London trip.

We're just back from a lovely but rather tiring few days away, firstly down in London and then to see friends in Kent before heading back this afternoon.

We got the train down on Tuesday and after leaving our things at the hotel, we spent a couple of hours at the Natural History Museum.  This is more or less compulsory on any trip to London, so that M in particular can see her friends the dinosaurs there.

That evening we went to the theatre to see something that friends had recommended: The 39 Steps.  It was brilliant, although K & M had a bit of a wobble near the beginning when there was a murder.  The cast of four played over two dozen parts between them and that was with one of them just playing Richard Hannay and the woman only playing three parts.

On Wednesday we spent the day at Kew Gardens and had a lovely day.  Little Grandad (A's dad) worked there for a while before going to horticultural college although we don't know if he got a job there because he was already interested or if working there was what made him find his vocation.

A & Mr Fox on the Treetop Walkway

Mr Fox & M too.

We liked the sculpture in the tunnel by the treetop walk and read about mycorrhiza - the symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi.

We all really liked the log trail that was made using Kew trees that had fallen victim to storms in 2012 and 2013.

M & K on the log trail.

M practised her gymnastics quite a lot too, particularly cartwheels and handstand into bridge.

She's getting rather good!  The girls and A also had a go at a bit of practical physics, balancing the big seesaw in the playground.

We all went into Kew Palace, where K got very frustrated when people kept talking while we were watching a video that was narrated 'by' Queen Charlotte, George III's wife, about their very large family.  After some misunderstandings about what she was doing while waiting and what I was going to do, we managed to watch it without interruption eventually and things settled back down.
There were, of course, also some really cool plants, like this orchid.

One thing that I found fascinating was another orchid, known as Darwin's Orchid with a particularly long nectar containing spur.  Darwin theorised that the flower had evolved to be pollinated by an insect with a particularly long proboscis and indeed a just such a moth was discovered 20 years after Darwin's death.

On Thursday in the morning we went to The Museum of London, it was rather interesting to compare with the equivalent museum that we went to in Berlin last November.

After lunch we headed south of the river to go to The Globe. 

The Globe from the Millenium Bridge.

We had been planning on doing the tour as well as visiting the exhibition, but as it was the opening night of the season, the tours weren't running.  The exhibition was really interesting though and there were also various demonstrations.

The first demonstration we saw was of a printing press, which was fascinating.  Something which we all learned, was that 'upper' and 'lower case' letters came from the fact that all the tiny blocks with the letters for setting the type were kept in two cases and the capital ones were literally in the upper case.

M and I watched a costume demonstration, when a female volunteer was dressed up in a costume from The Globe's wardrobe and then later there was another similar demonstration.  This time, because M and I were there again, they dressed up a man - Daddy! 

K meanwhile, although she came to watch the printing demonstration, didn't want to watch the costume ones.  She went round the exhibition on her own, happily working her way through all of the different things you can listen to on the handset that you are given.

One of about half a dozen Shaun the Sheep we saw.  This one was just outside The Globe and was called To Sheep Perchance to Dream

After having something to eat, we returned, this time to the theatre for the opening performance of their season to see The Merchant of Venice with Jonathon Pryce as Shylock.  K & M are familiar with the basic story, as it's one of the ones that they have listened to many times on a cd of Shakespeare Without the Boring Bits, so apart from asking who some of the characters were, they were able to follow the play pretty well.  The production didn't shy away from the antisemitism in the play, so we talked about that quite a bit during the interval and afterwards on the way home.  It was also very funny in places and there was even audience participation in Launcelot Gobbo's monologue, when he got two of the groundlings up on stage to be the fiend and the angel on his shoulders.

On Friday we had a fairly leisurely morning, after a very late night for the girls, with a late breakfast and packing up before getting the train to visit our friends G, S, R (6) & L (4) in Kent.  G had a music class that she teaches on the Friday afternoon, so we joined them as they were watching a video of Ten Pieces, which is aims to introduce children to classical music.  They all really enjoyed it (as did the adults) and M was particularly pleased that one of the ten pieces is Mozart's Horn Concerto, which was definitely her favourite.

L & K on our walk.

We had a lovely walk through their local country park to the playground this morning, where after a play we flew the kites that we'd taken with us.  This inadvertently caused some excitement when the string of one of the kites broke and landed in the mud of the Medway estuary and A got a bit muddy (although it could have been an awful lot worse!) fishing it out.  While doing so, he moved a rock to put it to stand on to reach the kite and uncovered a large number of crabs.

Just a few of the rather well camoflaged many crabs.

After lunch it was time to head back to the station and we were home in time for tea, rather tired after an interesting, educational and fun few days away.