I just realized that I've been a total slacker on here and I haven't even talked about all the museums I've gone to. I'm now going to take you on a tour of a couple of London's museums.
1. Natural History Museum
This museum was very fun. First off, they have a wicked dinosaur exhibit. It's really cool and has a lot of dinosaur skeletons and some animatronic dinosaurs as well. The museum is very much laid out for kids, so it's also fairly interactive and the blurbs on what you're looking at are interesting and relatively short. They also have this awesome glowing globe thing that you go into to enter the geological portion of the museum. It took the whole day to get to, but a lot of the exhibits were pretty amazing and visually stunning. They had a giant replica of a blue whale that was awesome. That being said, the museum is a bit dated. One of the maps actually had USSR on it. In retrospect I should have donated some money with a note attached saying "This pound is donated specifically towards any map that doesn't acknowledge the dissolution of the USSR." 2. Victoria & Albert Museum
The building of this museum is very attractive. Lots of marble and arches. They also had a really cool exhibit on some ancient architecture. I didn't have as much fun at this museum because as someone pointed out "It's more of a posh museum." Direct quote. It did have some nice art in it though. Apparently they often do special exhibits and once did one on Star Wars, so I'll have to keep an eye out for that.
3. Madame Toussaud's
Not technically a museum, as I'm sure you know. The wax figures were quite impressive and it made for some good photo ops. Additionally, there's a ride in it that shows you the history of London. I use the term ride loosely. It's a cab on a track. It was pretty cool though to see it all. It's funny to see the difference in the wax figures. Some of them are insanely well done whereas others look nothing like their human counterpart.
I actually have some photos with me in it, but I'm always embarrassingly short compared to the people I'm posed next to. Also, they have professional photographers there to take pictures of you with Obama, the Royal Family, and some other one. I think you have to pay for them, but I wasn't feeling lame enough to find out. As an aside, this one was £30, so you have to really want to see some wax figures.
4. Sherlock Holmes Museum
This was a weird one because as all of you know (or should know) Sherlock Holmes is not a real person. Obviously I knew this going into the museum, but I figured they'd have some artifacts (I'm blanking on the word I actually want to use here) from the shows and movies. This museum is really just a recreation of what Sherlock Holmes' house would probably look like. They also had some super creepy wax figures and just random stuff from the books, like knives and stuff. I'm happy I went I guess, but I'd say skip it. Especially if you don't have copious amounts of time like I do.
I'm definitely not an expert in art. In fact I know very little about art. I know nothing about technique or the different art periods. I basically know that impressionism is a thing and that a lot of art snobs don't like it. That being said, I love looking at it. I'm so bad at art that I have such an appreciation for what artists do. At least with the more classic artists. Admittedly I find a lot of modern art to be a bit questionable. I'm pretty sure I could throw paint angrily at a canvas and sell it for $1,000. Thankfully this art gallery was filled with older art that I couldn't create in a million years so I enjoyed the whole thing. There was one series of paintings that chronicled a husband and wife who basically hated each other and ultimately died of some disease. It was random and I loved it.
I'm going to try and go to St. Paul's Cathedral this Friday, so I'll try and blog about that. Tomorrow I'm staying in with my roommate and watching scary movies because that's what unemployed bums do when their roommate's have a day off. I swear I'm going to start working soon.
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