free concerts in our free time

yesterday, most of the morning was spent in a flurry of blogging as our response-paper-blogs were due. after a run with molly, i packed up some lunch and helen and i headed to hyde park. there was another music festival in the same place where last week's springsteen performance was. on the bill this week: kanye west!

by the serpentine on the way to the show

sidenote: every night i am amazing by how late the sun sets. since we're so far north, it's literally still bright out close to 10 pm. the picture above was taken around 7:30 pm. it's really really cool but seriously throws off any sense of what time it is. now that i'm thinking about it, this sort of explains why tea time is so late in the day. it's weird to eat dinner when it's still bright out, but you need something to tide you over. so clever...
anyway, helen and i hung out a little bit and listened to q-tip who was on before kanye and who we unfortunately know little to nothing about. but we enjoyed ourselves. about 9, molly, madeline, mike, and whitney joined us and we had a nice little group. also, whitney had made super delicious cookies earlier which we appreciated. we didn't have the greatest view, but we still heard kanye for free!

i guess this view is why some people paid...but we loved it

it was a little chilly once the sun (finally) set

we had no class today to give us a day off before our two consecutive weekend trips, so i tagged along with molly to the imperial war museum. while she worked in the archive, i looked around for a couple hours. it was both one of the best and most depressing museums i've ever been in. the exhibit on children during world war two really got to me. the holocaust exhibit was also not the most uplifting, as is to be expected. i did think it was slightly funny though that the place where they would store the excessive number of shoes and clothes from the victims, they would refer to as "Canada" because it was the "land of plenty". i've never really thought of Canada as the utmost example of a land of plenty, but that could be me being US-centric.
in another part of the museum, they had an exhibit about post-war rations and there i saw my first can of klim!
powdered milk which is sort of like the opposite of milk which is "milk" backwards-->klim! growing up in aruba, my dad would have this instead of real milk since they coudn't transport it there. even though i've never had it, this was a nice little reminder of home in a roundabout kind of way.

after that, i met back up with molly and we headed home. but since we were almost on the end of the line, we got a whole tube car to ourselves. we found this exciting enough to warrant a photo:
she headed to the v&a to learn about 19th cent. life and i, tired from just walking around one museum, headed home to finish up laundry (hooray clean clothes) and do some work.

today is also the first day that it's rained during the day really. there was a thunderstorm a week ago saturday, but it passed pretty quickly and was after i had already settled in for the night. but this seems like it's going to sprinkle all afternoon. hopefully it will let up enough for a run. at least it's cooled down a little bit. i have the door open to the garden and it's pretty nice in here right now.