This Is Not Real Life: Harrods and the Tate Modern

Yesterday was our day off after our long day of statue hunting the day before. So we decided to have a nice, calming day at the world's biggest and best department store, Harrods!

Harrods! He's taking me there.

We wandered the floors for quite a bit, looking for all of the things that we cannot ever afford. But we were really just biding our time until the inevitable...

Ice Cream Parlour!

Yes, we had found our way to the Ice Cream Parlour that I had discovered on my previous venture here and decided to forgo a healthy lunch in favor of something a little more monstrously delicious...

Before... and After!

The girls with their monster sundaes!

As we were eating, we had another little surprise in store. It was hard enough to believe that we were eating decadent desserts in Harrods on a Friday afternoon. But at the Pizzeria across the way, Harrods managed to amp up their level of class even more. I am talking, of course, about the Italian pizza chef who would occasionally burst into some true Italian opera whilst tossing his pizza dough in the air!

Singing "That's Amore"

After our ice cream interlude, and deciding that we will never need to eat ice cream again, we headed up to the toy kingdom to indulge the little kid in us!

Bobby Bear! Yours for only £1,900

Kate and William, looking kind of possessed...

Massive dollhouse

Shakesbeare theatre!

We looked around Harrods a little more, saw the Egyptian Stairs, an opera singer, the pet store, and all of the crowns out front, and then headed out to a different location entirely. We decided that the next destination would be the Tate Modern, so we could indulge ourselves in some weird, weird stuff.

On the way, we met this guy

On the Millennium Bridge!

So we arrived, and we got in line to see the Tate's current pride and joy: the Damien Hirst exhibit. Damien Hirst is one of the most expensive living artists in the world, mostly due to a piece that we got a chance to see.

For the Love of God is a skull that Hirst bedazzled with hundreds of real diamonds. His goal was to make it kind of like a religious relic, with symbolism dwelling on today's consumerism..

I don't know if I buy that. I learned that this is his most expensive piece, but only because it was bought for over $1 million by a "private buyer." A lot of people in the art world believe that Hirst bought it himself to make it look like it sold for a lot of money!

So after our "experience" with Damien Hirst, we roamed the rest of the museum, taking in some surrealism and cubism along the way. I was disappointed I couldn't see the rest of the Hirst exhibit, which was not free, but I'm sure I wasn't missing too much there.

Weird.

I did like this, though. It was a huge timeline of all of the artistic periods considered "modern" spanning the third floor

Having had our fill of bizarre (apparently, I missed out on some pretty strange stuff in some other galleries the girls went to) we decided to head out. Still kind of drained from the day before, we called an early night in preparation for the next day... Portobello Road!