Marianne in London: free concert fail and kew gardens

so yesterday we went to the british museum.

there was a lot of really interesting stuff there but it was kind of strange because a lot of the plaques and pamphlets were sort of self-defensive about the right of the british to even have the objects, which gave an interesting spin to this amazing place. my favorite piece though was an (exclusively british) exhibit on pharmacology in the 20th century which laid out all the pills that a single person takes in his or her life. there was one each for a man and a woman. the man died when he was 76 and the woman was still alive at 82. looking at the drugs was a really interesting way to tell someone's story. for example, for the woman, it explained how such and such pills meant that she had carried pregnancies to term twice and these meant that she had had post-partem depression and those were her birth control and some others were when she lost a baby and then there was hormone replacement therapy, pills for obesity, chemotherapy, and anti-depressants. it was probably 20 feet long and it's really striking to see them all displayed like that. this was the best picture i could get of the actual pills although it doesn't quite get at the scale. but it was long.

then last night we were supposed to go to a free concert. daniela and i were exhausted after the british museum though and had some stuff to do so we ended up heading out late and getting there after the time when they stopped guaranteeing entry. we waited in line for a bit but ended up just going home. it was kind of a bust but we didn't have anything invested in the concert anyway since we hadn't paid anything for the tickets, so it wasn't too big a deal.

then today, i went to kew gardens with molly, madeline, molly's sister abby, and becca's friend linda. it was so beautiful. here are some of my favorite pictures: