tripu

Two weekends ago, I spent part of my Sunday afternoon visiting the Tate Modern museum for the first time.

It’s quite an impressive place. The building that hosts the museum was formerly a massive bare brick factory, with a very tall funnel, on the Southern riverbank. Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge takes off just in front of it, leading to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which is well visible from the entrance of the museum, with its magnificient dome arising above the rest of the buildings of Holborn.

I think I read somewhere that it’s one of the most visited museums worldwide, but I might well be wrong. I just walked through the ground and second floors and decided to leave the rest for another day. As usual, what I liked the most were the Surrealists. Specially Salvador Dalí, Francis Bacon and Max Ernst. And I discovered with delight the work of Juan Muñoz. His sculptures intrigued and moved me as no others.

It was a very cultural afternoon. And that’s more true bearing in mind that the night before I was in a striptease bar.

Last weekend I came back to the Tate Modern again ─ that time with Elena, a friend of mine that I met here in London. She wanted to visit the temporary exhibition on Kandinsky before it got cancelled. We could only get tickets to start the visit at five o’clock in the afternoon, so we decided to cross the river and go to St Paul in the meantime.

If I weren’t a bloody software engineer, I would be a Cathedral. Cologne, Rome, Milan, Seville. London. One of those.

It doesn’t matter if I switch to my mother tongue to have more words to choose from. I have no way to express the deep emotion that always dawns on me when I contemplate such buildings, with their fair tall dimensions, mighty organs and beautiful stained-glass windows. We went up to the dome. Staring at the transept from up there was like staring at the very centre of the Earth. Then we went on to the very top and I took one zillion pictures of London.

The Kandinsky exhibition was hectic (it was the last day). And I didn’t understand much of it. I usually don’t know how to get my bearings with abstract art. Elena says there’s nothing to understand ─ you either like or dislike it. In that case, I guess I didn’t like it.

Kandinsky may be a genius. But going in St Paul’s Cathedral, caressing the dome from within and contemplating from its top so many miles of central London stretching at my feet, that made me feel alive and gave some sense to the whole week.

Even after paying £9.