London: Museums and Shopping

Mushrooms again at breakfast--I think we've been through the entire breakfast cycle now. John decided to skip breakfast, and today I met a woman from Modesto whose husband was also skipping breakfast. ("Having a lie-in," as our host says.)

After a quick stop at Starbucks for John, we started the day at the Imperial War Museum. The World War I and World War II exhibits were full of stuff--too much for me to take in. I enjoyed the "Children at War" exhibit, and the assemblage of planes, tanks, and artillery in the main hall was quite impressive.




For lunch, we stopped again at Pret a Manger (they're pretty easy to find!) John had the same chicken & avocado sandwich, while I tried a chicken club this time. Both were fresh and tasty.

The Treasures room at the British Library was fascinating! In addition to historic literature, old maps, and music manuscripts (Messiah score, Beatles songs, Beethoven's tuning fork), they had a large section of sacred texts. Beautiful books and manuscripts from all the major religions. John commented that in any other location, a Gutenberg Bible would be given top billing in its own case; here, it was just one of the many sacred texts in the display case. (And the Chinese starting printing about six centuries earlier!)



On the way back to the B&B, we finally found Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross station. It was not easy to find. Following the signs to platforms 9-11 didn't bring us to the right place, and I had to ask directions twice. It has been moved to an outside wall of the station, presumably because of all the construction going on right now:



We stopped by Oxford Street to do a little shopping. I bought a scarf at Marks & Spencer, then as we started down the street to get souvenirs for the kids, the rain started to come down. We ducked into a little covered alley and bought two Oxford T-shirts for the kids (yes, I know we should have bought them in OXFORD, but we ran out of time and forgot), then dashed down the street to a little souvenir shop to buy some knick-knacks for the other kids (niece, nephew + girlfriend, tortoise-sitter, and plant-waterer).

After settling our account at the B&B, we decided to go to a pub for our last dinner. The Jugged Hare turns out to be owned by the same company as The Counting House: as soon as we saw the menu, we both thought it looked very familiar. Minor differences, of course: The Counting House's house pie was the delicious steak/onion/bacon one that I had, while The Jugged Hare's was hare/carrots/onions/something else. I opted for the fish in "Discovery batter" and chips with minted mushy peas, while John had the steak burger:




By the way, I don't know if regular mushy peas are worth trying (the name is not particularly appetizing), but the minted ones were strange.

For dessert, we shared a bread & butter pudding (bread, butter, cinnamon, currants) with custard:



On the way back, we took a different route and ended up going through Eccleston Square:



Now it's time to pack and get ready for an early morning departure. John's just packed up all the books we bought--it turns out that buying a book at every museum really adds a lot of weight to one's luggage :-)