March 3, 2005
by Chris Minnick
We woke up sort of late Thursday. It seems that after nearly 48 hours of non-stop London fun, we'd hit a little bit of a wall. But,
we had already done just about everything there is to do in London, so we planned to spend this lovely (and cold) Thursday just
hitting the few remaining sites. After a short ride on the underground, we arrived at the "Way-Out Museums Stop".
First stop was the Natural History Museum, where we had been eagerly
anticipating an encounter with the huge T-Rex robot thing. But,
unfortunately, he was being serviced or something in preparation of the summer season. Darn. We did, however, see some incredible
stuff in this museum. For example, we saw the large mammals (see photo). We also saw lots and lots of cute English children in cute outfits.
Didn't get any photos of them however.
Next door to the Natural History Museum is the Victoria and Albert Museum, featuring many fascinating exhibits mostly having to do with clothing. Great stuff, and I highly recommend it. We spent almost 15 minutes there before heading down the street for a bite to eat then down the road a bit to use the famous luxury bathrooms at Harrods. I can't speak for the ladies', but the men's bathroom had big individual marble-walled rooms with doors made of really heavy nice wood. It was arguably nicer than our hotel room. I took care of my business in a leisurely fashion, rested a bit, then emerged and made use of some of the products next to the sink, tipped the nice elderly attendant, and exited feeling refreshed and ready to tally-hoe!
So, we tally-hoed ourselves down to Piccadilly Circus and saw "The Complete Works of W. Shakespeare (abridged)", which was a hilarious show in which they more or less acted out the plots of every Shakespeare play. Totally incredible, and highly recommended. When we got to Amsterdam, they were doing the show there too...so maybe this is some sort of franchise and you can go down to your neighborhood theatre joint and see it today. You should.
After the Shakespeare thing, we hopped on a bus to take care of the palace crap. Like Margaret has mentioned, I'm not real impressed
by royalty. I did get some good pictures, though! I had been carrying an oven mitt around with me all day long so that I could get
some photos to use on the cover of Oven Mitt Johnson's debut CD.
The sun was setting and we were freezing. We took some pictures of the guards (and the oven mitt) and headed to SOHO to get some
dinner and experience some snooty nightlife:
"Oh, I'm sorry, this club is member's only."
"Oh yeah? Well, fine! I hate your stupid club anyway."