V&A: instruments in the sky!

I lived in London for 6 weeks between my junior and senior year of college (spring 2010) and studied Shakespeare and theatre there. We had our classes at the Hyde Park chapel which was very close to the Victoria and Albert Museum. To see just how close, here's a link to the Google map of the V&A's general area. See the London Family History Centre on the NW corner of the block the V&A is on? That was my school. Jealous yet? Hopefully needless to say I spent a lot of time at the V&A. The first day of course I spent in the permanent fashion exhibit, then I started going through the entire museum. All told I think it took me about 4 or 5 afternoons to go through every exhibit in the museum. Along the way I looked for any and all costumes and clothing resources and took pictures of all that I was allowed to. Sadly, some/most of my early pictures are rather awful because I didn't know if I could use a flash or not and was too shy to ask so lots of blurry photos of clothes, BUT I did get the hang of it and have ended up with a rather nice collection of more or less detail and wide shots of what I found interesting in the V&A. Honestly, if I lived in London I'd probably go to the V&A more often than the Temple...and I'd need a V&A book budget bc their bookstore is phenomenal.

Anydoctorwho...I went through my V&A photo folder last night and got all teary and nestalgic and decided that I'd share my photos with you! It's hard to pick the first photos to share, and I hope you're not disappointed, but I figured I'd start with two that aren't of costumes. The first is of the outside western facade of the building about a half a block from the main entrance.

Of course dumb me saw the scars from WWII before I saw the sign and thought that something was terribly wrong with whoever was in charge of building maintenance, then I was incredibly moved when I saw this inscription. As an American it's easy to forget that European cities were terrorized during WWII and that the blitz affected London deeply, my beautiful beautiful London.

Next is something I stumbled upon through my meandering and fell in love with. I wasn't smart enough to find and take a picture of the description that goes along with this, but it's pretty self explanatory. These instruments were crushed and hung by basically fishing line above this study room in a perfect plane. It just cracks me up and blows me away. Such a pleasant surprise and one more thing to take my breath away in my favorite museum!

SO much more to come in future entries!