Make our garden grow

Another beautiful day, so I decided to make the most of it whilst it lasted and took the metro to the Olympic Park and began the day in the Botanic Gardens. The area covers something like 180 acres so it's a very impressive size and I was glad I'd managed to get up early enough to get around a decent bit of it. There were all sorts of specialist areas in amongst larger wooded/planted areas, including one of the largest Chinese Gardens outside of China. They had a special autumnal latern decoration to mark the harvest season, which was lovely, although I think my favourite garden was the Alpine area - no mountains but definitely captured the feeling. There was also areas for Japan, an aquatic garden, childrens garden and a tree house (although this was very disappointing as it was basically a building made out of wood, not a proper tree house!!)

I did attempt to make it around the Insectarium which was included in the price of my ticket but I didn't make it far as they'd already dug out the Halloween decorations and so the main hall was covered in giant spiders. I know, they're not real but I read in my guide book that the hall did also host real tarantulas so I decided that I would prefer to get back to the nature of a tree variety outside! :-)

I think the gardens would be amazing in the spring/summer time but there were still some beautiful plants and so I spent a couple of hours covering most of the main areas before having lunch at their nice, if somewhat chaotic canteen overlooking one of the greenhouses.

I then walked over the road to the Olympic Park, site of the 1976 games so it was a little bit older than me, and hopefully had a bit more wear and tear! The buildings themselves are quite cool in a kind of 70's vision of the future sort of way. The tower is the world's tallest slanted structure and has a cable car that goes up it (i opted out as it was expensive) and apparently the roof of the stadium didnt work until 1988!! I think quite a lot of the buildings weren't actually completed in time for the Games infact - London, take note!

I still had some time to spare so I went into the neighbouring Biodome, which although it was a bit tired, was actually quite good. There were various sections - rainforest, desert, Arctic etc and it was pretty well laid out which meant that even though it was crawling with people, it didnt feel too packed. The Antarctic area did make me laugh - a fairly tiny glass box filled with rather unhappy looking pengiuns. Made me think about my next trip and that I still cant quite believe I'm actually going to be in the Antarctic for real in just over a month.

Anyway, I managed to tear myself away from the lemur exhibit and made my way back into downtown where I decided to go to the cinema and watched Surrogates - was in need of some Bruce Willis silliness and definitely got it in that film!

Sep 26, 2009

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