Marianne in London: swiftly and with purpose

ok this post is kind of long but there is a lot of multimedia stuff so it really isn't as long as it seems. but what it lacks in conciseness it makes up for in nerdiness.
first off, in a previous post i mentioned that i was doing lsat work in the garden out back but that the photo-uploader wasn't working. now it is. so here's where i do my lsat homework!

this next one is the view from my room of my little work station.

definitely beats a normal lsat class any day.

now, yesterday we went on a mega-walking tour of historical medical sites throughout london. it was guided by this older woman who really nice and incredibly knowledgeable and kind of how i imagine a british grandmother. she kept getting frustrated that we (at one third her age...) weren't walking fast enough and as she hustled down the street kept yelling over her shoulder "walk swiftly and with purpose!" we did our best. sort of.

a quick list of things that we saw includes:
-guy's hospital by the london bridge which was one of the first places that would take infectious or chronic patients
-a 19th century operating room that was in the attic of an old church across the street from the hospital, removed to there so that the screams wouldn't bother the sick people (but apparently the praying people didn't mind?)
-st. bart's hospital opened in the 12th century
-detour during lunch to millenium bridge
-various sites around soho (which is called that because it used to be fields outside the city proper and people would go hunting there and "so-ho" is a hunting cry) including the garden that dickens based the manette family's garden on in a tale of two cities, where marx lived when he was in london for a bit, a variety of workhouses and hospitals and churches from the street
-john snow's water pump, where he figured out what was causing the outbreak of cholera--a bad water supply! so he removed the pump handle and the outbreak stopped. it was about 85 degrees and by that point we'd be running around for 7 hours so we were really disappointed to see that the handle was still missing...

here are some pictures from all that:

nick, amputating my leg on an actual 19th cent operating table.
he's holding a bone saw; other operating knives are in the wooden box on the right.

us, gathered around john snow's pump

after that rather long day, we took some time to recover. i went for a quick run then we had a group dinner of chicken tikka masala and fruit salad which was really good.
later, molly and madeline met up with us and most of the group went to a pub down the road where we discovered that british tv is bizarre, on the whole.

this morning we checked out the museum of natural history and got shown their rare books collection, focusing on darwin's and wallace's books and writings. it was really really cool. they published a version of on the origin of species in braille! molly crashed this as well and we were going to take stupid pictures pretending to read that but they put it away before we got the chance. but here are some pictures i did get to take while there.

me and my roommate in front of a giant dinosaur in the entrance hall to the musuem,
which has been discussed as a "cathedral for science"

molly super pumped about some fossils, although they weren't collected by mary anning

some cool butterflies from wallace's personal collection

and THEN we went to the science museum, where one of our professors used to work, so he gave us a cool explanation of part of a steam engine, which we were lucky enough to see when it's running because i guess they only do it once a week or so.

the actual point that he was making (which i stopped the camera before he got to) was that when wallace was explaining feedback loops in natural selection, he used this device as an analogy.
finally, we were let loose in the science museum where they have watson and crick's original model of DNA as a double helix!