London Calls Again

First of all...happy May! Seriously though, May? Where did that come from?

I know I've been saying a lot lately that I need to get up to London more since my time abroad is seemingly rapidly drawing to a close and I have not made the most of this amazing city that only takes an hour by train to get to. So on Wednesday that was partially rectified and I made it up to London again. Of course, because this is England, the weather was absolutely miserable. Cold, rainy, just gross. But we had decided to go on Wednesday and a little bit of bad weather was not going to stop us.

We got on the 10 AM train and we in London at 11. It's a little strange how familiar Victoria Station is to me now. But we made it through the madness and down into the tube to get to the Imperial War Museum. Now, my father had recommended this museum to me and I was a little suspicious because sometimes he has dubious taste, but they have a special Ian Fleming/James Bond exhibit going on to honor the centennial of Ian Fleming's birth and since I love James Bond I did want to go see that. So in we went and the Bond exhibit was really cool- it sort of chronicled Flemings life and showed how things he experienced SERIOUSLY influenced the books (I don't think I would have liked Ian Fleming as a person, he was definitely a drinker/womanizer/kind of ne'er-do-well). Then the exhibit discussed the books and various gadgets used in the books, a wall of villains, and finally went into the development of the books to film. And they had a bloody shirt that Daniel Craig wore in Casino Royale which made me super happy. I mean, Daniel Craig was in that shirt! How wonderful is that? After the Bond exhibit, we decided to wander around the museum itself and despite my initial reservations, it was really cool and I could have probably spent a lot more time in their. We went to the WWII section (which had some really fun war propaganda posters [With a photo of a blond- 'Keep mum, she's not so dumb! You never know who's listening']), and a section on the secret war which chronicled the development of MI5 and MI6 and had all these old Enigma and ULTRA machines and other various spy gear (lots of poison injecting pens!), which of course, furthered my desire to become a badass secret agent. After that we had spent about 2.5 hours in the museum and decided to move on.

We went to a lovely Rick Steve's recommended (yes he still exists) pup right by Trafalgar square and I had delicious chicken and mushroom pie. It's terribly unhealthy but I think I would be okay with subsisting on pub fare; it's just so good! After lunch, we headed to the National Gallery which was right by the pub and spent a couple hours looking at art. These massive national museums are just so overwhelming because there is far too much to see. But we wandered around, found some Van Gogh, Monet, etc...they have Van Gogh's sunflower painting which I really like. The blurb next to the painting said how Van Gogh associated yellow with happiness and this painting was somewhere in his house (or something to that effect) because it raised his spirits. I understand; looking at the painting made me pretty happy as well.

After seeing a small fraction of the museum, we got back on the tube (I think my favorite of all underground systems), and headed north up to Camden Market. Camden Market is just a bunch of stalls spread all around with a ton of random stuff to buy. When we first got off the tube, I was not impressed with what was being sold, but once we got deeper into the market and down into random tunnels (there was this place called the Horse Stable Market which was in this old stable and all the stalls were different shops) there was a lot cooler stuff. If I was in the shopping mood and was not wet and cold I probably would have wanted to fully investigate the vintage clothing stalls. But because I was not, we mostly wandered by things, admiring the goods.

Post-Camden Market it was actually quite late. We had originally wanted to get to the Tower of London as well during the day, but in retrospect, squeezing 4 things into one day was probably a little over ambitious. By the time we were done in Camden, the Tower had already been closed for about an hour so there was no way we were going to get there. Before getting back on the train, we looked for some cream tea (I had wanted it) but discovered that tea isn't really served at 7 o'clock. Tea time is really from 2:30-5:30. So we settled for pints and then got on the 7:30 train back to Brighton and I was back in my warm bed by 9 PM.

Only bummer of the day was really the weather. Also, partially through the day, my rain boots sprung a leak. I suppose I've had them for over a year, so maybe that's the duration of their shelf life but it was a little annoying because I had wet feet for the rest of the day. Oh well, at least this means I can throw them out and have more room in my luggage when I come home.