My London sights...

Here are a few of the things I've seen in London in the last couple days.

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
There was a new dinosaur exhibit here, the highlight of which was a life-size animatronic, motion-sensitive, roaring, moving, T-Rex. Pity about it being school holidays... the exhibit was one long queue through the displays. And the replica diplodocus skeleton in the main hall was celebrating its 100th birthday. I saw a stuffed platypus in the mammal hall that looked suspiciously too big to be a real stuffed specimen... it was at least 40cm long. And fat.

SCIENCE MUSEUM
At the moment they have a Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy exhibition, and you can get exhibition + IMAX tickets for a combined fairly cheap price. You could choose what movie you could see, so instead of seeing something short and mind-bogglingly amazing like a 3D IMAX movie, I chose to see HHGTTG cause I haven't seen it, and it's about space, which is big. Really big. So amazingly, mind-bogglingly big that... you get the idea. It was a fun movie, even if it wasn't stretched to fill the whole screen.

The exhibition contained mock-ups of sets (you enter through the front door of a facade of Arthur Dent's house), original costumes as worn in the movie, as well as props, behind-the-scenes info and panels explaining the "science" behind Douglas Adams' ideas.

HYDE PARK
A very big park, with its own lake. It was cold and windy, but the sun did come out for a little bit. I saw a squirrel. It ran around for a bit, ate a nut, then ran up a tree.

KENSINGTON GARDENS
Right next to Hyde Park, here I saw a statue of Peter Pan, and a monument to John Speke. It was called Speke Monument, and looked kind of obelisk-like, so I thought of it as the Speke Spike. Speke was the first European to see Lake Victoria, and died in 1864, just so you know.

CAMDEN MARKET
This place is crazy. Packed with cheap amusing t-shirts, wild fashions, stalls of "goth" clothing including black corsets...

BIG BEN
I took a tube to Westminster Station at midnight one night to get a few photos of the clock tower lit up at night. Very cool.

HARRODS
This is one BIG department store.

THE SCOOP
An outdoor auditorium near Tower Bridge, where some organisation is screening free movies every Wed, Thurs and Fri night. I saw Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, which was even funnier than I remembered.

THE TOWER OF LONDON
I spent a whole day here, to make up for the expensive entry fee. But it was packed full of interesting things, so I guess it was worth it.

THE LONDON UNDERGROUND, OR "TUBE"
And many days of buying daypasses and hopping on and off different tube stops to make sure I get my money's worth each day. Fun. Sometimes I wait for the second train, 1 minute behind the other, so as not to get crammed in with everyone else waiting on the platform. Once I took a crowded train to the next stop, then got off, then got on the next train approaching on the same line - which was almost empty.

More later,
Glennjamin