Since we were not travelling to Paris on this day, I booked tickets for a National Gallery exhibition and for theatre. 

We leisurely made our way to Leicester Square on the tube using Oyster cards that still had some £s on them. After looking at the National Portrait Gallery, we had a light lunch at the 3rd floor cafe.

Then on to wander around Trafalgar Square:

The fourth plinth had a work called “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist” a Lamassu, a winged ancient Assyrian deity made from syrup cans from an industry once in Iran, now destroyed by war.

And we looked around the National Gallery before going to the Monet and Architecture exhibition.

No photos allowed in the exhibition  but in any event, they would mostly have been of people’s backs. The  rooms were very crowded despite the timed entry and on a week day in early May. Monet is very popular, it appears.

We walked to the Churchill War Rooms but not having bought advance tickets meant at least an hour wait.  Add it to the next visit list of things to do.

Walked past 10 Downing Street, which looks like a fortress these days.

We had dinner at J Sheekey, a theatre district  seafood restaurant. They were very attentive about getting us to our show on time. I had a very tasty sea bass, tomato and artichoke dish.

Scott had fish pie, also tasty.

We went to see “Red”, about Mark Rothko as he was painting his series intended for the Four Seasons dining room in the Seagram Building in New York. Rothko thought he would make the rich power brokers choke on their food with the powerful emotions elicited by his paintings. He and his unnamed assistant talk and argue as they work. Parts were quite funny but the audience knows that Rothko decided not to sell the paintings to the Seagrams and instead donated them to Tate Modern. The day the paintings arrived in London, Rothko killed himself. An interesting play about the purpose of art. And the interpretation and creation of art.

The actor playing Rothko was Alfred Molina, who you may have seen in “The DaVinci Code”. He was sitting on stage when we were seating ourselves.

Thus ended our short stay in London.