The Cartoon Museum & The British Museum

After a busy day zipping around from one place to another earlier in the week I decided to keep my last Nice Day Out of 2013 a bit more simple and just visited two places, right next to each other.

Well, okay, I also made a quick stop on the way as I had to pop into John Lewis on Oxford Street to buy some yarn. I love the Barbara Hepworth sculpture on the side of the store...

After giving some directions to a group of very friendly, very lost Australian tourists on Oxford Street (amazingly, I actually knew exactly how to get to where they were going!) I headed to...

... The Cartoon Museum, which is one of the places I can get in free thanks to my Art Pass.

I love little museums and it's fun to try new things (especially when they're free!) but it turns out that I'm not particularly interested in the history of cartoons. Ah well. I was quite tempted by some of the stuff in their shop though - lots of fun cards and gifts, plus shelves packed with comics, books of cartoons and graphic novels.

Then I headed over the road to the British Museum...

This was my third visit to the British Museum in a couple of months, I am totally in love with it. I looked at some of the galleries and objects I adored from my previous visits. Then I slowly worked round the rest of the museum, visiting all the rooms I'd not yet seen, ticking them off on my museum plan and making scribbled notes about the locations of some of my favourite pieces so I can easily revisit them in future.

 
Some of my highlights from this visit were... this mural (and the other awesome stuff in the Egyptian galleries), this jade terrapin, the Medieval Europe gallery, and this amazing feather leaf bowl.

I also loved the Clocks & Watches gallery, not least because many of them are working clocks so the room is alive with the sound of ticking. If you visit, make sure you head to this room at the top of the hour so you can hear all the chimes. Quite delightful!