Museuming In the Rain: Friday in London

When we pulled back the curtains, we found grey skies with a light rain falling this morning.  The heatwave that has plagued London this week is coming to an end.  The meteorologist on BBC announced that London would have rain with occasional downpours and thunderstorms.

After a late breakfast, we went through the checklist:  Oyster Cards, map, camera, shades, tissues, and phone.  We then hoofed past the little shops and restaurants, the Shoreditch Fire Station, and the little coffee van who was set up in the rain under large umbrellas.

  We went down the long ramp into the station past the little food shops and flower shop to where we checked the amount of money left on our Oyster cards.  We tapped our cards onto the little pads that opened the gates for entrance to the trains, followed the signs for the Northern Line, went two stops (Angel and then Kings Cross) changed to the Piccadilly Line

and rode nine stops to South Kensington where we took a very, very long, long tunnel to the entrance at the basement level to the Albert and Victoria Museum.  It purely makes me tired to think about it!

The people visiting the museum are as fascinating as the exhibits.  I loved watching a family from India which looked like it spanned four generations.  The older man was in traditional clothing with the decorative spot on his forehead and a full, grey beard.  I loved the consideration and respect I saw the younger members of the family paying him

The Albert and Victoria Museum has everything from an exhibit on the history of underwear to a lot

of very nice art work from all over the world.  It is quite a fascinating place and I suppose you could spend a week there and never see it all.  We breezed through a lot of sculpture, a lot of medieval religious art, a lot of things from Korea (Klep identified the Kimchi pot without even having to read the explanation), a lot of things from Japan, and some things from China.  We saw the underwear exhibit, but we did not pay the eleven pounds to tour it.  I figure drawers are drawers!

The Grand Entrance to the museum is beautiful with its dome and columns.  Right now they have an art object which has quite beautiful shades of blue and green hanging under the dome.  For the life of me, it reminded me of the bunch of plastic fasteners that I have at home all tangled up in a drawer.

After we left the A & V, We walked a short way to the Natural History Museum where we joined a very long, long line in the light rain for the security check to get in. The building housing the museum is one of the draws for us.  It was a design which lost out in the competition for the buildings to house the Parliament.  It was such a spectacular design that it was built, too and later became the museum.

While we moved up, we fell into conversation with a tourist (His wife is in London for business and he came along) from Charleston, SC, a Carolina fan, but a pretty nice fellow who was going in to see the dinosaurs.  He didn’t have far to go.  The first one was right inside the entrance.

We took a brief stop in the restaurant for a light snack before we headed into the large dinosaur

exhibit.  It was pretty slow going because of the crowds of people everywhere.

We were about museumed out.  We headed to an entrance onto Cromwell Street and thence to South Kensington Station that did not require a long, long tunnel, took Piccadilly back to Kings Cross, walked down lots more stairs (Northern Line always seems to require a couple of flights of stairs and an escalator.  It seems to be a really deep tunnel.), changed to Northern Line and walked up the stairs and up the ramp to the sight of temporary sunshine.  Before we got back to the hotel, we were in light rain again.