Day 127: London, UK: London Blitz Fails

September 23, 2012

We powered up today for one last crack at seeing London, with a homemade full English breakfast. We have now eaten a reasonable number of English breakfasts, at the guesthouses where we have perched from time to time.

I had always wondered about the "bacon" component, since the bacon always provided has no resemblance to bacon back home. Clearly what you get is a form of "back bacon" while in Canada it is from the belly, and is mostly fat. Strangely, Americans usually think of Canadians as eating back bacon, but in fact it is not us, it's the Brits. Anyway, since we made our breakfast out of Tony's fridge, I got to see the British bacon in its natural, packaged state. The slabs are thick, and are called "rashers". Cool.

British bacon. So this is what the stuff in the "Full English Breakfast" looks like.

This time, aside from being stuffed on back bacon, we were mentally prepared for the rush and crush of London, and we aimed to visit several museums. We cruised through Victoria Station quite well, and found our way to a stop for the city bus tour (The "Original Tour" - there is also the "Big Bus" and one other). We did this because we somehow had some valid tickets left over from the Spring. So we rode the bus around the city and got reacquainted with the various spots. Visibility was not great, though, because Fall rains arrived today. The tour was enlivened because of a live guide. Ones with a recorded track and cheap earphones are not very good.

A Decathlon ad in the Underground wisely features folding bikes.

Standing with so many people gives a chance to study their sociology. It is immediately clear that a goodly proportion are non-white, though no doubt a great many are UK born. Is London finding benefit or problem from this? How do the various people get on with each other?

The famous, complicated, tube map. Actually figuring out the map is not too hard, but finding the lines and platforms in real life can be a challenge.

Londoners pull out their umbrellas - it's Fall!

Excellent narration on the "Original" bus tour.

"Mama Mia" - playing in the theatre district

A queue at the Bank of England. It's not a financial crisis - rather this is a day when admission is granted and free to many public buildings.

We got off the tour in the South Kensington museum district, and this is where our downfall began. The first museum we entered was the Victoria and Albert. We passed from the pouring rain into the grand entrance, and found throngs of people. Some were generally milling about, some were queuing for some kind of tickets, and a goodly number were queuing for the cloakroom, or the ladies washroom.

People in the entrance to the Victoria and Albert (VA) museum

In true Grampies fashion, we knew nothing about this museum. So we waded through to the information Kiosk and asked the girl "What is this museum about?". "Design and fashion", she said, and stopped. We asked if there was a pamphlet about it, and she rummaged about for a long time before producing one. We abandoned this girl and were fotunate to speak to a volunteer, who quizzed us on our interests and recommended a selection of the museum's galleries.

The problem is, there are six floors. The exhibits are pertinent either to countries, to eras, or to subject matter. There are about forty in all, and each is equivalent to a normal museum. The nice man recommended we have a look at Medieval and Renaissance 300-1600, and then Ceramics, Glass, and Jewellery. Ok, sure, we'll give it a shot.

We walked in to Medieval and Renaissance and realized we could not look at everything, or even at 5% of what was there. We tried for a bit, and further realized that our blood sugar was too low to do this at all. So we headed off to the museum cafeteria.

St Margaret and the Dragon. These dragons are a good follow up to our analysis of dragons in Christianity by John Kater (Day 124 - Part 2)

A marble table from a wealthy renaissance home

We inadvertently cut a queue and got a good position in front of a tape, where an employee was metering people in to the huge restaurant space. Once in we found that you had to queue at various food stations, then queue to pay, and finally, that there were no vacant tables to eat at. We thought about just buying something and eating it standing up, but that would only cut out one of the three queues. So we dragged ourselves back to the lobby, looked out at the pouring rain, and thought "Now what?".

We pulled our hoods over our heads and were back on the street. We made our way past the Natural History Museum and to the Science Museum. It was a little less crowded, and we found the cafeteria and a table. Twenty five pounds (yes 25 pounds - about $CAN 40 - bought us (just) enough food to keep body and soul together for a while. So we expected to find the strength to enjoy the museum.

Again, this thing has five floors, many exhibits, and zillions of objects. The main floor has, among many many other things, the kind of large objects we sort of associate with the Smithsonian Institution - airplanes, cars, rockets, moon landers, steam locomotives, steam engines (from large to giant). It was wonderful. But Dodie is not so interested in gadgets, even if they are original V2 rockets or Cray supercomputers, and she soon was looking for a place to rest.

It was not just the overwhelming museum exhibits that were tiring, it was the total assault on the senses, including in no small part the noisy, swirling, throngs.

I left Dodie on a bench and did some more whirling around, all on the first two floors. Then we sent an expeditionary force (me again) toward the fourth and fifth floors to scope out the various exhibits on health and medical equipment. I found them, though the layout of the building did not make it easy to get up that high. We were too beat, though, to actually try to go up there and do any justice to the displays.

Part view of a V2. Surprisingly, from early rockets to quite advanced spacecraft, the hardware looks more like a plumbing shop than Star Trek.

In the Science Museum, a display about Turing and the Enigma code

Pilot Ace computer from 1950, partly programmed by Turing

We knew that we had to conserve strength, which would be needed to find our way back across town and then out again to Horley. So we abandoned our project, descended into the Tube.

The Natural History Museum - this is about as far as we got with that one.

The Tube (London Underground) is aptly named. On some lines, the cars really are like cigar cylinders, and the people are packed in very tightly. You have to push your way in at a door, and if you are too deep in the car you may not be able to make it to the exit at your stop. During the trip, if you have any tendency at all to claustrophobia - just forget it - there is no space and no air available for weaklings!

So there you have it. You can look at our few shots of a couple of London museums, and rest assured that this is representative of absolutely nothing, in percentage terms.

Meanwhile, the Grampies are resting up and getting ready to fly back tomorrow to the wide open spaces of ..oh,oh - downtown Montreal. Whatever convinced these folks to leave their little farm?

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