"The Most Famous Artist in the World"

Adeline had been playing an educational game on my computer and ran downstairs to ask me if I could help her find "the famous painting" on the internet so she could draw it. Luckily Abe walked in from work at that moment and she started asking him to help her on her wild goose chase. She told us that we just needed to look up the most famous artist in the world and we would find it. We started throwing out the names of some famous painters, such as Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso.... but she replied "no" to all of them. Abe decided to humor her and took her to the computer. She asked him to look up "The Most Famous Artist in the World". Abe googled and of course it came up with several names. Immediately Adeline said, "No, he used primary colors like red, yellow, blue and black". So Abe googled, "Famous Artist Primary Colors". As some random stuff came up, Adeline said, "His name is Mondrian!". Abe typed it into google guessing how to spell his name and sure enough, Google corrected the name for Abe and amongst the different stuff that came up in the search was the "drawing" Adeline was looking for by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. Apparently her teacher had talked about this artist today and Adeline really wanted to re-create it! She amazes me with the information she remembers! This is one of Adeline's "intense" qualities and I love her for it. Super persistent and knows what she wants.

A Girls Weekend in London

Our time is seeming to be really short here in Germany. Sure, we have another year left, but that will surely fly by. We had planned out our entire year with all the vacations we would like to go on. The hard part is that there are SO many places that I would like to go to and check off my bucket list. The reality is that there will always be something that we didn't get to, or didn't see. After planning out our year, it looked like we may not have a time to go to London with the family. Abe doesn't have a huge desire to go and it didn't seem like the most fun place to drag our kids around for all the things we would want to see. I planted the seed with my friend Kelsey and when our friend Heidi found out, we immediately started planning. Our plane tickets were only 19.99 euro each way, so not bad!

We left super early on a Saturday morning and got to London just after 8am. We hit the road running right when we got there and started touring the city. Our first stop was at the Wicked Theatre to buy our tickets for the Broadway play that night and then we dropped our luggage off at the B&B.



Then we headed over to the famous Portobello Street Market.



Loved this cute little antique store. We rummaged for a second, but decided not to fall in love with something since we had no way of bringing anything home with us!










There were a bunch of people gathered around a sign place looking at a specific sign. When we walked up, this is what everyone was looking at. Ha, if only people would stop smoking. That is one of my many frustrations here. I feel like you are in the minority if you don't smoke. I can never escape the smell of smoke whenever I am in a public place.



Next, we took the tube to the Westminster stop. When we came up from the tube, we immediately had this amazing view.



Then the major walking began. First we saw Big Ben and the houses of Parliament.





I can't remember if this next picture is of part of the Houses of Parliament or the Westminster Abbey, or none of the above! I just wanted to post it because it has a picture of a cute little taxi in it. I loved that this is how all the taxi's looked!



Westminster Abbey



Reading some history about the Abbey. We were going to go in, but we were not about to stand in the extremely long line to do that!





St. Margaret's Church right next to the Abbey



I'm not really sure the purpose for this building, but I loved it nonetheless. It was near the Westminster Abbey.



There was a cute little doorway on the side of the building in which we had to do a photo op.



View of the Westminster Abbey as we were walking away.



Then we started our walking journey over to Buckingham Palace. On the way, we couldn't resist photo ops with the phone booths. This is about how it went.









Yes, we are dorks! We walked through St. James Park and while walking over a bridge in the Park, we had a view of Buckingham Palace.



As we were on our walk, we kept walking past these little Princess Diana landmarks.



Another view from the bridge.



And we finally made it to Buckingham Palace!



We had to sit and figure out where we wanted to walk to next.



We decided to head towards Kensington Palace. On our way, we passed Wellington Arch and the Royal Artillery Memorial.





And then through Hyde Park.



Princess Diana Memorial in Hyde Park





Peter Pan Statue



After what it seemed like forever, we made it to Kensington Palace. Pretty sure we had only walked about 5 miles, but our feet were killing us. We did not wear the best walking shoes!



We did go into Kensington Palace and saw a neat exhibit on Queen Victoria. This was her cute little wedding dress. Other than that, I didn't really take any pictures. We also went to a "Fashion Rules" exhibit in the palace. It showed a collection of some of the Royal dresses from different Eras.



Outside the Palace, people still come and leave things for Princess Diana...



Kelsey and I decided to change shoes so we could manage to walk another 2 miles to Harrods. Thank goodness we did, or else I am not sure that we would have made it!

We passed the Albert Memorial on our way to Harrods...



And one more photo booth picture. How can you resist? At least we couldn't.





And Harrods. All I have to say is this place is INSANE! It was slam packed with people and hard to even walk anywhere. It was very glamorous inside and definitely had the "royalty" feel. We felt a little claustrophobic and most likely couldn't afford anything anyway, so we headed out and went to a nearby pub for Fish and Chips.



After dinner, we took a taxi to the theatre where Wicked was showing. We most likely had walked at least 8 miles on no sleep and we were spent. Heidi and I had already seen Wicked, but agreed to see it again because Kelsey has been waiting for years to see it. We love it, so were not in the least disappointed to see it again. Of course Kelsey kept nodding off the entire second half!



The next day we headed to the Tower of London first thing. I'm glad that we were one of the first ones there, because it got crazy crowded fast!















I loved the guards everywhere. The look like little Statues. This deserved a photo op as well.





Inside this building were all the Crown Jewels. They were AMAZING!



I guess I didn't take anymore pictures that day. We went to Oxford street and did a little window shopping. We headed to Leicester Square and decided to relax and watch a movie, and then went out for dinner. The next morning we had to wake up at 4:45am to go catch our bus that was supposed to take us to the airport. We hardly got any sleep the entire trip and the traveling was exhausting, but it was so worth it. I loved being able to walk around London and take it all in with two of my good friends! Now if only I had an entire week I could dedicate to London so I could see a lot more of it!