A few weekends ago, I went with a group of friends to the Tate Modern in London. This is what I wrote in my organising email.

On Saturday, I am taking the train to London to see the Carsten Höller exhibition at the Tate Modern. It features the world’s biggest slide
— it’s six storeys tall, and you can slide down it to reach 30 mph.

It’s free, too.

Where does the ‘art’ come into it? The description asks, “How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?”

I’m really only going for the thrill factor, though. Thought I might like to leave Cambridge a bit past 9 AM.

We arrived at 11 AM and got tickets. We were scheduled to slide at 2:30 PM.

In the mean time, we saw some really interesting exhibitions on the top floor of the museum and grazed around Borough Market. Borough Market was good but I wouldn’t recommend anyone go at lunch time on a sunny Saturday, which also happened to be the 150th anniversary day of the market. We could barely move.

When we got to the slide, a couple people in our group said they were feeling sick in the stomach. I was unfazed. “You can’t fall out of it. What’s there to be scared of?”

So I put on my safety cap and kneepads, and climbed into the potato sack.

The first bend was much scarier than I expected. My heart jumped. I giggled madly all the way down. It wasn’t exactly comfortable; the slide was assembled in segments so it was bumpy. My head hurt afterward.

In the evening, we went to see the Blue Man Group at London’s West End. Being students, we paid £15 for the best seats in the house. That’s a 75% discount.

If only I didn’t have to study, I could have fun all the time instead of just most of the time.

My friends made me prove that I was tall enough to ride the big slide.

There were three slides, I think. Kids could only go on the slides that began on the second or third floors. The six of us asked for tickets to the tallest slide on the fifth floor.

People kept falling off the sides of the slide when they came down. I think they fell because they try to halt their sliding. I was too busy giggling to think about stopping so consequently, I flew in gracefully and was poured onto the landing mat.

The faces of Intel, The Blue Man Group. It was very, very random. It was funny and clever, too. Worth seeing, especially if you have a student card.