"Kew"ing It Up!
Kew Royal Botanic Gardens is a sprawling wonder of a place on 300 acres complete with huge ponds, enormous glass and ironwork glasshouses, herbariums, a library and laboratories. It boasts the world's largest collection of living plants -- over 30,000 different kinds! .
This winter they transported visitors to the Amazon rain forest and the deserts of Brazil with a color-explosion of orchids in celebration of Carnival! Strolling through the Princess of Wales Conservatory felt like a tropical paradise with all types of orchids -- my very favorite flower! -- in ground, in pots, suspended in air, woven into amazing arches and floating in ponds. There was also quite an array of succulents in another display. What a contrast those two biomes were! Captivating!
P.S. It was also exciting to make a successful go at the festival of transportation it took to get there -- just Google Maps and me by bus, overland train, subway and walking.
Pancake Day!
Celebrated in England for centuries, Pancake Day -- also known as Shrove Tuesday -- precedes Ash Wednesday and is still an honored time today. Traditionally, it was a way to use up what they considered in those days to be rich, indulgent food like eggs and milk before the 40-day fasting season of Lent.
This year it was rung in with style as charity fundraiser races were run all over the city. I attended the Parliament event in a park over by the Houses of Parliament with participants from members of the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the media. And what a hilarious outing it was!
Bedecked in aprons and chef hats and each holding a frying pan containing a pancake, participants had to relay-race dash, flipping a pancake in the skillet the whole time they ran. There was jostling, good-natured teasing, lots of pancake dropping and a few runners who ended up just clutching the skillet and making a full-tilt run for the finish when they couldn't do two things at once and their pancakes "flipped out" one too many times!
The House of Lords won and received their proper hardware: a wooden spoon, winner's cup and medal. The giddy winners whooped and sang their victory songs, with a bit of rival-taunting, too.
Afterwards, I treated myself to a pancake (a quasi-unique menu item here. They don't have pancake houses as such and eat more crepes) on special offer in recognition for the day. It was delicious -- a ricotta pancake with bananas and maple/peanut dressing. Yum! And since a bottle of Aunt Jemimah Syrup here will set you back over $7, going out was a good (and tasty) deal!
"Russian" to the Science Museum
A "Cosmonauts -- Birth of the Space Age" exhibit hosted at the Science Museum caught our attention and so Mike and I rushed over to see it before it left to return to Russia. Evidently, the items featured in this exhibit have never left Russia before, and after their 6-month display here, will not be leaving their country again. In short, London is the only place this show will be outside its home country and we were very excited to have the chance to see it.
Since Russia was the first country to launch: a dog, then a man and later a woman into space, the first crew into space and to achieve the first spacewalk, there were lots of spacecrafts, artifacts and memorabilia to see!
Highlights were a model of Sputnik, the actual LK-3 lunar lander they designed (they were never able to use because the engines kept malfunctioning), the actual bowling-ball type pods their astronauts orbited and survived in, and space station items. Lots of other examples of space suits, showers, food, the suits and capsules from their initial test launches of dogs and monkeys, etc. were also featured.
My favorite quote was from Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer, Tsiokovsky in 1911: "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."
A 3-D IMAX movie about deep space with footage from the VLT (Very Large Telescope -- actual name of it!) located in a Chilean desert was a mesmerizing tour of real images from distant galaxies, the sun and Mars. WOW!
The whole event definitely qualified for something out of this world!
Tate Britain
Took a wander into the Tate Britain museum which houses the national collection of British art. It includes pieces dating from 1500 to today's more modern art. Besides portraits, sculpture and rooms of contemporary art, I found two particular pieces that caught my imagination.
The first was an auditory piece called "War Damaged Musical Instruments." It showcased "fourteen recordings of British and German brass and wind instruments damaged in conflicts over the last 200 years. The notes recorded are based on the tones of the military bugle call 'The Last Post', but the tune is fragmented to such an extent that is is almost unrecognizable. The tune signaled to lost and wounded soldiers that it was safe to return to base and is used today as a final farewell in military funerals . . ." (from Tate's brochure on the artwork). It was haunting, yet inspiring as the notes were piped through single speakers resembling megaphones placed throughout a bare corridor. Such a unique medium.
The second was a work by Turner, a lovely and inviting landscape that appeared not quite finished by the artist, but beckoning the viewer to mentally fill in the details. Not sure that's what he intended, but that was my take! At last, I'm an artist (although I'm pretty sure I could have whipped out something like the solid blue canvas or the striped one there)! ;)
This winter they transported visitors to the Amazon rain forest and the deserts of Brazil with a color-explosion of orchids in celebration of Carnival! Strolling through the Princess of Wales Conservatory felt like a tropical paradise with all types of orchids -- my very favorite flower! -- in ground, in pots, suspended in air, woven into amazing arches and floating in ponds. There was also quite an array of succulents in another display. What a contrast those two biomes were! Captivating!
P.S. It was also exciting to make a successful go at the festival of transportation it took to get there -- just Google Maps and me by bus, overland train, subway and walking.
Pancake Day!
Celebrated in England for centuries, Pancake Day -- also known as Shrove Tuesday -- precedes Ash Wednesday and is still an honored time today. Traditionally, it was a way to use up what they considered in those days to be rich, indulgent food like eggs and milk before the 40-day fasting season of Lent.
This year it was rung in with style as charity fundraiser races were run all over the city. I attended the Parliament event in a park over by the Houses of Parliament with participants from members of the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the media. And what a hilarious outing it was!
Bedecked in aprons and chef hats and each holding a frying pan containing a pancake, participants had to relay-race dash, flipping a pancake in the skillet the whole time they ran. There was jostling, good-natured teasing, lots of pancake dropping and a few runners who ended up just clutching the skillet and making a full-tilt run for the finish when they couldn't do two things at once and their pancakes "flipped out" one too many times!
The House of Lords won and received their proper hardware: a wooden spoon, winner's cup and medal. The giddy winners whooped and sang their victory songs, with a bit of rival-taunting, too.
Afterwards, I treated myself to a pancake (a quasi-unique menu item here. They don't have pancake houses as such and eat more crepes) on special offer in recognition for the day. It was delicious -- a ricotta pancake with bananas and maple/peanut dressing. Yum! And since a bottle of Aunt Jemimah Syrup here will set you back over $7, going out was a good (and tasty) deal!
"Russian" to the Science Museum
A "Cosmonauts -- Birth of the Space Age" exhibit hosted at the Science Museum caught our attention and so Mike and I rushed over to see it before it left to return to Russia. Evidently, the items featured in this exhibit have never left Russia before, and after their 6-month display here, will not be leaving their country again. In short, London is the only place this show will be outside its home country and we were very excited to have the chance to see it.
Since Russia was the first country to launch: a dog, then a man and later a woman into space, the first crew into space and to achieve the first spacewalk, there were lots of spacecrafts, artifacts and memorabilia to see!
Highlights were a model of Sputnik, the actual LK-3 lunar lander they designed (they were never able to use because the engines kept malfunctioning), the actual bowling-ball type pods their astronauts orbited and survived in, and space station items. Lots of other examples of space suits, showers, food, the suits and capsules from their initial test launches of dogs and monkeys, etc. were also featured.
My favorite quote was from Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer, Tsiokovsky in 1911: "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."
A 3-D IMAX movie about deep space with footage from the VLT (Very Large Telescope -- actual name of it!) located in a Chilean desert was a mesmerizing tour of real images from distant galaxies, the sun and Mars. WOW!
The whole event definitely qualified for something out of this world!
Tate Britain
Took a wander into the Tate Britain museum which houses the national collection of British art. It includes pieces dating from 1500 to today's more modern art. Besides portraits, sculpture and rooms of contemporary art, I found two particular pieces that caught my imagination.
The first was an auditory piece called "War Damaged Musical Instruments." It showcased "fourteen recordings of British and German brass and wind instruments damaged in conflicts over the last 200 years. The notes recorded are based on the tones of the military bugle call 'The Last Post', but the tune is fragmented to such an extent that is is almost unrecognizable. The tune signaled to lost and wounded soldiers that it was safe to return to base and is used today as a final farewell in military funerals . . ." (from Tate's brochure on the artwork). It was haunting, yet inspiring as the notes were piped through single speakers resembling megaphones placed throughout a bare corridor. Such a unique medium.
The second was a work by Turner, a lovely and inviting landscape that appeared not quite finished by the artist, but beckoning the viewer to mentally fill in the details. Not sure that's what he intended, but that was my take! At last, I'm an artist (although I'm pretty sure I could have whipped out something like the solid blue canvas or the striped one there)! ;)
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