2/28/12

Hello hello hello!! What a wonderful Tuesday morning! Unless you are me that is. As mentioned in my last blog Hannah, Jenna, and I weren't expecting on feeling the best today after our wonderful dinner experience last night, but shockingly everyone felt pretty good, except me who woke up with a headache that would not go away. Sooo this post may be pretty short since I tried to keep my eyes closed for the majority of the day. Even so I did manage to experience some of what this wonderful city has to offer since I had to get out of bed and tour with Andrew yet again.

First stop today was the Foundling Museum. It was really cute.

The museum is built where the Foundling Hospital had stood, a nice little establishment where orphans lived and were taught certain tools of the trade so that one day they could go out and work for the military and become useful to the society. Well that is just one thing the place is known for, the other thing is art, strange combination right? But really it makes sense. Have you ever heard of Hogarth? The name sounds familiar doesn't it? Yea, he was an artist, painted a lot of famous works and his stuff is all over in museums. So Hogarth was one of the original contributors to this Foundling Hospital. You see, Hogarth was a Protestant and part of the whole being a Christian thing includes helping people and Hogarth was quite the philanthropist. Not only did he paint a whole lot of stuff in order to spread the word about this place and make money for it, he convinced a bunch of his artist friends to do the same thing. And so all of these artists were painting scenes showing charity to children and biblical scenes (again with children in them) and all of these paintings were sold or commissioned in order to raise money for this hospital. Kind of neat really, and a bunch of the paintings are hanging in this Foundling Museum now. Mind you I had a headache while I was learning all of this so I probably missed a fact or two in there. Sorry no pictures of any of the inside of the place.

We spent a good two hours at the museum before we headed off to other parts of Russell Square (the area where we were exploring today). The class was pretty lucky today, we got to take a break after this part of the tour because Andrew needed a coffee. So we all got to sit outside in the beautiful sun and drink our coffee or eat our snacks that we got in this little area of shops we found. The weather became very nice at this point. The sun felt great and we were able to enjoy it as we made our way to a little park a few blocks away, passing the building where Andrew works on the way. When we got to the park I was so amazed by its beauty.

Gorgeous right! Too bad we weren't allowed to go in. There was a big fence surrounding the whole place. I only got these pictures by sticking my camera through the bars :)  Oh well, it was still nice to look at. The class got to go somewhere better after this anyway, the British Museum! It was so cool! We saw some awesome stuff!

The building itself if awesome!

And then there is THE Rosetta Stone!

Closeup of the Rosetta Stone

A lot of cool Egyptian stuff

The two eyebeam statue guys from the Neverending Story

Oh! And Jenna and Hanna took a dance class with the statues!

And can you believe it? I got to feed a horse.

Really cool double headed serpent from Mexico used in a lot of different ceremonies.

And a whole bunch of cool little figurines of gods and goddesses from all over the world.

The British Museum was so great! I had a blast and must go back really soon! The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. Spent a lot of time online and then Lizzi and Charlotte made the most delicious stir-fry for dinner, seriously amazing!

Well bed time for this little night owl. Night all!