Search Results for: alice in wonderland

Alice in Wonderland Exhibition and Sea Life Aquarium London

Alphabet dating is, quite simply, the idea where you go through each letter of the alphabet and plan a date around that letter. So rather than the usual “what do you wanna do this weekend?” “I dunno, what do you wanna do?” routine, my hubby and I have decided it would be fun for us to do this! So now once a month, we will plan a fun date based on whatever letter of the alphabet is next in the sequence.

As March was the beginning of our Alphabet dating, we obviously started with ‘A’ and between us decided to visit London for the day, or more specifically, the Alice in Wonderland exhibition at the British Library and the Sea Life Aquarium on the Southbank.

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a little while now knows that I totally love Alice in Wonderland so when I heard that the British Library had a free exhibition on to celebrate 150 years of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I knew that I had to go visit.

The exhibition features drawings of Alice’s adventures by various artists such as Ralph Steadman, Salvador Dali and of course the original illustrator to the stories, John Tenniel. You can also see Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript as well as other books and artifacts for everything Alice. I adored the Alice in Wonderland pop-up book and would have loved to look through that but sadly all of the items on display were kept safely in glass display cases. Obviously.

Photography is only permitted at the beginning where there is a mix of illustrations telling the story, so I have no ancient artifacts to show you here so you’ll have to go see for yourself!

There is also a pop-up shop in the library, which is beautifully decorated and features an assortment of books, accessories and other merchandise. Unfortunately copies of the pop-up book weren’t for sale in the shop as I had hoped but I did spot some cute jewellery I recognised as being by the same company that designed the panda necklace I bought at Hyper Japan last year.

The exhibition is fairly small, so we were there for less than an hour, but if you’re a fan of Alice’s adventures and you’re in London then I would definitely recommend, but hurry – it ends on 17th April!

After our brief visit to Wonderland, we hopped on the tube from Euston to Waterloo and made our way to the Southbank, where after a quick bite to eat we visited the Sea Life Aquarium.

I love an aquarium. I find them so fascinating and relaxing. Actually I would love to have my own aquarium one day… I’d give all the fish awesome old people names like Doris and Percy!

Anyway…

Sea Life London do a good job of educating the public about marine life, rather than just “oh look at the pretty fish!” and they also raise awareness about the work they do for conservation. I found it very interesting and I feel like I learnt something.

I mean, I knew sharks were in danger of becoming extinct due to shark finning (killing the shark for its fin in order to make shark fin soup) but I had no idea that shark fin soup was something that was available in some chinese restaurants in London! You can sign the petition to help protect sharks around the world and also find out more here. Actually I think the huge shark tank was probably my favourite bit of the aquarium as it made me feel so small, I could have stood there for hours just watching these fascinating creatures just swimming around.

Unfortunately, the aquarium wasn’t quite as peaceful and relaxing as I had hoped (and have experienced in aquariums elsewhere). Perhaps it was our fault visiting on a Saturday afternoon, but the number of people visiting the aquarium made for quite a noisy and overcrowded experience, so much so that our visit was quite rushed. It would be better if visitor numbers could be controlled and staggered a little as it made me quite tetchy and claustrophobic.

After the aquarium we were pretty tired so decided to head home. Bring on date ‘B’!

Have you ever tried alphabet dating? What would you do for your ‘A’ date? Leave me a comment below.

Well we finally got round to our ‘K’ date! We decided to go to London and be kids for the day – something that anyone can do anywhere and is pretty much open to interpretation, in fact I reckon we could be kids for the day for several more dates and still not run out of things to do!

Our date began at the Natural History Museum, somewhere that neither of us have been since we were school children and my husband had told me that he was particularly fond of dinosaurs as a child. The other thing about the Natural History Museum is that its free! Perfect!

I enjoyed the animal exhibitions such as learning about toothless mammals and mammals with pouches. We also got to see some ginormous antlers, as well as a Moeritherium – one of the earliest known relatives to the elephant. And a Kirk’s Dik Dik because I was disappointed I didn’t see them at Chester Zoo (even though this was just a taxidermy one in a glass display).

Of course, I’m not gonna lie, the friggin great big animatronic T-Rex they had in the dinosaur bit was pretty awesome!  Yep dinosaurs in general are pretty amazing when you think about it.

After lunch (which should have been a McDonalds Happy Meal but wasn’t because neither of us fancied it) we headed to our next stop – Alice’s Adventures Underground. Now you may remember that I already had a Wonderland experience 2 years ago with some friends, well it’s back and because I banged on about it so much first time around my husband decided he wanted to go. This of course represents a huge part of my childhood as I watched this Disney classic more times than I can tell you.

This time I chose the ‘eat me’ route and became a diamond. We met the frog, Cheshire Cat and Humpty Dumpty. We inspected the jam tarts that were being made (I was forced to hold the baby pig… not real, sadly) and we also heard the Mock Turtle sing.

Instead of eating the jams tarts (like I did last time), as a diamond we were spying on one of the other suits who were eating the jam tarts!

The ‘falling down the rabbit hole’ part as well as meeting Tweedledee and Tweedledum, plus the tea party scene, were all the same as last time around. The court scene, however, felt slightly different and I’m pretty certain that the guilty suit who ate the tarts was different to last time around too.

If you haven’t a clue what I am on about (we’re all mad here) then begin at the beginning and read about the last time I fell down the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures Underground.

After a brief pitstop in Skinny Dip to buy myself a fabulous new purse, our day of fun ended with freakshakes at Maxwell’s in Covent Garden. We ordered the Salted Caramel Donut Freakshake and the Unicorn Freakshake – you can guess which one mine was. The Unicorn Freakshake looks beautiful but the bubblegum flavour was a bit too much for me and I think I would have enjoyed it more if it had been strawberry flavoured. Ah well!

And there ends our day of being kids, let’s not dwell too much on me accidentally using the men’s toilets at Alice in Wonderland and hubby ordering himself a beer to go with his freakshake haha.

We did want to go to a Lego exhibition and Ballie Ballerson (the ball pit bar) but we were tired and ended up just going home. There are so many possibilities with the ‘Kids for the day’ date idea ranging from spending the day at a theme park (Disneyland please!) to a movie marathon of all your favourite childhood films!

What would be your perfect ‘Kids for the day’ date? If you need some suggestions then why not have a quick read of my 10 ways to embrace your inner child.