After going to sleep so early the night before, we woke up without too much difficulty on Wednesday. The day was nice, and in the sunlight, the area proved much simpler to navigate than it had seemed the night before.<\/p>\n
After looking at the map, we decided to walk down to the Victoria and Albert museum, which was just down the road. The V&A is located right near the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, and our plan for the day was to just hit all three and take it easy.<\/p>\n
And that’s pretty much just what we did. The walk was a little longer in fact than it had appeared on paper, but as it was only the first day of our trip, our feet were up to the challenge. It helped that the walk was also broken up by a stop in a small cafe to have breakfast. (Accompanied by a can of German Coke Light for me.) Along the way we also passed numerous internet cafes, but only took note of their location and prices rather than going in just yet. <\/p>\n
We hit the Natural History Museum first and wandered around a bit. I have a note here that says “sex”, and I recall that we spent a good portion of our time in the museum going through the portion relating to human reproduction (us and probably 90% of the school children who were there on a field trip), but though I assume something amusing occurred, I no longer remember exactly what. Some of the displays were decidedly unattractive.<\/p>\n
After we decided to give the Science Museum a miss (we’re both science geeks, but the Boston Museum of Science<\/a> is pretty good, and it seemed unlikely there’d be anything too special there), we headed in to the V&A. The first thing that struck us was the chandelier in the atrium, a monstrosity of blue and green glass sculpture that looked decidedly out of place in the non-modern architecture and design of the building. (There’s a very similar chandelier at the Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford, CT.) <\/p>\n The V&A was undergoing a fairly extensive renovation, so some of the collection wasn’t available to be seen. However, a lot of it was out. There were a number of really interesting displays, including several rooms they’d attempted to restore to their original decorating schemes, including the windows, window treatments and wallpaper. The part I found most interesting aside from the furnishings was the clothing. A large display of period costume for both males and females was extremely intriguing, and in the center of that room was displayed a large number of clothing items from the wardrobe of Queen Maud of Norway<\/a>, who was Queen Elizabeth’s great great aunt. (I think. Victoria’s granddaughter.) <\/p>\n By this time we wanted another quick break, so we went into the gift shop and purchased a pile of postcards. Then we found the museum cafe and sat down with something to drink and wrote them all out, so we could send them off and maybe not beat them home. The postcards written, we decided to walk back to the hotel at a leisurely pace, with the agreement that if we saw any interesting restaurants on the way, we would stop and have dinner. As we came out of the museum, it was snowing — a really light snow, not even quite a flurry.<\/p>\n Though we passed several restaurants, none intrigued us enough to go in. But what we did find was a Post Office. Stamps were purchased and the postcards mailed out, putting us ahead of the game for once. We got all the way back to the Earl’s Court area before we found a high concentration of restaurants to choose from. Our first selection of pub proved to be too smokey inside to endure for long, so after an abortive attempt to find a seat where the smoke wasn’t annoying, we abandoned ship and went up the street to another pub. This one was much better and had some interesting stuff on the menu. I ended up with a salad and some Welsh rarebit, and Bob and I shared some spring rolls with a really wonderful sweet chili sauce.<\/p>\n Then we went back to the hotel (so close and so easy to find… we couldn’t imagine how we got lost the night before.) After flopping around for a bit we left again, trotting down the street to the Tesco supermarket to get some things for breakfast and some bottled water to carry around with us.<\/p>\n After grocery shopping it was back once more to our room, where it turned out Apprentice was showing on the TV. But not the Trump version — the Apprentice UK, with Sir Alan Sugar in the role of Trump. It made a refreshing change to not have the Donald prancing around, and I actually found his reasons for firing the person he did to be sensible and well thought out. I was amazed. (You can probably find this show on BitTorrent if you look. I recommend.)<\/p>\n Then, to sleep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After going to sleep so early the night before, we woke up without too much difficulty on Wednesday. The day was nice, and in the sunlight, the area proved much simpler to navigate than it had seemed the night before. After looking at the map, we decided to walk down to the Victoria and Albert […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}