Winter is Here

Lovely trees on the Heath

I think winter has finally arrived, not that it's particularly cold just yet, in fact I think we have been extraodinarily lucky with the weather so far.  Perhaps it's because it's a La Nina this year, and Australia is getting all the rain.  After the big-freeze of last year, we are still to see any real snow.  We had one snow flurry a few weeks ago, but nothing settled, and Christmas day was about 15 degrees, cold enough for a roast duck, but certainly no white Christmas.  But even though it is still warm-ish, the trees persist in losing their leaves, and running through the Heath the other day, you were certainly sure it was winter.  Still pretty in it's own, bare, way though.

Snow only settled on gloves

And cars

Natural History Museum

The main hall, I love this building!

I went back to the Natural History Museum the other day, mainly to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.  A combination of two of my loves, photography and animals, so I was definitely looking forward to that.  You can't take any photos of the photos, I hate that rule, but you can see the winning photos online here.  There were a variety of different categories, but it seemed that some of the photographers were taking a bit of an easy way out by taking extremely similar photos and then submitting them for different categories, which I thought was a bit dodgy.  Some of the shots were incredible, and the photos by children were pretty amazing, and these were often just taken in their backyard.  Which goes to show you don't need to travel for miles to take good shots. 

I think the Natural History Museum has to be one of my favourite buildings, though I think they could spend a little more time on the display labels.  There's actually quite a

Standing guard at the entrance to the dinosaurs

big difference between the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, and whilst I think they both have great stuff in them, it just seems that the British Museum has a lot more money to be able to spend on explaining the different displays.  Everything in the British Museum has a detailed explanation, whereas most of the stuff in the Natural History Museum, just has a name plate.  The stuff that does have a more detailed description looks like it was last updated in the 1960's.

The museums here in Britain are all free, and it makes me wonder where do they get the money to prepare any exhibits, is it purely government funded, or do they rely heavily on donations?  And if that is the case how is it that the British Museum has so much more money than the Natural History Museum?  Are they just better at pulling in the donations?  They would certainly get more visitors, but then you wouldn't think the average-joe visitor would actually donate all that much. 

A little guy casting shadows

Anyway it seemed a little quieter at the Natural History Museum this time round, so I thought I would try their dinosaur exhibit, by far their most popular, permanent exhibit.  It was certainly pretty good, they had a lot of complete skeletons, and quite a bit of general dino info.  They also talked a bit about how they couldn't really be sure of much, and the different evidence leading to why they think they were cold-blooded, or warm-blooded, or why they died out.

T-Rex and Triceratops skulls

The strangest thing about the exhibit though is the way it is structured.  It is very much a one way path, you walk in, up some stairs, and then you walk along an elevated walkway over all the exhibits, past skeletons, until you get to the very back of the room.  You see a sign saying T-Rex, so you think, oh cool they have a T-Rex skeleton, it's strange that it's behind a wall, but fair enough.  You then walk around the wall, and you find you are on a ramp, leading back down to the ground.  And it's not a T-Rex skeleton, but a strange animatronic T-Rex, which I assume was life-size, but it was hard to tell.  And I'm thinking, why are we all forced to go past this thing?  I mean it was a major crush up on the walkway, and if it was only leading to this weird robotic thing, then I would gladly have skipped the crush and the robot, and focused on the rest of the exhibit.

Freaky alien model

After the dinosaurs, the other exhibits seem a bit half-hearted, I think they sunk all their donation money into the robot.  I checked out the human body section, which looked like it was last updated 40 years ago.  I have to say the highlight here was the 80x scale model of a foetus, that thing looked like an alien!

Christmas Lights

Why umbrellas, is there a hidden Christmas message here?

A quiet patch on Oxford street

Lights down the street, before it's closed to traffic

I realise these Christmas related posts are coming a little late, but I think even bloggers deserve a break over Christmas.  London does do quite a good Christmas light, they haven't quite fully grasped the Christmas market, I think they just see them as another chance to consume random stuff.  And speaking of consuming, these shots were all taken on Oxford Street, which has to be London's temple to consumption.  It is also rapidly becoming my least favourite street in London.  The people! The barging! They had to close Oxford Street for the week leading up to Christmas, I think there would have been casaulties if they hadn't.

When I took these photos I vowed not to return until after Christmas.  I should have extended that vow until after the after Christmas sales. 

Recent Shows

Ceiling at Albert Hall

We've managed to get out to a few shows recently, unfortunately "the show" does not lend itself to photos, what with the excessive number of "no recording device" signs around the place.

We managed to see the Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall, that was a highlight, though really everything we've seen has been good.

The bassist was fantastic, even though when it wasn't his turn to sing he sat slumped in his chair and appeared to nap.  He made up for it when he opened his mouth.

Going to the shows you do get to experience freaky humanity in all of it's glory too.  There were two wonderful freaky instances, one was at the Messiah. To be fair the Messiah is certainly something that you really have to concentrate on, to understand what they are singing, and these people didn't seem to speak much English, which would have made it a couple of orders of magnitude harder.  So within about 20 minutes at least two people in front of us had fallen asleep and then proceeded to doze throughout the performance.  At the very last minute of the performance, where everything is rising to the conclusion, one of them managed to rouse herself and then offered a mint to the person sitting next to her.  Apparently she couldn't wait 30 seconds for the show to end before freshening her breath.

An even better example of strange show behaviour was at a play we went to see, it was the Veil, a new gothic Irish play set in the 1800's.  It was at the Royal Theatre and the staging was unbelievable, seriously there was a full-blown tree on stage, as well as a working fireplace and dozens of candles, all of which were constantly being lit throughout the play.  This time sitting in front of us there were two incredibly drunk people, who found the tense moments hilarious.  At one point in the play one of the actors is screaming out "Who's there?!?!" over and over again, and I'm afraid the drunk people could not resist the call.  Luckily they didn't make it past intermission, and disappeared to polish off the bottle of wine they were carrying with them.  I am starting to appreciate why the boxes exist in these theatres, the rich people don't want to be mingling with the riff-raff.

Again though this play was fantastic, and even had an actor from the Vicar of Dibley, not Dawn French, the sullen farmer one, and he was really good, completely different from his character in the Vicar of Dibley :).

A small portion of the choir at the Messiah, with the orchestra yet to arrive

It being Christmas time we also couldn't resist a showing of the Nutcracker.  There were at least three different theatres showing it at the same time.  I think that really brought the difference with Australia home.  In Oz you would be lucky to get one showing, which would sell out weeks in advance.  Here we could still getting reasonably good seats the week before we wanted to go.

It was a Matthew Bourne production, apparently he did a version of Swan Lake in Sydney, which was an all-male production, so it seems that he's willing to try different things.  I really liked the Nutcracker, perhaps it wasn't true high-ballet, at some points it really seemed more like contemporary dance than ballet, but then I don't really know what the technical difference is sometimes.  I quite liked the opening scene, which was set in an orphanage, and though at the beginning you keep expecting them to open their mouths, the exaggerated facial expressions and body movements soon seem to be natural.

Long Nights

 The long nights and cold weather here seem to be leading to an uptick in our booze consumption.  In the last couple of weeks we have bought a bottle of port, a bottle of rum, and 5 mini-bottles of whiskey.  Dave is particularly keen on trying the whiskey, and we finally found what seemed to be a proper whiskey shop near the British Museum the other day.  As we really don't know much about whiskey, we thought what better way to work out what we like than buying a few small bottles and conducting a tasting session. 

We have started with what the sales-person said was the lighter, more sherry flavoured ones, though he did give us a peaty one just so we can see if we like that as well.  He didn't really start off on a good foot, describing the whiskey he likes as having an almost antiseptic flavour.  But he got better from there and certainly seemed to know what he was talking about.  But then as we know nothing about it, he could have been telling us that the moon was made of cheese and we would have believed him.

I'm thinking we'll be tasting a few of them this afternoon seeing as how Dave has just spent 50 minutes on the phone with some idiot from Singapore Airlines trying to book tickets to Australia.  Let's just say Dave handled the off-shoring of Singapore Airlines reservations office much better than I would have done. Especially when the guy on the phone told him there were no seats available on a flight we had just looked at online, which had half the plane empty.  But he got there in the end.  So we can enjoy a week of Australian warmth in March this year.  Or at least I think we can, I'm still not convinced that the guy on the phone managed to book the correct tickets.

Uggs - You're Doing it Wrong

Uggs are super popular here, the only problem is that people seem to treat them as outdoors shoes, as opposed to the slippers that they really are.  It's really weird to see people wearing Uggs into the office on cold winters mornings.  For me it's like they are still wearing pyjamas.  I means Uggs are only really used outdoors if you need to do a last minute dash either to pick up a takeaway or for milk and bread.  And even then you should be also wearing tracksuit pants and hanging your head in shame.

But then I suppose to be fair to the British, Uggs cost 200 pounds here.  So that does seem to give them a bit more of a glamorous air.  In fact if I had spent 200 pounds on a pair of Uggs they would be glued to my feet.

Sunrises

Golden colours in Hampstead

Winter solstice is over here, and whilst the days are not yet growing noticeably longer (or warmer) I have to say there is a bonus for the incredibly late mornings. Today's sunrise occurred at 8:06am (the latest morning of the year) and it was a beauty!  I've been running in recently, and on occasion London pulls out an impressive sunrise, which you actually get to enjoy because it isn't 5am and you aren't dying of sleep exhaustion.

Sunrise over the city in the distance

In fact I would go so far as to say that the mornings are really the best time of the day here.  Today I ran into work, a nice 9km downhill run, the route back home is not nearly so pleasant :). The photos here give some idea as to the sunrise that was awaiting me as I stepped out of the front door.

I would suggest that if you are visiting really try and get out in the mornings, most of the time I would seriously say that it is the warmest part of the day, there's no wind and the clouds have rained themselves out overnight.  For example I got this sunrise in the morning, whilst on the way home from work it was blowing a gale and my coat was drenched.  I find that midday is the turning point here, the clouds come over and the wind picks up.  So museum it up in the morning and then find a nice warm pub for the afternoon.