More museums and birds

After breakfast in Kensington Gardens we walked to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

We saw more birds in the gardens including ring-necked parakeets, which have become naturalised in the UK, and very tame Egyptian Geese with a chick.  Coots were feeding their chicks in the water.  Mandarin ducks are very colourful. 

V & A was like Sir John Soanes' but on a much larger scale, and we only saw a fraction of their collection.  The jewellery was beautiful and included a butterfly ring owned by Beyonce.  As well as the original artefacts there were two galleries dedicated to plaster casts.  We had fun with the camera obscura (pin hole camera).

The Natural History Museum is next door to V & A and we admired the finalists in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.   They had a great exhibit on bird anatomy which would have been perfect for our WIRES avian training.
We had time left and didn't want to waste our last day in London so walked to Harrods and admired the very expensive stuff.  The food halls were works of art, including Aussie wagyu beef at $250 a kilo.  Rent for a one bedroom apartment in this area is about $15,000 a month.

By this time I was exhausted (18458 steps) so we slowly walked home through the gardens pausing to take shelter from occasional rain showers.


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