and sketched my lunch for the last time:

And then went for my last coffee at Monmouth Coffee Company:

In the evening we went to see “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Stephen Fry was excellent as Lady Bracknell, but I didn’t like the director’s interpretation of the play (Algernon is gay, Jack is gay, Cecily is gay, Gwendolen is gay), and the two main actors weren’t very good. For the life of me I don’t understand the director’s need to try and outsmart Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s work is polished to a mirror finish – there really is no need to be clever with it. It packs enough punch as it is.

On the last day of the trip I went to the Phoenix garden for a last sketch:

I got to talk to a lady that works in the garden, and it was nice showing her all of my various sketches of the place.

And we went to The Parlour at Fortnum and Mason for celebratory Sundaes before the flight.

Overall it was a great trip even though I was sick during its first leg. I’ve never sketched so much during a trip before, largely thanks to some recently acquired sketchbooks and watercolour palettes, and some skills I learned during USK Poznan. I got a ton of watercolours, pens, pencils, inks and art supplies that I can’t wait to try out, and I got a nice stack of books to peruse over the coming months. Hopefully this was fun to read, and perhaps you got some inspiration for your next trip to Paris or London.