“It’s very sad,” I said to myself as I gazed wearily about a hall in the Victoria & Albert Museum, “that the human mind seems to have a finite capacity to absorb beauty in a set period of time.”
Plaster cast of Trajan's column, V&A Museum, London
We had been to the Science Museum in the morning. We all (our friend C was with us) loved Launchpad, an interactive learning area full of very cool things to see and do. Pearl was less impressed with the Mathematics section, despite the amazing beauty of models like this:
Uniform polyhedra at London's Science Museum
We ate at the museum’s little cafe, then went across the road to the V&A. We just wandered, looking at all the wonderful things, and gazing open-mouthed at the enormous ceramic collection.
After a while, our brains went into overload and we just couldn’t look at wonderful things any more. The marble floors (I think?) were making my sore leg ache, too.
So we took the tube and went to Buckingham Palace to see where the Queen lives. She wasn’t home, so we didn’t knock on the door. Handy, that flag system. We collected ice-creams from a kiosk in St James’s Park, and wandered along the lake towards Horse Guards Parade.
We got there at just the right time to see the Changing of the Guard, lots of horses and shouting and Pearl was thrilled.
The Horse Guards, London
And then, worn out but still exhilarated by all we had seen, we scoured some tourist shops for obligatory postcards and SMALL! souvenirs, then took C out for dinner on The Strand. My ambitions of a show or night-time ride on the London Eye were foiled by general exhaustion and the need to get up early in the morning to get our next plane.
© UpsideBackwards 2011.
UpsideBackwards 