Of the various museums we were going to go to on this trip, the one we were perhaps both the most excited for was the Victoria & Albert Museum, or the V&A for those who are into abbreviations. It’s an art and design museum, you see, and art and design are some of our most favorite things. Having decided you can’t have too much of a good thing we went once again to Café Tropea for breakfast and then had our first tube adventure. This was fun and easy and we just used our credit cards which is a technology our American minds could not comprehend and we took a straight shot on the Piccadilly Line and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we didn’t even need to go above ground to access the V&A, we could just take a tunnel and pop out into the basement. Fun!

Tell you what man we were excited for the V&A and it lived up to the hype. My super amazing wife had done her reading more than I had and so was aware of the Cast Courts. These are wild. So the theory was that it is hard to go see say Michelangelo’s David in person and so what they did was bring David to you (provided you are in London) in the form of a plaster cast. They went into a lot of effort to do a good job on these casts and also used other reproduction methods, and a chunk of the exhibition was just about different reproduction techniques. The Cast Courts themselves were built around the dimensions needed for the largest casts, those of Trajan’s Column, which lemme tell ya, are HUGE. Since my super amazing wife was familiar with the Cast Courts we went there first, and since I am such a hound for showing up to museums early we were there before nearly anyone else, so here we were in these cavernous rooms just chock-a-block of the world’s finest sculptural works squeezed together for an admiring public which consisted of just us. It was revival architecture but for interior decorating. My kind of style really, but I nearly lost my super amazing wife somewhere between the Portico de la Gloria and the Tomb of St Peter Martyr. We were off to a great start at the museum.

Look from here I will simply have to recreate the experience of going through the rest of the V&A, which was just absorbing like body blows of beautiful object after beautiful object by telling you about them one after another, relentlessly, making you jealous, like I was, that there is so much beauty in the world and yet we have only a limited time in order to perceive it. In the guts of the museum itself our first stop after the Cast Courts was the extensive jewelry collection. We had wanted to see some particular pieces, and we did, but why limit yourself to one when they have thousands of pieces spanning millennia. After that we just stumbled upon a hall full of tapestries, and like, we like textile arts, we have to go see the tapestries. We are here to see the tapestries! I couldn’t stop saying that in my head. But here are these works of art, gigantic, 500 years old, how did they do that, what luxury to decorate your house with such things just to keep out the drafts. From there we just blast through the theater and arts section, catching glimpses of Dua Lipa’s Mugler bodysuit alongside Stormtrooper armor alongside the biggest celebrity they have to have had, the costume worn by Manuel in Fawlty Towers, yes, Manuel! Manuel from Fawlty Towers, one of the greatest British TV shows of all time (though I can’t even watch The IT Crowd it is too funny), they had that sucker just on display in a corner, now we are going through a whole section from William Morris of the Arts and Craft Movement, which is another highlight that my super amazing wife really wanted to see, but on the way there you have to stop by the particularly famous bed, and now we are very nearly lost and also hungry, but we manage to find the café, itself just a gorgeous environment, surrounded by Victorian-era tile which in itself is a delight to the senses but also we were eating some rather good salmon, alright back at it, gotta view the fashion special exhibit, I liked it all, it was all super great, up and at ‘em through another hallway, what is that chair, it has to be modern, it is so chic and sleek and minimalist, but no, it is Victorian, how did they even know to do that back then, you have to explain it to me, wait there is no time, now we are in an entire hallway, an entire hallway! of ironwork, wrought and cast and bent and shaped which we admire because my dad is a blacksmith and we want to find things he would like, and there are so many things, it is too much, my heart can’t take it anymore, we gotta get out of here and we stumble out into the sun instead of going back through the tunnel to the tube because by then we needed the cleansing rays of daylight to let it all wash over us. It is a really fantastic museum, you should definitely go.