Kew and the V&A

Today Meredith & I split up for our own separate adventures.  Meredith went to the Tower of London and the British Museum and I went to the V&A and Kew Gardens.

I wanted to go to the V&A (Victoria & Albert Museum) because it intrigued me.  It seems like a museum of all decorative work.  The volume it has is amazing (& daunting), and it is a huge place.  There was a long corridor just full of ironworks!  I saw another with sculptures (by Bernini, Rodin...) as well as 2 other rooms I saw, and more I didn't go into.  Jewelry, metalwork, glass, theatre, photography, painting, tapestry, architecture, furniture, ceramics... those were the thematic ones.  There are areas for study, areas for research, then there are areas that take you through by period of history, and some that focus on particular artists.  There's an area on fashion too.  Displays oriented by time period throw all the arts together to depict it - fabrics, furniture, tableware, painting, etc.  It's almost as if one needs to have an understanding of the whole of European history to fully grasp & appreciate all the objects.  It is a vivid reminder of the how intertwined many countries histories are intertwined with England's.

Here were some of my favorites...
A daguerreotype of the opening of the 1851 Great Exhibition
In the Asia section, there was a tapestry that was a map.  It was amazing
Seeing Raphael's tapestry Cartoons and a corresponding tapestry

As for the Kew Gardens, we haven't managed to see any gardens yet, and so when my Mother suggested go to Kew, to Kew I went!  Kew Gardens has the oldest (functional? intact?) Victorian glass building.  It was lovely.  Kew has many indoor gardens, but most of them I did not see.  You may recall an earlier post mentioning that all the trees here are unfamiliar.  Well, Kew puts labels on their trees so most of my time was spent wandering from strange looking tree to strange looking tree.  It was marvelous, and there are some really strange (lovely) trees. 

Only one hitch in today's events and that was transportation.  The train line to Kew Gardens was closed past a certain point, and so I had to take a "rail replacement" bus, which was decidedly far better (quicker, less mob-like) than Calgary's Ctrain replacement buses, although still a bit painful.  Compensation: it was a double-decker bus and so I sat on the top level and got to see the area I was travelling through.  Not sure it was worth the time though - getting back to the hostel took me an hour and a half.

Tomorrows plan: Tate & Churchill War Rooms, possibly Westminster Abbey.  I'm also on the hunt for some place I can buy food I can eat (like groceries).  I'm pretty much just eating fruit, veggies and meat.  Rice if I can cook some for dinner.  I'm generally running on hungry.