Heather's Playing Catch-Up

I've been sadly behind in the blogging this week, but in my defense, I've been running a little ragged. We had our second (and also last) week of classes and there were papers to write and required sites to visit and rampant colds to fight off, but most of the rest of the group has gone off to their weekend in Paris now, so I'm left with some time to myself at last! So, without further ado, here's Heather's week so far. Monday. Classes were cancelled, so we decided to try and fit in as many things that we hadn't done yet as we could. Of course, it was windy and raining (and my umbrella turned inside out!) so this translated into two things, and only one of them outside. In the morning we went to the Victoria and Albert museum. I thought this was going to be a museum entirely about Victoria and Albert, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was infact a collection of treasures and paintings from around the world. They have a gallery with huge Raphael originals, several statue galleries containing statues I've studied over the years, a glass gallery with lots of mirrors and crystals, and a recreation of a Tudor-style music room that looks like it was plucked out of whatever home it had been in before and insereted into the museum. There was a whole lot more than these things, though--ancient wooden spiral stairways that would probably break if you tried to walk on them, huuge galleries of art and treasures from China, Japan, Korea, and India, and an exhibit on fashion through the ages that had lots of cool dresses. My favorite part? Learning how to tie a cravat and singing songs from the Scarlet Pimpernel with Alexis while doing so. Second favorite part would have to be the chairs in the museum's foyer. They're like tops. You sit on them and then you roll around in circles on them. We had entirely too much fun. Second stop of the day was to the one and only Tower Bridge! The olympic rings are currently hanging from the bridge in honor of the games starting up next week. We walked across it twice and took some fabulous pictures. We sealed the deal with fish and chips and ice cream before heading home to call it a night. For FHE we had a crepe party and I ate nutella on my crepe. Have I mentioned my sudden love of nutella? I don't know where it came from; I didn't even like it when I had it in the States, but it's different now. Maybe it's because nutella was all I had to put on my toast when we were living in hotel after hotel after hotel. I don't know. MOre to come, more to come! ("I said brief, not infinitesimal!")