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2 things crossed of my bucket list

2012 July 16
by dena

another typical morning with makenzie. just us drinking coffee (it should be tea i know i know) in the cold cold flat and waiting for our bread to toast. we’ve been sleeping in way late -like almost 10am- and therefore got a super late start this morning.

well, it had been windy windy cold rain-ing all morning so we didn’t miss much. we rode the tube over to “russell square” stop and walked a few block to the British Museum. we had one thing to see, the rossetta stone, as you can imagine i’ve been to more than a half dozen museums//galleries and am a little tired of the whole “lets walk a lot and read a lot” thing so – i pretty much just wanted to get in and out of this place – which is not to say the interior and artifacts didn’t REALLY REALLY impresse me – one could easily spend a week in this place.

ta-da, here it is. the REAL rossetta stone. it was pretty crowded so i took a few obligatory photos. oh and this is mak showing off the literally everything-you-could-ever-think-of inspired by rossetta stone dingy things in the gift shop.

we had 20 minutes before meeting back up with the sisters and mom so we climbed the stairs up to the top floor and saw the Pablo Picasso print making exhibit. looking at all the etchings and dry prints took me back to my PVA print making days and gave me warm feelings for everyone’s favorite print-making teacher Mr. O’Fiel and ALL the cool techniques i’m familiar with thanks to him. oh and then we saw some more egyptian and celtic artifacts – we spent most of the time making inside jokes and rewriting lyrics to tunes we know – you know like making the songs be about mummies and medieval lice combs.

hope these paddington bear goof ball pictures made you smile, mak and i have made numerous “paddington bear” references during this trip. once again, if you really know us in real life this would not surprise you at all.

for lunch we went to “golden dragon” for london dim-sum. i had some sort of fried vegetarian egg rolls, of which i’m not sure if i was supposed to eat ALL of the outside because it was dang hard to bite off with my teeth, but whateves it was good. mak and the sisters had some unrecognizable duck dumplings unusual things and lots of fried rice.

ditched the family and now of a little mak + dena adventure, as if the whole dang trip isn’t one BIG dena + mak bonding experience, anyways we headed north to the st. john’s wood tube stop and walked down the road to the offical abbey road zebra cross walk. i was worried we wern’t going to be able to find it and that we’d have to take pics on some random street and just lie to you blog readers but as we approached the neighborhood we saw the crowd of tourists.

across the street from the cross walk is the abbey road recording studio of which is gated off and covered in graffatti. we obviously had to add to the “art”. i drew my favorite clould-with-rays doodle in blue pen (pictured in the middle-left of the picture below) and mak wrote a sweet little dena-heart-mak-4-ever (although the 4-ever sorta looks like “never” with is ironic. hehe.)

quick little story about me that will eventually have something to do with the evil eye bracelets pictured below. so my OTHER best friend from high school-present day, halie, went to israel as part of birthright and brought me back a super sweet little clear evil eye bracelet. i wore it every day until last fall. halie moved up to lawrence,ks to go to KU and my freshman year of college i went up to visit her on fall break. while headed back to the airport our car ran out of gas – well actually more like her across the hall dorm-mate Billy’s car – ran out of gas on the side of the highway and i had no other way of making my flight on time except hitch hiking. so long story short some random guy picked me up and drove me to the kansas city airport and i made my flight – except upon taking off my jewelry  in the airport i noticed one of the little evil eye stones had fallen out – i think it fell out to protect me on that sketchy car ride. this made the bracelt even more special and even more of a bummer with i lost it sometime last fall. SO today at abbey road, along the wall of the recording studio mak and i stumbled upon 2 evil eye bracelets left behind as mementos – we figured it was ment to be and sort of like one of those “pass it on – pay it forward” type of things. so we took them.

on the way home i remembered  we hadn’t had any dessert yet that day and so HAD to get out at the westminster tube stop and have a nutella crepe in front of big bed. too bad it was cold and drizzly. oh and we paid in coins – like literally counting out 1 pence coins.

the family was waiting for us when we got home – we had a way scrumptious home cooked dinner and got to talk all about our day. it will be weird going home in 1 1/2 weeks to a family of 3 – including me – as you can tell mak is one of 6 !!!

2 more full days here in london to go. ok bye.

.dena.

5 Responses leave one →
  1. sandrada719 permalink
    July 16, 2012

    Curious about the Rosetta Stone, don’t they speak English in London? Love the Abbey Road shot & finding the 2 evil eye bracelets. Hitchhiking in Kansas, Dorothy??? Glad that one had a happy ending: there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, hope you’re clicking the heels of your ruby red clogs. So glad you didn’t miss D, the most important meal of the day.

  2. July 16, 2012

    the Paddington pictures cracked me up! Love the table/flowers Mother Paige set for all – ya’ll certainly bring some Texas sparkle wherever you go – evil eye twin bracelets – meant to be…..

  3. July 26, 2012

    Hey, I’ve been loosely following yr London trip – looks amazinggggg. I used to live in the big grey apartment complex catty-corner to the Abbey Road crossing! The buses were aaallllways delayed because of tourists lolol.

    • July 26, 2012

      Thanks! London is really wonderful, I’m glad my family has the opportunity to live here. I bet the tourists got so old for you!! PS I like your art!!
      Mak

    • July 27, 2012

      aww haha, ya we felt sorta bad holding up traffic. we were so obviously the “american tourists”. but anyway, thanks for the comment and for following our blog – next time we run into you at a houston counter culture sort of event we’ll have to share our london experience. and by “experience” i mean things like: our favorite tube stop names and which H&M has the best sales and the way their Coca-Cola tastes different. you know, the IMPORTANT stuff
      .dena.

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