Does not divide Sunday from the week

Yeah, so I'm going to divide my two Sundays from the rest of the week.  I really need to blog about my trip to the North, but I figure that I'd better do this part now and the trip will just have to come later.  Next post, I promise.

Alright, so last week on Saturday I went to the Tate Britain for my Arts class.  It was a pretty cool museum with some really awesome Turner works.  Oh, and Sydnie and I went to the Science Museum that morning, which was pretty neat.  They had the Rocket and a whole display about clocks that was really cool.  They also had these big old plastic drape things that were everywhere in the plastic section.  We had taken pictures the day before peeking out behind trees near the Globe, so I took one peeking out from the plastic.

Very red, isn't it?

On the way back to the Center we stopped and bought delicious sandwiches, Ben's cookies (THE most amazing cookies that you will ever try) and then I bought a copy of Much Ado About Nothing to read on my trip to Scotland, because I'm going to see it performed.  Yeah, so that Saturday (the 21st) was pretty awesome.

On Sunday I was in with the Primary again.  I sat between the two troublesome kids and tried to keep them quiet and focused on the lesson.  It was absolutely exhausting.  I'd forgotten how much work little kids can be when they don't want to be helpful and it's the last hour of three hours of church in the afternoon.  But that night at the Center we had the most beautiful devotional.  I can't remember the names of the speakers (Brother and Sister Hughes, I just checked), but the woman was a member of the Relief Society General Presidency for a while, and so that was really cool.  She talked about how it is all of the small actions of little people that God can use to make us great.  It was a really amazing devotional, and precisely what I needed.

Anyway, then yesterday, the most recent Sunday, the 29th, it was stake conference.  However, a bunch of us thought that it would be a good opportunity to go to Westminster Abbey to attend a service there and to get a peek at the inside of it.  So Sydnie and I tried to go to the 11:15 service, but we got there barely too late.  So we went on a walk instead and then went to Evensong at 3:00.

We did the Inns of Court walk, and I suppose that I was the leader.  It was actually rather difficult because the Inns of Court are apparently not really open on Sundays or weekends or something because we couldn't get through the gates.  So we did a lot of walking around them and backtracking and looking through at what we should've walked past.  I feel like we saw everything on the walk though, and it was definitely more interesting the way that we did it.  We didn't get a group picture (hard with just the two of us and hardly any other people about) but we did find some nice statues next to a bookstore.

Me next to a penguin!  I took this picture for my siblings.

Yeah, so after we'd finished our walk we were pretty tired and it was getting onto lunchtime, but of course, it being a Sunday, we couldn't buy any food.  Our month-long Oyster cards had just run out, which means now I either have to buy weekly passes or simply pay every time that I take the Tube.  We didn't consider a little hunger to be enough to warrant a trip back to the Center and then back to Westminster, so I pulled a Tangerine and some digestives out of my bag and we ate those on a little bench in the park.  Then I pulled out Much Ado About Nothing, which I still had about two acts left in to read, and we read it out loud.  We were each at least five different characters, which made for some pretty interesting conversations, because sometimes you'd have a whole page of text to read, but three different characters on the same page.  It was really actually quite delightful.  I love Shakespeare!  And something about reading out loud and having all the words flow together, especially in insults and declarations of love, was really wonderful.  Probably one of my favorite parts of the day (especially because there were roses in the park that I got to take pictures of).

We went to Westminster after that, walking along the river through parks and past Trafalgar Square.  The Evensong was really beautiful.  Those big tall roofs with all that empty space in these Gothic cathedrals is absolutely beautiful acoustics for the music.  I'm really convinced that we need more beautiful singing at church.  The sermon was really good too.  The man was talking about the importance of using your resources to help the poor and he talked about Haiti and their history and how he was headed there next week to meet with other religious groups that are working with the people. It was a nice talk and it's always neat to hear things applied to the present day.  I hadn't heard a Catholic sermon before, so it was neat.

Yeah, so that pretty much sums up Sunday.  We had these absolutely delicious shish kabobs for dinner, but I won't bore you with the details.