Things About London

Alright, now for the updates after Liss ran away and left me all aloooone. I got a box! it was an exciting box full of yummy things and tea!

And these owl sticky notes, which are the bestest thing evar. (Thanks mom!)

I also took a wander through the main UCL library, which is up a staircase that opens up onto this lovely statue which looks down to the floor below, and the library seems to sprawl out in all directions from there, though I've not thoroughly explored it yet. 

 Southbank now has some lovely lights up which I think might be new!

Look, red leaves! Things are still remarkably green, and we've had some pleasantly sunshiny days, despite the rain and clouds that show up in between.

Some sort of art related building has this fun, colorful web strung up outside for Halloween, fluffy yarn spider included.

This lovely little plants are a vibrant purple that almost shows up right in the picture!

The same park also has this slightly awkward looking depiction of the Green Man.

The past weekend was the Bloomsbury Festival, and I wandered down to have a look with a friend. There were lots of attached things going on, but the main exciting bit was the fire everywhere. It was lovely and warm!

 Yay fire!

 A lovely little tree of punched metal lanterns.

Fire trees!

And fountains!

And spheres!

The nearby architecture building also has this amazing 3-D map of the city of London.

The big artistic piece of the night was this flaming skull bit, which was super-warm and awesome to watch as it burned down over the evening.

There was even music in the midst of fire.

And a brave florist willing to put flames near his plants!

 We visited a neat underground bar with some lovely doorway art, too.

And I got a drink that had fire on it! I didn't even ask for fire. The bartender must have known how much I like things on fire, haha.

I also found this awesome toilet seat in one of UCL's bathrooms and had to take a picture. Every other seat is the plain white ordinary old seat. And then: Strawberry. I love it. 

I also caught the last of a sunny evening out at the clock tower park near my place. The clock tower was actually built in the mid 1800s, and stood over a cattle market that was on this site. The cattle market has left, but the clock stays. You can also go up inside the tower on certain days.

It makes for a nice pretty little escape from the cityscape, as do any of the little parks and green spaces dotted around the city.

The sun didn't last too long - I'm still getting used to how early it sets here!

But the sky was pretty.

And the moon came up before I left, hiding behind the clouds.

This old iron gate goes around part of the park and was also from the original cattle market. It's held up pretty well for being the better of 150 years old!

Today we had a field trip in through the British Library to visit their conservation lab. This tower of books is in the main part of the library, and everything in it looks old and beautiful.

This is Doug, one of the conservators, who demonstrated how to create the embossed gold names and designs on the bindings of books for us.

This book was in the process of being rebound after the material in it had been conserved.

Chris was another conservator, who showed us some of the books he was working on, and how you can repair cracks in bindings and tattered book corners with Japanese tissue.

The conservation lab was large and lovely, but so is the rest of the library. This fun statue sits near the doors.

And I had a brief peek inside the St. Pancras Station before heading on home! 

Hope all is going well for everyone!