17 September: London.

It is impossible to close the door to the hostel room quietly; it's got one of those misbegotten spring-loaded things that prevents you from manually pushing it shut, but grabs it out of your hand at the last minute: CLANGK. The reading woman (the same one we tried so hard not to bother the day before) leaves her extremely bright reading light on most of the night. The girl sleeping in the bunk below me comes in late, tosses and turns and mumbles in her sleep, and packs up noisily to leave in the early a.m. She also has such strong body odor that, even three feet above her, I keep wondering if it's me.

Given all that, I sleep surprisingly well. We leave the hostel late in the morning and swing by a pastry shop for breakfast. I sample a hot cross bun, which is not at all hot but fairly tasty.

We wander around Notting Hill and the Portobello Market. It's pretty, and mostly pretty expensive. My favorite "shop" is an old man with a table full of antique clutter: old glass transparencies, miscellaneous keys. We don't buy much; the knowledge that we have to carry whatever we buy for the next ten days has blunted our acquisitive instincts.

The next step is to get back to the Underground. We've walked quite a distance already, so rather than backtrack, we get directions from the map posted at a nearby bus stop. After a while we check another bus stop map. Later we start asking people for directions. This is not immediately helpful. I privately wonder if we are close to the world record for longest series of navigational errors.

Our next destination, which we reach approximately two hundred years later, is the Tate Britain (the national museum of British art). Mitchey's friend JT works there, and he is delighted to see us. I'm puzzled; in my current state of surly fatigue, I certainly wouldn't be delighted to see me. JT treats us to lunch at the museum cafe and answers all our questions about his life since we last saw him in Iowa City. "I've traveled around the world and lived in half a dozen countries," he says, "but London is the most foreign place I've ever lived." Communication here involves subtleties and nuances and secret codes that he is only just beginning to glimpse, let alone comprehend. We nod sympathetically.

When we have eaten at leisure and talked at length, he asks, "What would you like to see?" I want to see stuff by the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood; he leads the way. The Pre-Raphs are colorful and dreamy, for the most part. I like them because they are art that tells stories, which is about half a step away from illustration, which is really my favorite kind of art. Mitchey's favorite of the Pre-Raphs is The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, which exhibits a level of detail suggestive of utter barking madness. I have a soft spot for Burne-Jones, and am fascinated by the story JT tells about the giant, melodramatic "Death of Arthur" that occupies one wall. Apparently this sort of thing was looked on as quite gauche for some time; no British museum would take it. "And now it is considered to be representative of British culture," JT says, grinning.

Would we like to see one of JT's favorite exhibits? We would. JT is a fan of J.M.W. Turner, an extraordinarily prolific painter and printmaker whose work proves to be well worth our inspection. JT tells us about the process of making engravings from watercolors. There is an interactive area where you can try to copy one of his drawings by hand. I try the simplest one. It's a lot less simple than I thought it was when I started.

Meanwhile, JT is talking to Mitchey about the toxicity and decomposition rates of various pigments. JT is interning in the Department of Conservation Science, where he devises and tests ways to preserve great works of art. He is currently testing a sealed frame designed to protect art from further decay.

Now JT wants to take us to the Print Room. Oh, we say, to see thee prints? No, says JT, there are no prints in the Print Room. There are originals in the Print Room. You can hold them in your hands.

Really?

As we wash our hands, JT introduces us to Lucy, who works in the Print Room. Lucy is vivacious, quick-witted, and as eager to bestow large amounts of knowledge on us as JT. Lucy gets out a box of original Turner watercolors. We hold them by their protective mats and ooh and ahh over the richness of detail and color. After the Turners, JT recommends we look at something by William Blake. The Blakes are mostly illustrations for Dante's Inferno; they are dark and flaming and tortured, and they are right there on the table, the very same lines and colors laid down by Crazy Blake himself, with not even a pane of glass between us.

One more, says JT. How about Beatrix Potter? And this is better than the Pre-Raphs: Lucy brings us illustrations. She brings out a box of original art from The Tailor of Gloucester. The watercolors are barely bigger than the books we are used to seeing them in. Otherwise, they don't look all that similar. Oh, the teeny tiny brushstrokes on the mouse whiskers! Oh, the colors of the fine clothes! There are some pages from the book stored in the box with the watercolors, and they're appallingly dim and blurry next to the originals. Why hasn't anyone re-scanned and republished these books? Everyone would want to upgrade!

The part of this account I am not doing justice to is the sheer amount of time JT and Lucy spend just talking and talking. They are extremely entertaining, so Mitchey and I don't mind. We are learning about how great works of art are transported between museums, about book preservations and how most materials marketed as "archival" are a joke. By the time we finish admiring the Potters, they've agreed that the next thing they need to show us is the death mask of ol' Turner. It used to be on display, but some museum official was creeped out by it, so now it lives in storage.

We follow Lucy behind the Prints Desk into a back room. She pulls out a wooden box and removes from it a whole head in shiny white plaster, toothless, sunken-eyed. It is so incredibly morbid that we have to say irreverent things about it out of sheer discomfort. Still, we're thrilled: nobody else gets to see this.

JT and Lucy continue to talk and talk, revealing gaping holes in museum security, making dark allusions to museum politics, and I am seriously dying on my feet but I don't want to end this adventure. Finally JT tells Lucy, We'd better get going. To us he says, I'll have to show you out, because at this point you are locked into the Tate. And we say, Cooool.

JT has to go back to his lab to get his bicycle, so we get to see the oven and the freezer and a few of the trays of test tubes he uses for his research. He invites us to join his wife and him for dinner, but warns that it may be difficult to get back from his part of town after the Underground quits running. We decline, reluctantly; we're supposed to meet our host for dinner tonight.

Our host is delayed. There have been computer problems at work (he's a history professor at what we would call a high school), and tons of important data have been lost. He was supposed to get off work early today; instead, he spent hours and hours of his own time trying to reconstruct what was lost. We go back to Earl's Court, retrieve our stuff and a pub supper, and head for our host's place; by this time, he is finally home.

The Canuck is gone, so it's just the three of us here tonight. Our host apologizes for being unable to show us around. He seems eager to talk to us, and I start to feel like maybe that whole thing the other night wasn't personal after all. We ply him with questions about English culture and the things we saw today. As a history professor, he is well prepared for our interrogation. He tells us he is currently teaching a course on the American Civil Rights movement, about which he knows a heck of a lot more than we do. Apparently all the major players we learned about in school were just figureheads, while the real work went on in the background. Huh. I wonder if the same thing isn't true about pretty much all of American history.