rockym93 dot net

archive · tags · feed

See you later, London.

01 July 201402:34PMeurope-2014travel

I'm on a plane right now, and I had to get up pretty early to get on that plane, so this is gonna be short.

(Monday)

Somehow between all the packing and cleaning we found time to do to things yesterday.

Thing one was the War Rooms. My one overriding thought about the War Rooms is that I wish I'd had more time in there, especially in the Winston Churchill museum. It's such a cool setup, inside a really neat bit of history. A couple of highlights:

• The early encryption technology they used, with room-sized scramblers and secret transatlantic telephones hidden behind a toilet door really got my computational history geek excited. I wish they'd had more on Turing and the cracking of the Enigma cipher, although I think that actually has its own museum. The whole think just made me want to read Cryptonomicon again.

• The other neat part for me was the history of how it became the museum. The story of how the bunker was just closed up one day and forgotten about, still a secret to most of the world, until years later is really fascinating. They have the caretaker's original letter to Margaret Thatcher, asking to turn it into a proper museum, on display, in a weird but cool bit of meta-history.

Then we saw Wicked. This is one of those things that I would probably never have done on my own, but I really enjoyed it. I don't know that I've ever been to a proper musical before, especially not one as famous and popular as this. At least a part of it was the experience of going to a show, but also the show itself was very, very good. Not that I know about these things. Everyone else seems to know a lot though, and I think they're in agreement that it was pretty decent. It really made me realise how much the structure of things like Frozen, and I guess Disney movies in general, owe to musicals.

Also my green tie accidentally coordinated with the show, which was kinda cool.

Things I forgot to mention.

• We watched the London Pride parade on Saturday, and then went to an English pub and had alarmingly drinkable English beer. Both of these were enlightening and colourful experiences, in their own way.
• I accidentally went back to Waterstones. Oops.
• Tube lines are colour coded! All the hand rails match the tube map colour for the line. I wonder if you put a Londoner on a random train, if that would manifest as a subconscious sixth sense about what line they were on?

What I thought.

I like London. As a place, it's probably like a 7/10. It's really, really big, which makes it a total pain to get around, and it's kind of, well, grimy. And a little expensive. I don't know that I could live there.

As a place to visit though - awesome. So much cool stuff in one place. It's really a place you go for the cool stuff which is there, rather than for the experience of the place itself.

I think my favourite bits were Greenwich, Stonehenge, and the Natural History Museum. It's a dorky top three, but I'm sticking with it.

If I was going to come back, I'd spend longer here, and just devote an entire day to each museum. Maybe combine it with more train-y day trips out into the country, and maybe sneak up to Scotland for a bit as well.

That's next time though. Because as of right now, we're in Ireland baby.

read the comments