On Saturday, I went down to London; we had a look around Leighton House, a "Palace of Art" which used to be the house of Frederic, Lord Leighton. An amazing place - the Arabic hallway is extremely well constructed but totally out of place, and the gardens have the most beautiful but bizarre deep purple lilies. As well as Leighton's pictures and paintings, there are a few other pre-Raphaelite works as well.
After a brief stop at an Iranian sweet shop, we moved over to the Museum of Natural History. I had vaguely wanted to go the Science Museum but Ei did her famous deliberate mishearing trick and we ended up in the Nat Hist instead. I wasn't too bothered, since it's an extremely well-operated museum, and somehow managed to make Natural History stuff non-boring.
Next stop was the Japan Center in Piccadilly, which was quite disappointing, so we moved on to Brewer Street, which has the Rice Wine Shop, an excellent second-hand bookshop and Arigato, a fully-fledged Japanese convenience store. But we chose not to get anything this week, and we'll grab stuff next week for the movie night I'm hosting.
Yesterday was pretty lazy, got up late, watched a movie, and went for a wander around town. Stopped myself from spending hundreds on CDs at Borders, and eventually went to see About A Boy. Good fun, if not entirely shallow. But all in all, a good couple of days.
