London Things to Do Tips by tzuki

One of my favourite's places in London are the Kew Gardens or Royal Botanic Gardens.
These gardens are one of the best botanical centres of the world.
Open to the public in the s.XVIII thanks to many collaborators and these gardens contain more than 50,000 different species from all over the world!!

It is open every day.
winter time: 9:30 to 16:30h
summer time: 9:30 to 19:30h

The entrance costs around ?5.

and in summer is lovely to spend the day with some friends, taking pictures and having a pic-nic outdoors.... hmmm

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Phone: 0 20 8332 5655
Address: Kew, TW9
Directions: Kew Gardens tube
Website: http://www.rbgkew.org.uk

There are always some exhibitions going on at The British Museum, some of them are permanent exhibitions and others no, however, still very interesting to see.

One of my favourites is the Great Court and Circle Library, as the Entrance at the Museum..... hmmmm I can stay hours and hours there, watching and enlightening myself. [See picture :-)

Also, there is one piece of Art I really like in the Egypt section.... The Rosetta Stone! If you come to London and to the British Museum, do not miss it! is amazing!

The Rosetta Stone data from the Fort St Julien, el-Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt
Ptolemaic Period, 196 BC.
It is a valuable key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs.

The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests, one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the
13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation.
The decree is inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration).
The importance of this to Egyptology is immense. Soon after the end of the fourth century AD the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-Fran?ois Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.

Height: 114.4 cm (max.)
Width: 72.3 cm
Thickness: 27.9 cm

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Phone: 0 20 7323 8299
Address: Great Russell Street, WC1
Directions: Holborn tube
Website: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

The TATE Modern Britain's national museum of Modern Art.

The building belong to the Bankside Power Station, along the River Thames.

I do like the main entrance at the gallery , the Hall which is very open with has a high ceiling. At this entrance, sometimes, there are exhibitions going on as the one that I am showing in the picture [The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson].

Also, they do performances as dance in this entrance because the big set-ups they can build in it.

Besides, this entrance, the gallery displays a huge diversity of international and contemporary art including artists such as Matisse, Rodin, Deacon, Brancusi, Mori, ....

The buiding has also a coffee room and restaurant at the top floor, where is very nice to stay while observing the sunset over the River Thames.
Besides, has another restaurant and bar at the ground floor, at the side with the main entrance.

And a bookshop in the hall-entrance where is possible to find the catalogues of the exhibitions goin on and a large variety of titles and artist in the Modern Art field.

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Phone: 0 20 7887 8000
Address: Bankside, SE1
Directions: Southwark or Blackfriars tubes
Website: http://www.tate.org.uk/

This museum is another of my favourites in London. They always hold very pretty exhibitions [not only painting :-P] but Light and Sounds installations, Photography, Talks, Conferences and much more.

I love to go there in Wednesday because it is open until 22pm and they have a quartet of musicians playing in the entrance hall, which renders the environment in a good atmosphere to chill out.

Normally it is open from 10am to 5.45pm daily and 10am to 10pm Wednesdays and the last Friday of the month .

If you come to London, you should not MISS it and you will understand WHY.

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Phone: 0 20 7942 2000
Address: Cromwell Road, SW7
Directions: South Kensington tube
Website: http://www.vam.ac.uk

If you are going to be in London from July 16 until September, 11 and you like Classical Music, it is time to go to the PROMS.

The PROMS are the world's greatest Classical music festival in one of the most beautiful buildings in London, The Royal Albert Hall.

There are two ways of getting inside:
- paying for a ticket
- or queing from early in the morning, depending the programme for that day, for very cheap money but considering you are going to stand up during all the concert.

Yesterday, I have been in one of those.
The programme was stunning.
The BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with John Casken as conductor for:
- The Symphony 'Broken Consort'
- Ravel - Piano Concerto
- Stravinsky - The Firebird

Fantastic experience in nice atmosphere!

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Phone: 020 7838 3110
Address: Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AP
Directions: Kensington Gore
nearest tube station: South Kensington
buses: 9, 10, 52
Website: http://www.royalalberthall.com/
Other Contact: http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/