year of the pig

Last weekend my housemates and I went to Leicester Square to see "Volver" at the cheap and semi-classy Prince Charles Cinema, which has the most comfortable movie-watching chairs I have ever experienced.

Anyway, it was Chinese New Year, and although we were too late to see the celebration itself, a lot of the decorations were still up. Happy Year of the Pig!

I know these pictures are increasing the creepiness factor of this blog about ten-fold, but I really wanted to share the trees outside the National Theatre with all of you. My theatre class sees a lot of plays at the National Theatre, and I also went there with friends to see Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days" (which starred the amazing Fiona Shaw). Every time I go there, I always want to stop and take pictures of the trees. They're very strange because they've been trimmed, but not enough that they've stopped growing. The other night I was early for "Coram Boy" so I stopped to take some shots.

in which we attempt to break away for Hogwarts

Rebecca and I went to the Victoria & Albert on Saturday, and when we first walked up from the pedestrian subway (!) we encountered a room full of statues and sculptures of the human form. There were tons of people taking pictures, completely fascinated with these representations of shapes such as themselves. And that fascinated me. (The sculpture was great, too.) We were there to see Collect, an exhibit of functional art, but I plan to go back to look at the other exhibits sometime soon.

Our music class took a trip to Cambridge on Sunday to experience Evensong at King's College. We took a train out of King's Cross Station in London, so of course we had to visit Platform 9 3/4 of Harry Potter fame!

I really, really wanted to go on the Hogwarts Express, but I didn't have any luck this time.

After Evensong, we wandered around the King's College grounds. The light quality was honestly stunning; no photograph can do it justice. Still, here are two--the taller building to the right of the first image was the chapel where we attended Evensong, and the picture on the right is a reflection in a puddle.