In which we go to the Natural History Museum

Our first day in London, which was really just a partial day, we didn't manage to accomplish much of anything. We established that the Tesco Express that is just around the corner from our apartment has rather limited options, and that the Waitrose, which is a half mile walk from our apartment, has pretty good options, and that spiced pudding with treacle, which is something like cake with caramel, is really pretty good. Also I discovered that our windows open from the top as well as the bottom, and that every single outlet in our apartment, err flat, has a little on/off switch next to it, which allowed us to solve the mystery of the washing machine that failed to wash.

By Thursday, though, we were, more or less, ready to go out and explore the city, and so, after a delicious breakfast of crumpets with Guernsey butter and lime marmalade we braved the walk to the London Underground which, evidently, is the actual name for the Tube. (And if you're thinking that crumpets are properly eaten for tea, you may be right, but the shop had them with the breakfast foods. And I didn't see black sausages.) Anyhow, we ended up successfully making the trek to the station, and figuring out how to buy tickets and get to the proper platform.

Twenty minutes and one transfer later, we were escaping the station at South Kensington, only to discover that the route to the Natural History Museum involved walking through a further quarter mile of tunnel before emerging, blinking, into the sun. (Actually, we weren't really blinking, but I've always wanted to write that.) We soon discovered that the museum was divided into four zones, red, orange, blue, and green,  with each zone including three or four large levels of exhibits and the obligatory gift shop. We began with the pliosaurs and ichthyosaurs (green zone), moving into the birds (still green zone), and then got distracted by a massive metal globe with an escalator rising into it and disappearing (red zone).

After a leisurely stroll around the outside displays of the room, which were full of mineral specimens

from all over the world, including this very cool piece from Cyprus in which the wood in a mine prop has been almost completely replaced by copper, we headed up the "escalator of doom." I'll leave it to you to guess who named it that. Upstairs we went through an exhibit on volcanos and earthquakes, and experienced a simulation of a grocery store during the 1996 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. Amazingly, the people of Kobe had the forethought to firmly fasten all of their goods to the shelves ahead of the earthquake, because none of the boxes or bottle in the shop fell to the floor, despite the fact that the shelves were moving like crazy. It's not clear to me how anyone could have bought any of them though…. We saw lots and lots of gold and silver and gems, and learned about how advances in metallurgy allowed for other advances. We saw fossils of all types: animal, vegetable, water, and traced the evolution of life from single celled organisms up to the present day.

By that time, it was almost five o'clock, the museum was closing in half an hour, and we'd barely managed to cover a third of their collection, despite having been there since shortly after eleven. Also, we had no food in our apartment, and we weren't sure whether the fact that the kids' transit day passes were off peak was going to be a problem (answer: no), so we figured that it might be time to retreat to the tunnels and head for home. After a stop at the Waitrose on the way home to pick up something for dinner, as well as more crumpets for breakfast and stuff to pack a lunch for Friday, we headed back to the apartment, where I "made" dinner (sausages, mashed potatoes, and salad) and the kids worked on French and started their blogs.