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Fireworks, History and Magic

Ok, so I know I still need to make posts about my Canada trip, and I will, but this weekend I went up to London for a few fun-filled days of Fireworks, History and Magic and I think I should post about that while it's still recent. As is usual for me I took a ridiculous number of pictures so I'm going to split this into two entries.

Entry the first - Fireworks and History...



Paul and I went to the Battersea Park Fireworks display on Saturday. I love fireworks so I didn't want to miss them or spend the whole time watching through a lens, so I just held my camera and pressed the button loads of times to take pics. Obviously this resulted in a lot of blurry or badly-timed photos, but I also got a few good ones in there as well:



























Battersea Park also boasted that they had the biggest firework in London. I kinda managed to capture the scale of it in these three pics of it exploding:







Boom!

~*~


And now, on to the History...



Sunday saw us travel up to Henry VIII's pad, Hampton Court Palace.



Nice digs.



Here's Henry's Astronomical Clock, which is a pretty cool piece of design.


We took part in the Queen in Danger event, a dramatised account of the attempt of the Lord Chancellor to turn the king against Katherine Parr and accuse her of heresy...



Searching her private rooms for heretical material!



The Queen says that if she can just talk to Henry, she'll be able to convince her husband of her innocence.



The King himself! Will he listen to Katherine's protestations or cast her aside like so many wives before?



Phew. The couple reconcile and Katherine gets to keep her head.

This was followed by Henry and Katherine holding court and answering any questions people had. Mostly it was children asking how old they were!

After that we did the Young Henry audio tour, all about him when he was a handsome youth with just the one wife! It was set in the Wolsey Rooms and included some famous artworks, such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold...



I took this picture of part of the painting cos that fountain doesn't dispense water, oh no, it dispenses wine. My kind of fountain!



And I took this picture because I'm not sure the artist had ever seen dogs before...


Henry VIII's Apartments are home to many fancy rooms with fancy ceilings:



Such as this one.



And this one.


As we all know, Henry VIII was famous for enjoying his food. And his wine:



Yeah, that might last me a week or so.


We then headed into the garden...



I quite like this picture of the long archway.



And I love how one Canada goose is like "It's all right, you lot eat and I will stand watch to make sure no harm comes to you."

Finally, any trip to Hampton Court wouldn't be complete without a visit to the famous maze. Paul and I decided to attempt it separately as a race to the middle. Whoever got there first was the winner and whoever got there second had to buy the other a drink.



This is the face of a winner! =D