Buckingham Palace and Natural History Museum

21 August, 2014

Diamonds.


We spent the morning seeing the public staterooms at Buckingham Palace. Once again, we weren't allowed to take picures, so we don't have a lot to show. It wasn't anywhere near as impressive as Hampton Court, in any case.

Our AirBnB place in Picadilly Circus was really close to everything, so we decided to walk to Buckingham Palace.

We walked first through St. James' park.


There were many ducks, geese and swans. Eric got a good picture of a swan cleaning itself.


Buckingham Palace

Buckingham Palace.


Eric's close-in view.


The tour of Buckingham Palace was annoying in that there was only one bathroom available, and it was at the end of the 1.5-hr tour. They really wouldn't let me just use the bathroom and then come back for the tour. They also didn't tell you that you couldn't take pictures until after you'd bought your tickets. So, I'm warning you now, if you do this, go to the bathroom somewhere in the park first, and be prepared for no photography.

It was very pretty inside, but there were a lot of exhibits about the living royal family, in which I had no particular interest. I just wanted to see the beauty of the architecture and decor. I was especially impressed by the Blue and White Drawing Rooms. I did think to myself, though, that the decorators had displayed a great disregard for any principle of sustainability.

Back side of Buckingham Palace.


Eric took a picture of the flag.


Flowers in Hyde Park.



Eric went into a McLaren dealership to take a picture of one of the cars.


I had planned to see the Victoria & Albert Museum, a museum of design, but one of our friends highly recommended the Natural History Museum. I thought Eric might like that better, so we went there instead.

We did walk by the V&A and take some picture of the architecture, though.


Controversial quotes in the stairs, perhaps part of a current exhibit on political art.


A cupola on top of the V&A.


Entrance to the Natural History Museum.


Eric's view of the outside of the Natural History Museum.


And his view of the elaborately decorated inside.


I liked the floor tile.


The museum was divided into four general color-coded areas, and most of the exhibits that interested us most were in the geology section, the Red Zone. There was a long line for the dinosaur bones, so we skipped most of them and went straight to Red.

We did walk past these bones of a giant sloth.


Eric took a picture of a display showing the world's plate boundaries.


Note in particular the complex plate tectonics of the Pacific Northwest, where the Juan de Fuca plate intersperses itself between the Pacific and North American Plates, creating the Cascade volcanoes.


Here is Iceland, right on a plate boundary (where we snorkeled!).


Folded gneiss, showing the way the rock was twisted and folded by forces beneath the earth's surface.


Folded schist, similar.


The exhibit presented three types of lava, the usual 'a'a and pa'hoehoe, plus something called Pele's hair.


I'd never heard of Pele's hair before and I think it is pretty rare, but it was presented as being as common as the others. I suppose it's possible that it is very common but that it's light and blows away, but you would think that it would collect somewhere. Somewhere, at the base of some mountain, there would be an accumulation of Pele's hair, in the same way that there are accumulations of dust bunnies in the corner of your bedroom. I suspect the truth is that, while Pele's hair is very pretty and makes a nice exhibit, most of the time, volcanoes just produce 'a'a' and pa'hoehoe.

More columnar basalt! We've seen so much of this lately.


There was an exhibit of the world's supervolcanoes. There aren't that many of them, but there are three in the US: Yellowstone, of course, the Valles caldera in New Mexico, and the Long Valley caldera in Mammoth Lakes, California.


I had been led to believe that a volcanic explosion would help solve the climate change problem, because the ash cloud would cool things off. According to this volcano exhibit, volcanic eruptions release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and are associated with the atmosphere's warming periods. The atmosphere cools when no volcanoes explode for a significant period. So, an eruption will only make things worse.

Eric took a picture of the illustration of the use of geothermal energy, which featured a picture of the Blue Lagoon.


He also took a picture of this picture of a truck barely escaping the advance of a pyroclastic flow in the Philippines.


He took a picture of this photo of Dyrhólaey, which illustrates a mid-ocean ridge.


Inside of a stalagmite.


A fossil of a pile of dead fish.


A crystal called stibnite.


A calcite crystal.


San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid, featured in an exhibit on structural strengthening of buildings.


Lybian desert glass, occurring only in Lybia. It may have been produced by a meteoric impact, but scientists are not sure.


One of the coolest exhibits in the Red Zone was this escalator going up to the second floor through a model of the earth.


We did not get to ride the escalator, however, because they closed it more than 15 minutes before closing the museum. This was a huge disappointment, and it wasn't really fair.

I did take a picture of the inside of it from the floor, though.


Meanwhile, Eric took a picture of a moon rock. I was too unhappy at the time to appreciate the rock's significance properly.


We did get to see this statue of Darwin.


And Eric got a great picture of this sample of ammonite.


We stepped off the main drag to look for a geocache, and saw a little bit of this high-density residential neighborhood.


Harrod's

For days, I'd been walking all over London, past many shops and boutiques with names like Calvin Klein and Gucci, and thinking there was no reason to come to London to shop. If I wanted any of this stuff, I could buy it on my lunch hour in San Francisco! But there were a couple of items that I wanted to get myself from London (some good tea and a cookbook in metric units), and I also wanted a few gifts. I had been told that Harrod's might be a good place to buy all of these things. On entering Harrod's, I expected a fairly nice department store. I did not expect Harrod's to be what Harrod's was! It was practically a museum in itself. There is nothing like this in San Francisco.

Harrod's from the outside.


First, we found the food halls, with the tea, the cheese, and the chocolate. Wow. You could do your grocery shopping here. It was incredible. Then, we went looking for the bookstore. On the way, we went through some art for sale.

Want to buy a malachite piano? You can at Harrod's! Photo by Eric.


Eric also took a picture of this beautiful globe.


We didn't want to be too ostentatious with the photography, but our jaws were dropping at all of the stuff. There was a surreal melted clock the size of a twelve-year-old. There were sculptures, bags, perfumes, shoes... wow. There was even a Quatari sheeshah lounge, obviously catering to the neighborhood customers. The bookstore was unbelievable. The selection! The beauty of all of the books! Everything was so beautiful.

Even parts of the store were works of art. Look at the Egyptian escalator!


The Harrod's experience cheered us up somewhat after having missed out on riding the escalator through the world at the Natural History Museum. We walked around Knightsbridge, seeing one Lamborghini after another, feeling all of the money that surrounded us in London. Earlier, after the luxury of Buckingham Palace, we had walked through some of the properties of the Grosvenor estate. London has wealth. Lots of wealth. A kind of wealth we don't really see in San Francisco.

We needed to get up early for the train to Paris in the morning, so we had a reasonably good and expeditious Chinese dinner in Knightsbridge.

On to Paris.

Last updated: 22/08/2014 by Eric and Beth Zuckerman