Sneaky LIttle Changes

Wow, they may be taming me.

A friend and I were planning on going to a Da Vinci exposé. Much to our chagrin, we discovered that the tickets were already sold out. For the next 4 months.

I've always been fascinated by him, not so much because of his art, but because of his inventions and his unique and odd personality. How cool is it that he wrote his journal in mirror-image writing? And have you ever seen sketches of his flying machine?

Needing to confirm such terrible news for myself, I googled it. What did people do before the Internet. I never cease to wonder. And when will they add "Google" as a verb to the dictionary? Those little red underlines annoy me.

It was true. But while I was on the National Gallery website, I checked out some of their free talks, and admission (Canada, it's free by the way. As are all of the big museums. And you can actually go right up to relics here. And dogs are allowed on buses, and in pubs. Just a few things we could learn from our mother country.)

I started seriously considering checking out the gallery this coming Saturday. And then I caught sight of a photo of the front of the building. Do you know that I walked right past it my first week here, wandering around Trafalgar Square? I admired the living painting to the side (but only because it was made of plants), giving the front steps a wide birth, shuddering, and thinking "Not going in THERE!"

They're sneaky here. You visit all of these interesting buildings, and they casually strew a few paintings here and there for you to admire. Some of them are ginormous, and you stare at them from the sheer novelty of the size! Next thing you know, you start looking at the people in the paintings, wondering who they are. And then you start noticing how they make the eyes so life-like, the brush strokes, the painting techniques. Sneaky, sneaky.