Front-Row Seats for Squirrels

Another day, another new coffee shop! Today's stop was at Lantana, yet another Aussie-run coffee shop where we enjoyed some delicious flat whites.

In addition, the musical selection ran to our tastes and the staff were some of the friendliest we've encountered in London. The woman who brought us our coffees said she'd give the prettier coffee to "the lady," and tried to explain Bob's coffee as her attempt at depicting the Sydney Opera House. We appreciated the attempt at an artistic explanation, even if we didn't believe her. We haven't been to the V&A in a long time, and headed there tonight for one of their "Friday Late" openings, with this month's theme being "the year of the ox." One of the first installations we took in when we arrived wasn't related to tonight's event, though:

I'm not sure what the premise is meant to be, but the video screen in the courtyard garden displayed a changing array of images, nicely reflected in the central pond.

The best moment in the garden didn't directly have to do with the images, though: upon seeing the interesting display, this little girl ran up to the front of the crowd to get a better look and then set down her tiny squirrel friend so that he too could enjoy the show.

Unlike previous nights at the V&A, there seemed to be a fair degree of disorganization muddling tonight's events, and as we wandered through the museum to find something that wasn't either starting late or at full capacity, we passed two pieces in the collection that caught my eye. The first is this copper beaker and lid, thought to be meant for decorative use, dating to somewhere in the range of 1475-1500:

The other piece is this tiny bit of painted enamel from Limoges, France, dating to 1520:

During our wandering through the museum, we came across another wanderer: a fortune-telling ox!

(Unfortunately, it didn't choose to tell our fortunes.) Headphones spread around this next room contained forty different field recordings that were supposed to create different vistas for the listeners. I just found the headphones a bit annoying; the ones near the floor were so low that I couldn't sit up while listening, and the ones hanging from above had short cords obviously meant for people closer to Bob's height than mine, so that when I put those headphones on, it felt like someone was trying to yank them off my head!

Although this next event was touted as one exploring "New Year traditions of food sculpture," the creations we saw didn't look very traditional: