Day 70: Museums!

(This is for Wednesday 5 November)

Since I only have one class on Wednesdays from 9.15-10.30, I have basically an entire day open afterwards. On this specific Wednesday, I decided to be especially daring and take on three museums: the National History Museum, the V&A, and the Science Museum.

I started off with the V&A since I'd been looking forward to going to the Cold War Modern exhibit for a while. It was quite the extensive exhibit and definitely was worth the money. I liked how they had a structured organization to the exhibit since it was in chronological order. I learned a lot about the history of not just art and design but also more about the events of the time around the world. Very interesting.

Also managed to get this shot before a guard told me you couldn't take pictures. (Honestly, I saw no sign anywhere saying not to take pictures...)

After browsing through more of the V&A, I headed over to the Natural History Museum. This was aimed more towards kids, which made me even more giddy on the inside when I got to stuff about fossils and dinosaurs:

I'm a big fan of fossils for someone who's never considered being an anthropology major, so I had a field day at this museum.

There was also another exhibit about either just volcanoes or natural disasters in general that I found kind of fun; they had a videotape from a supermarket during a volcano they played in a room set up to look like the supermarket that shook along with the video. Fun. Especially when I saw one poor kid run out on it when the floor started shaking.

Last, but not least, was the Science Museum. I was a bit museum-ed out at this point, so I mostly just walked through the exhibits without reading too much. My problem is that I either like to read absolutely

everything or pretty much nothing at all. Hm.

Well, I did find the exhibit on plastics interesting:

And there was this very cool special exhibit called the Listening Post.

It's this area set up with small screens, and it takes random chatter from the internet and speaks it out loud. Sounds kind of boring when I put it like that, but trust me, it was pretty interesting. I think there was some kind of music, too, and the set up made it feel like you really were listening to the internet. There were different ways the chatter was read, too, and since the displays lit up when there was text there were different patterns throughout.

It was quite a productive day, and I have just a few more museums I would like to go to before I leave now. Also, have I mentioned how sad it is that the sun sets so early here?

Here's a picture taken before 5 pm:

Yep, pretty soon sunset will be before 4 pm even.