Ancient Art, Ancient Rocks, AncIent Cathedrals, Ancient Baths

This is about to be a long post, so bear with me!

Last Wednesday I went to the V&A museum, AKA the Victoria and Albert Museum. Victoria and Albert were huge supporters of education and the arts, which is why this museum was named after them. Inside are many forms of art: clothing, theatre costumes/sets, old silver decor, paintings, tapestries, even furniture styles throughout the years. I didn't take too many pictures inside, but here is the building:


On Friday some friends and I went to Platform 9 and 3/4 (because we're Harry Potter nerds), but it turns out King's Cross Station is under a lot of construction so they moved this tourist attraction outside. This is the very cheap version by which I posed, wearing an extremely disappointed look on my face.


However, we also made it to Harrod's, a gigantic (and famous) store where you can pretty much buy anything you can dream up. Seriously. It's like Santa's workshop in there. It's also extremely expensive. You have to pay a pound just to go to the bathroom.

After this we checked out China Town and had some DELICIOUS authentic Chinese food! That and the trip to Harrod's made up for the Harry Potter Disappointment.

Saturday morning we left to visit Stonehenge, Salisbury, and Bath. I will let the following pictures (and their captions) narrate that adventure!

Stonehenge was built around 3000BC, before the wheel was invented, and we suspect that they stopped using it around 1500BC. However, we still don't know WHY they built it. It must have been important though, because these rocks weigh around 3 tons and came from a mountain about 40 miles away. There are a few theories, ranging anywhere from funeral-like rituals, to a calendar, to extraterrestrial conspiracies.

After this we went to Salisbury, where we saw the Doom Painting in St. Thomas Beckett Cathedral, depicting the good going to Heaven and the bad going to Hell:

I'm not sure you can see this, but Jesus is up at the top in the middle, the angels are on the left, and the people going to Hell are on the right. It was painted around 1460, and likely because this church was mainly for commoners who probably were illiterate and couldn't read the Bible.

We then went to the Salisbury Cathedral, which has the second-highest spire (the tallest one is in Ulm, Germany) and houses an original copy of the Magna Carta (of which I was not allowed to take pictures).

The oldest working clock! Too bad I can't remember how old it is...

Baptism Pool

We then went to Bath, which was a great city that I really enjoyed! Here are some pictures of the Roman Baths, where men would go to relax and be healed by the spring water (which continues to surface hundreds of thousands of litres each day, at about 125 degrees Fahrenheit).


Here are a few more pictures of the scenery in Bath:


Bath Abbey
The Royal Crescent (appears in some films of Jane Austen's Work)

We also managed to check out the Jane Austen Centre and went on a tour of the exhibit there. I learned a lot more about her (although nothing was necessarily picture-worthy), like how she absolutely hated Bath. She didn't like that it was a big fashionable city to visit and was much more of a country girl, but it did become the basis of her social commentary in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. However, we found out where her house was located when she was living in Bath (25 Gay Street) and took a picture by it! It is now a dentist's office.