What's here? The portrait of a blinking idiot

Alright, so I've got a week's worth of blogging to catch up on.  Thank heavens for Sunday mornings!  This post is going to a Monday and Saturday combined post.  All of the days in between those days I wasn't in London, so I'll catch up on what I've been doing in London first and then we'll talk about my trip to the West in my next few posts.

So Monday and Saturday I spent mostly going to the National Portrait Gallery for art class.

Here we are in front of the gallery.

The portrait gallery was pretty neat, although not as interesting as some of the other museums.  I only briefly went through the more contemporary portraits, but I didn't like them as much.  I knew that I wouldn't before I even went through them, but it was still disappointing so not really like them.  I felt like there was a lot more to see and think about with the older pictures, particularly when you had one person portrayed by several different artists.  Yeah yeah, I'm turning all philosophical and thoughtful again, so enough of that.

On Monday that's really all that we had time to do.  The museum and then pack that night for our trip to the west (with of course a stop at Tesco's to stock up on snacks).  On Saturday the museum was only a small portion of the day.  That morning I went to the market on Portobello Road and looked around for a bit.  It's mainly focused on antiques, so there was a lot of really cool old jewelery and clocks and cutlery and the like.

Then we had a splendid time eating lunch at the park by the Peter Pan statue in honor of Molly's birthday.  And I tried another new kind of candy!  This time it was a Catherine Wheel, which if any of you are as intimately familiar with the Harry Potter books as I am know, is something that Fred and George's fireworks are compared to.

See how exciting?  And they're black licorice, so it wasn't another chocolate candy that I was trying.

Oh, and Molly's British friend who's studying at the University of London came to the picnic too, so that was really fun because he was talking in a British accent and such.  I don't hear too much of that because at church, which is our main conversational contact with people from Britain, everyone is from countries where they speak Spanish so they have a Spanish accent and a British accent all rolled into one, which is interesting but hardly the real thing.  So it was fun to talk to someone who's actually British, because listening to conversations on the Tube just isn't quite the same.

After the lunch and the National Portrait Gallery Catherine and I went to the Courtauld Gallery.  Unfortunately, you have to pay to get into the gallery unless it's a Monday.  So obviously we decided to not go into the gallery and just return on Monday when we didn't have to pay.  We did however take some neat pictures at the courtyard that had water spouting out of it.

You can see the water shooting up.  Just the sort of thing that you want to run straight through and get absolutely soaking wet.  We didn't though, because it was just a little too cold for that sort of thing.

Well it was still just a tad bit too early for dinner and a tad bit too depressing to simply head back to the center to do homework, so we ran over to 221B Baker Street, home of Sherlock Holmes.  My guide book said that it was open until six thirty, but of course it was wrong and it's only open until six o'clock.  We spent fifteen minutes looking through the gift shop and taking pictures out front because they wouldn't let us into the museum.  I'll have to go back later.

Here I am in front of the door.  If you look carefully you can see the number above it.

Then that night I went for a lovely stroll in Hyde Park to catch up with Dezi, who's on the theater study abroad.  She made me terribly jealous as she told me about her plans to go to Madrid and her awesome day in Brighton.  At least I'm going to Scotland in another week!