Categories: just-life
Date: 12 October 2006 11:10:04
They say that learning is fun. By 'They' I mean teachers and others who want to fill your mind up with often useless information. I mean, what is the fourth piller of Islam, just how much coffee is grown in Brazil, what instruments are being played in this piece of music, how do you make TNT (I had an interesting school-time)???
Yesterday my mind was filled by more, well, not so much useless, but not really useful information, for I crammed in some of the museums of London after work.
First I went to The Natural History Museum and was blown away. It has been a very long time since I was there last and I will be going again soon just to see some of the stuff I missed.
I only visited the Blue Zone and even then I only went fround the Dinosaurs Gallery (cool), the Human Biology Gallery (cool as well) and the Mammals Gallery (ditto on coolness level). If you ever wanted to see just how much bigger a blue whale is, compared to an elephant or a dolphin they have a lifesize model of one. Hanging from the ceiling like some giant airfix plane.
I didn't manage to get to the Fishes, Amphibians and Reptiles Gallery, nor the Marine Invertebrates Gallery, which was a shame, nor the Red Zone with vocanoes, earthquakes or the Green Zone with earth's ecology, metorites and a dodo.
*note - the links to the Zones seem to work only some of the times
The reason I skipped these obviously just-as-cool zones....??? Cause I was on my way to The Science Museum. Which was a slight let down after The Natural History Museum. This was partly because the one exhibit that I'd wanted to see was no longer there (the GWR locomotive, Caerphilly Castle, which had been there when I was last, but has since been moved to Swindon (as I've now learnt)) but was still enjoyable. They have Stephenson's Rocket (1829), the Apollo 10 Command Module (1969), Mika Hakkinen's crashed McLaren F1 car. The shop at the Science Museum is also better than that of the Natural History Museum.
To finish my day off a trip to Victoria and Albert Museum was in order, helped by the fact that it's open late on wednesdays.
I only looked round the ground floor (it had been a long day) and as I don't really care about all the South Asia stuff it meant that I looked at the Raphael Cartoons (big), the fashion section (the 60s were cool) and some of the Cast Courts. These include a two-part cast of Trajan's Column from Rome. Big really doesn't do it justice. Stunning, amazing, awe-inspiring..... if it wasn't for the fact I was dozing off I could have stayed there a lot longer!!! Though the John Madejski Garden once dusk has fallen is beautiful. The way it's all lit up and with the fountains going......
I am going to have to spend a day sometime soon up in London just to work my way through these museums properly. And a full day at that, not a few hours crammed into the end of a working day!!!