London, part 2 of 3

Of all the cities I'll visit during this whimsical year of travel, London has got to be the one I visit most. I've flown in or out of London 14 times already, but that's hardly a reasonable measure of my time spent here. Which is currently a total of two afternoons and one evening.

All of my connecting flights to the states have been through London save one, and I've even made London a connection between Andalusia and Venice (check your europe maps to see if that makes sense). But I've only visited London for one day before today. I went to visit Elisabeth from my teaching English course in Brighton and we made it up to London for a day, but didn't do much other than meet a myriad of friends of hers and spend the day searching for a costume for a dress up party where you had to dress up as something ending in '-st.' (for the record, I eschewed the typical artist/buddhist/florist routine for 'hidden cost').

So this is my first real London as a destination. And I likely won't see much. Despite what seemed to be a short flight (3 hrs + the hour saved when you go back in time), I wasn't able to set out on the tourist trail until 4:20 and didn't get to my destination, the Natural History Museum, until 4:40. Since Becka and I have decided we won't be doing museums (she doesn't like them enough and I don't want to be burdened by someone who doesn't like them enough), and London's chock full of great museums, I tried to fit them all in today.

I saw two. And one sucked. The Natural History Musuem had a number of great, well done exhibits, particularly on dinosaurs. But they used fake casts instead of real fossils (which are all in NY. And many of their facts were wrong (I did, after all, receive a citation and an 'A' in a class called Dinosaurs! at an Ivy League school). So that dampened the thrill. But I made up for it in the National Portrait Gallery, a symposium (not sure if I'm using that word correctly and don't have time to look it up to be sure although I did have time to write that whole sentence explaining such) of portraits (some famous) of many Britons (all famous) throughout the years with accompanying explanations as to who they were and why they were famous. Great consolidation of my British royal history. Enjoyable.

Which brings me to the three lessons I learned today:

1. Trust your guidebook. It said the Natural History Museum should be skipped, and it was right. It said that the National Portrait Gallery would be good and it was.

2. Don't fret about missing connections or, in general, the little things. My taxi driver told me that the only thing you should really worry about is dying. B/c then, you've really lost. But when you miss a bus/train/plane (the first was my mishap today), it's not the end of the world. Besides, I had a great conversation with a taxi driver as a result. I learned that his whole family's military and one of them works in top secret chemicals for the americans. And he told me how to keep your windows from fogging up in your car (wipe them with water-less soap) and water from sticking when it rains on the outside (wipe a potato on it).

3. I can't remember and I have 2 minutes left on internet, so I'll write it later

Obviously if it didn't come back to me in three days, it probably wasn't that important...