London - Queen's Park to Little Venice & Beyond

London - Queen's Park to Little Venice & Beyond!

On Saturday (the 21st July), Steve dragged me out the front door for a walk...and I mean DRAGGED! *chuckles* Anyway, I had recently started my job at Paddington, so I thought perhaps it would be a good idea to mark out the distance between home at Queen's Park and my work to see if it was feasible on whether it could be walked in a reasonable time.

My work at Paddington, is positioned close to the station itself (a little walk from) but also close to the Paddington Canal. So we veered onto the canal from home and where the Regent's Canal (from Regent's Park) and the Grand Union (or Paddington) Canal meet is where you will find LITTLE VENICE. I've added a link to a map so you can all see for yourself ;o)

http://www.maidavalevillage.com/maidavale.html

Little Venice is one of London's Prime residential areas (apart from Mayfair). It is well known for its collection of shops and restaurants as well as the Puppet Theatre Barge, The Cascade Floating Art Gallery, the Waterside Cafe & Warwick Castle Pub. It is a very small area and it has a park that runs along it as well.

http://picasaweb.google.com/hillsj/LittleVenice

From there we walked ourselves and made it eventually back to the British Museum. As I mentioned some blogs ago that place is HUGE, so we thought perhaps we would go back and try and finish it off. Problem was that by the time we got there it was well after 3pm so we only had about an hour and half to make a dent in it before they booted us out. We made our way past a examples of the art of Japanese Flower arranging displays, part of the museums new exhibition. This art form is called Ikebana ("arranged flower") or it can also be referred to as Kado ("the WAY of flowers"). It emphasizes the linear aspects of floral arrangement unlike Western floristry where the focus is on the flower. The Japanese have also developed the art to include vases, stems, leaves, branches AND the flowers of course and it is based on three main points to symbolise heaven, earth and man.

After that, we entered a room called "Enlightenment - Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century" and rightfully named so as it is a room entirely filled with books..really OLD books and antiquities designed to enlighten the mind I guess! This room is labelled as the KING GEORGE III library. It had some items of particular interest such as a shell collection including one with its pearl's intact. A Grecian Vase which dates back to 300BC. , it was once owned by Napoleon Bonaparte. It also contained a peice of paper if you will, with deciphered heiroglyphs by a Frenchman, Jean Francois Champollion. One particular item caught my attention was a pendant given to Captain James Cook on his visit to NZ in 1769. It was given to him by Maori natives and is called a Hei-tiki and is carved out of nephrite a form of Jade. This pendant is traditionally handed down as an heirloom and is thought to absorb spiritual power from each of its wearers and bears an accumulated power from its ancestral line. This makes is a very potent gift. James Cool gave this amulet to King George III.

From the room of enlightenment, which I admit perhaps enlightened me a little *chuckles*, Steve and wandered into an exhibition focusing on items from Mexico between 2000BC and 16th Century. The display has some fabulously interesting turquoise mosaic objects from the Mixtec/Aztec culture of 1400-1521AD. The MIXTEC are a group of indigenous mesoamerican people inhabiting Mexican state of Oaxaca. The Aztec empire centre was in the Valley of Mexico and its culture is rich in religious and mythological traditions. The most shocking element of the aztec culture were its human sacrifice practices being conducted right up until the Spaniards conquered the territory. Still this culture, really had some interesting artifacts on display.

http://picasaweb.google.com/hillsj/BritishMuseum

We visited the American/Indian display for a short while before getting booted out of museum and we still had heaps of rooms to see! It is such a place that there is so much to absorb and only short visits of about an hour to two hours is about as much as the brain can handle.. so please stay tuned for the next time we step into our historical tour! We also uploaded some more photo's from around Queen's Park close to our little shoebox studio apartment we live in.

http://picasaweb.google.com/hillsj/QueenSPark

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