Day 38
I think I'm going to title my shoes "Sock Eaters." I know we do a lot of walking, but I've gotten holes in an awful lot of socks.
We take pictures of absolutely everything. As demonstrated by the random flower pictures we took while waiting for the rest of our group to finish with the antique shop behind me.
Saturday we decided to take advantage of the gorgeous weather, especially since we don't know how much longer it's going to last. We went up to Hampstead, which is a lovely little village about 4 miles away.
An excellent example of Georgian architecture on Church Row.
The graveyard at St. John's. Apparently they shot a vampire movie here. I'd believe it.
The barrel vaulted cieling of St. John's
The house I'm probably going to live in someday.
Hampstead's just full of nice quiet streets. It was very pretty.
I was really excited about this shop.
This truck has grass on the roof!
Yes, that would in fact be a pub with a polar bear on the sign (which, unfortunately, was broken, so I don't know what the actual name of the pub is).
One of the main attractions of the area is Hampstead Heath, which is basically another giant park, but much more wild that the manicured London parks. The Heath has woods and lakes and fields and such.
And big trees, which are almost changing color for fall.
Woods which actually look much darker and creepier in real life.
I don't know who those people are.
You can see London over the tree tops.
Other than the woods, this is what a lot of the heath looked like.
It's a popular artists spot.
One of the lakes. They have three: one for men, one for women, and one that's mixed.
Kenwood House. We actually meant to go straight here through the heath, but we got rather lost and wandered through most of the heath instead. But was a beautiful day and a beautiful park, so we didn't mind too much. You might recognize this shot from
Notting Hill, where it's used as a movie set pretending to be a movie set. Clever.
Like I said, it was a beautiful day. And apparently Kenwood House is the place to be.
Okay, now if this was just a bit darker, it'd look like it came straight out of the spooky forest in Disney's
Beauty and the Beast.
We went out for dinner and got falafels. Here is me, with my first ever falafel, which was delicious.
Sunday I was in Primary again. We were running through the Primary program, which is really hard for the kids, because they've got nothing to do but sit in their chairs and listen to the other kids. They tried really hard. There's one old British lady who's also with the Primary, and is quite strict. Sit up nice in your chair, stop looking around, quit rustling your papers, speak up! Afterwards we took them all outside to use up some energy and sing some of the less reverent Primary songs: Do as I'm Doing, Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree, I'm All Made of Hinges, Called to Serve, Follow the Prophet, Book of Mormon Stories. It was great fun. We all marched around and did a lot of jumping in Do As I'm Doing. I've sort of become the unofficial Primary chorister, which is fine with me, because I love Primary songs.
This week is also my turn on the kitchen crew. We're divided up into groups of about 7 and have the responsibility of preparing meals, setting places, clearing up after dinner, and washing everything up. I actually don't mind kitchen duty. I find cooking rather therapeutic. Unless I'm crunched for time, and then I just find it annoying. We were cleaning up after dinner last night, and at first it was really rushed trying to get everything cleared up, but then we were just standing around waiting for loads of dishes to go through dishwasher. So I somehow managed to get us off an a Disney song kick, and we sange "Be Our Guest," "Part of Your World," "I'll Make a Man Out of You," and other classics. Because apparently, we all had the same childhood, and it was Disney.
Today we went to the British Library, which is really cool. They get a copy of every book published in Britain and Ireland, so basically, it's enormous and awesome. They had a gallery full of historical artifacts of interest (it was a very dark room, so that the light doesn't injure the exhibits). They had a Guttenburg Bible, pages from Leonardo Da Vinci's sketchbooks, the Magna Carta, the Beowulf manuscript, a page of Galileo's manuscript, letters by Charlotte Bronte and Isaac Newton, music by Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven's tuning fork, a lot of old illuminated texts, Daoist texts, several Qurans, Zoroastrian texts, and so much more. It was really cool.
Over the years, a lot of great minds have lived there, so you see blue circular plaques everywhere on the houses where they lived. Such as, Charles Darwin.
This is where the first anesthesia was used in London.
I love how all the buildings have chimney pots of them.
This would be the skeleton of Jeremy Bentham, famous utilitarian, dressed in a suit, with a wax head on top. Not at all creepy...
A London college campus.
The statue of Ghandi in Tavistock Square
Me feeding pidgeons!
This was so funny. There was this little old lady feeding like three squirrels running up and down a tree, and afterwards this squirrel went and stuffed it in the ground under a leaf, and then went to chase another squirrel off and look for where it buried its nut.
You can't really tell in this picture, but that white blur is a pidgeon that was entirely determined to sit on this man's arm.
A statue of Newton at the British Library.
Also at the British Library, they had a whole circle of these rocks with human forms emerging.
St. Pancras station is an excellent example of Gothic architecture.
And also looks cool inside.
And has a random parting statue.
Interesting cab design
For some reason, everywhere you look in London, there always seem to be cranes somewhere.
I actually really enjoyed walking around some of the quieter London streets for a change.
