1st January 2011! New Year's Day!

Christina

Today we all slept in because it's new year's day and NOBODY wakes up early on new year's day.  After breakfast downstairs and a Berocca (apparently it helps give you back your B-B-Bounce) and in my case, another Sudafed, we went and took a metro to the Natural History Museum.  I've been watching a series on ABC about this museum and was really looking forward to it!  (plus it was free).

First we visited the Dinosaurs exhibition!  It was awesome!  They had the bones of lots of dinosaurs and lots of interesting facts and pictures and stuff.  It's one of those cool museums that have history facts and information AS WELL AS objects - I guess that's because it's aimed at children too.  There were SO many kids and parents there.  Lots of kids being frightened by the big animatronic t-rex.  Lisa didn't quite understand our fanaticism about the dinosaurs - she doesn't yet understand that dinosaurs are AWESOME.

Then we went to an exhibition about MAMMALS.  It was great.  There were heaps of old taxidermied animals which is sad but also interesting.  I saw how big a moose is!  It's big (not as big as 3 school buses though).  Mammals are often categorised by how many toes they have, which seems kind of arbitrary to me.

After a nice lunch at the cafe and another Sudafed, we walked over the road to the Victoria and Albert Museum.  I'd heard they have a lot of interesting fashion stuff.  This is a HUGE museum and has one billion exhibits.  Unfortunately, the fashion exhibits were closed for refurbishment, but that still left plenty to look at.  At one point we found ourselves in a huge gallery with only wrought iron stuff, like gates and fences and keys and stuff.  My favourite was a room that was just full of lace.  There was also heaps of fabric and embroidery samples from centuries ago.  I loved it (lisa got a bit bored i suspect).  There was a big amount of theatre stuff, like costumes and sets and advertising and stuff.  Fascinating!  There were also big paintings by Raphael and lots of giant sculptures and a hall of jewellery.  We didn't have time to look at everything and we would have been there for 6 hours if we had tried to.

We were pretty tired after that, and there were no shopping places open (being new year's day), so we came home and watched TV for a while.  I started to feel really awful and decided not to go out again.  Lisa and Charles went out to Sainsbury's and bought me tissues, a greek salad, and 3 different types of cold medicine.  They are so nice!  Now they've gone out to have dinner in Chinatown (wherever that is). I await their return with bated breath to see how it went.  I feel bad for staying home tonight, but I think I would've felt much sicker if I went out.  I've been having a nice time playing on the internet.