Three's Company: Natural History and Science Museum

I was already on the 333 to Tooting Broadway for the Northern Line heading to Highgate Cemetery on Octobre 17th when I received a message from Katja saying something the along the lines of "We're on the way to the Science Museum - wanna come?" So sure I did.

All I did on the day before was to rest (yeah!) for most of the day and to go to Tooting Broadway for a new haircut, some shopping and foooood as all I had eaten so far was breakfast. Oh by the way, some time ago, I found out that the toast I get here is always already expired. Always. I have given up to complain or to get upset about those kind of things quite a while ago as mentioning anything would be of no earthly use and I'd rather live peacefully here than in a tense atmosphere.
Haircut. I am fussy about my hair. Fussy to a pathetically high degree. Embaressingly fussy. I once came out with such a bad haircut that I did not enter a hairdresser for more than half a year and the one I went to right before I departed to LDN, although I had been there before (but with a different coiffeur), gave me a haircut that eerily resembled the one from Mireille Mathieu with is not a good thing, either.
    

Anyway, I walked around for a while until I found one that looked halfway trustworthy. There surprisingly is quite a variety of hairdressers to choose from at Tooting Broadway and no - not all of them would rather give you beads or weaves (contrary general assumption). I came in, had my hair washed three times (I asked whether it was really necessary before the third time as I slowly started to think that they are going to charge extra - what they did not - but appearently, the last time was with conditioner), was treated in a friendly manner, asked how I wanted it to look like, was given further advice and left the place quite pleased with the result. I hate the places where they want to hear from you exactly what you want them to do as it always seems to me then that they don't know what they are doing and furthermore, I am not a frickin' hairdresser so how the hell am I supposed to know exactly how you are ought to cut my hair. Ah, there we go. I think it became obvious now that I really have got hair issues. Dunno where that came from.

After strolling through Tooting Market and the area for a while, finding something to eat became the main goal. The first low priced stall went out of food (haha! To their defence however, it was rather late and I was still in the market hall then and there was still some stew stuff left, but that was not really what I was looking for. It was Jamaican food, btw). I then decided to go to an Indian restaurant, which was not the best idea I have ever had. I am talking about the restaurant, not the fact that it was Indian. The amount of food was way too small for what I paid, it was way too greasy and again they gave me one of the shittiest seats available. meh.

That was the day before. I actually wanted to write about my day with the two gals, so here I go.
     

I arrived in South Kensington a bit earlier than they did, so I had plenty of time to get myself a (not too nice and rather flat) cheap coffee from a place right at the station and sit down on a bench for a while before they showed up.
Writing about coffee. Probably deriving from their history of being tea drinkers, the English coffee of choice is instant, somewhat weaker, milkier and sweeter from what Germans usually prefer. A kettle here is just as much a kitchen essential as is a coffee machine in Germany (FYI, I don't even own a kettle - if I need hot water, I use a good ol' pot on a stove - takes longer, though). Just a little side note. That being said, London Town is still plastered with coffee shop chains and you also don't need to look fot too lonh in farther areas. It seems to me, that Starbucks is to my surprise not the one to find the most but rather the runner up to Pret a Manger (or just plain Pret) which seems to be omnipresent. Followed by Costa and Nero, with the occasional Paul's. As I am someone who is very fond of coffee (as well as tea), I will gladly give you my opinion about the coffee of mentioned chains.

Let's start with Starbucks. Starbucks is the place to go if you want nice, tasty, overpriced fancy shmancy hot beveranges with a lotta cream and syrup but with very little coffee. Let's be honest. Who does not love overpriced fancy shmancy hot beveranges with a lotta cream and syrup but with very little coffee once in a while?
Don't go to Pret if you want coffee. I like their food; you can see the 'effort' in offering more healthy food and the fact that everything is supposedly organic is to their favour as well, but their coffee tastes plain frowsty. Fail. End of story. Organic BS or not, if it tastes bad, I won't buy it.

I cannot say a lot about Paul except that their coffee is alright and their food - at least the macaron I once had haha - is delicious but everything is ridiculously overpriced.

The coffee shop that takes the cake for me is definitely Caffè Nero. Their coffee tastes almost nutty, roasted but not burned and their prices are - for coffee shop standards - rather low.

But finally time to come back to the museums...

We first went to the Science Museum. I have already been there three years ago and remembered it being - watch out, uncreative ad talk on its way - "fun and interactive" meaning that there are many things you can/need to do something with. Different ones than there used to be  years ago which is a good thing as it makes it worth revisiting.

Besides the obvious themes of natural science and technology, the new exhibition "Who am I" adds psychological, biological and socioligical aspects. That was were we spend most of the time.

I don't want to go further into detail as http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ is way better in describing what they offer, but it really is worth a visit, especially combined with the Natural History Museum , which is right next door, so to say and picks up themes such as geology, biology and, well, natural history. Again, we did not quite see all of it as the two still had an appointment, and I might visit it again.

Oh yes, both museums are free except special temporary exhibitions and a few extras.

Both are enjoyable and not the kind of museums where you oooh and aaaah over historical, man made, high cultural objects (arts and crafts for short), which I like as well (the V&A still being my favourite museum).

However, while grown-ups still find something interesting and are going to have there fun - children will get the most out of it.

After leaving the museum oh so much wiser but hungry, we decided to have dessert before our actual dinner (or was it a late lunch? dinner? linner?).  So we went to Snog - a frozen yoghurt shop with a shitload of toppings to choose from. I had green tea yoghurt with chocolate brownies, strawberries and mochi blobs on top. The gals had plain yoghurt and dark chocolate and that were actually all one could choose from. Tasty? Yes. Expensive? Definitely.

We moved on to Victoria Station as their train was going to depart from there and ate at Garfunkel's again (I just love their spareribs and chips. Honestly. I do) where Sarah taught me that you can just ask for tap water in restaurants here as a beverage. We all got big glasses of it even with icecubes and a slice of lemon without being charged. Love it. The best thing that would happen I assume if you asked for tap water in Germany, would be the waitress giving you an irritated look, the worst thing would be you being thrown out. Well, a bit of an exaggeration but you get the picture.
Afterwards, we I drank an alright but not too good chai latte with them at the train station (at least I had a chai latte) before they had to leave what made me decide to walk around the area by myself.

Shame on me, but I did not know that Buckingham Palace is so close to there! I pretty much ended up there by coincidence, but surely not regretting it at all. The palace itself is really not too interesting from the outside. However, the fountain in front of it is!

I got to Hyde Park Corner Station, passing the Wellington Arch.

Between Jurism, Journalism, Corpses and Fairytales: Holborn

Alright, this time it's gettin' bathetically touristy.

Bath was yesterday, sunny it was today. So, 'what to do' I was thinking when I remembered that quite a while ago, I actually purchased a guide for London that was supposed to help me in exactly this kind of situations. Half-heartedly leaving through it, I stopped in the centre of the book. 'Pretty', I thought when looking at a picture of a dragon-like figure artsy fartsy lit from behind by warm evening sunlight. That kind of picture everybody loves to look at and every hobby photographer proclaims to be his 'masterpiece'. I don't quite recall, but thoughts like 'Yes, I want to look at pretty things lit from behind by warm evening sunlight, today' might have come into my mind when settling on going out for a walk that it exactly described in the pages of that guide. Holborn it was, so I set out to go there.

Sir John Soane's Museum

What a suprise - Holborn was the name of the closest station so I got off the tube there, trying to find the start point of said walk with intitial difficulties. I think I have mentioned before that my sense of directions puts me close to retardation sometimes. Or maybe it was just because you sometimes just don't know in which direction you look when exiting the tube station. Nevermind. Lincoln's Inn Fields was supposed to be the first street to enter and also the name of the park it surrounded at the same time. The guide did not mention entering the park but I did anyway just for a sneak peak: yes, a park, not really too interesting. The first sight worth seeing was supposed to be Sir John Soane's Museum, which I did not enter, but viewed from outside. The architect from georgian times rebuilt the building, as well as the neighbouring ones himself. Alright, nice to look at for a moment, but not too interesting. What I liked about using a guide though was that one directly has a few background information and that things are described that one might not have noticed.

                    

My masterpiece!

Heading to Lincoln's Inn - one of the oldest Inns of Court - turned out to be a bit difficult as the BBC seemed to be busy doing something in there with trucks - ehrm lories - and waggons parked outside. Gary Rush, Niamh Cranitch and and Nick Slade - are those local celebrities? Never heard of them but they had their own waggons, however. Alright, taking on the 3rd side of the park - catching a glimpse already of the backside of the Royal Courts of Justice and the Royal College of Surgeons, I turned into Portssmouth St. The 1836 founded Royal College of Surgeons now contains besides laboratories a anatomy museum, hence the corpses in the title. I found studying medicine always rather disturbing as I could neither look at corpses/body parts much less operate on them (let alone on living people always worrying of causing them any damages and so on). I am more than grateful that doctors and surgeons exist (duh), but then I sometimes think that you have to be at least slightly f*cked up to be capable of doing the things they do and did in college. Just a thought. Anyway.

The Old Curiosity Shop I saw next may or may not be the name giver of the story by Charles Dicken's  - but this building from the 17th century can give a slight impression of how the area looked like in that time (before the Great Fire of London). This is one of the most fascinating aspects of London: One old building can stand right next to an even older building standing beside a modern one.

                                                                         

From Portugal Street over Serle Street to Chancery Lane, this area really has to offer a lot of histrorical architecture and an atmosphere hard to describe. Old, but not the medieval kind of old but the sophisticated 18th century kind of old with a sophisticated nobleness, and the creative busyness that then gives you Fleet Street, that has been the home of many British newspapers.

                           

 

I was still following that guide, leading me through a tiny passage at Fleet Street that I never would have noticed ending in a little court with a gate that - was locked. Guide:failed. End of story. Cul-de-Sac. That was the moment when I decided to send the guide to hell and walk around just with my own gusto.

See how majestically the sun shines through the dreamy smog of London.

I went back to Fleet Street, finally having a look at the Royal Court of Justice from the frontside.

This victorian-gothic building could really be right out of a fantasy fairytale: Majestic, playful and dark at the same time, here is where I finally found the alluring dragon I have been longing for all day (please notice the lack of seriousness). The dragon  - being actually a griffin - marks the border to the City of London.

                                        

          

I aimlessly walked down, almost to the riverside, finding a lory loaded with something that seemed to be a very old coal waggon. I am always very pleased by those kind of coincidents. Me randomly walking around London, finding a rather deserted place with such a temporary sight. Brilliant. Those kind of things remind me of the one week I spent in Paris last year when we rather spontaneously decided to go to the Arc de Triomphe where unforeseen a parade was taking place with people playing trumpets and so on and minutes later while walking down Champs-Élysées a red bus passed us with wig-wearing people on top singing songs by the Beatles. Kismet.

Anyway, quite close was a small park with a memorial and not a lot else to see, so I went back to the Court of Justice, walked down another street and found something I have never seen or heard of before:

                        

What lay in front of me was the court of the Somerset House. Open to the public, very nice at dusk with not too many people around, I rested there for a while before I looked out for something to eat. Eating out alone always is a bit awkward and my experiences have been rather on the bad side but still: I had not eaten so far and was not even too picky. Not very far away was a Garfunkel's - a chain I had already noticed. I decided to eat there and naturally was given the worst place in the restaurant: right at the front, at the window next to the stairs down to the toilets. Fabulous. But - hungry - dinmatter. I ordered the chicken and rib combo along with chips and a sad tiny portion of coleslaw but tasty nevertheless.

The chicken was dry and chicken-y, but the spareribs however were the best I have ever eaten so far with no nibbling off the bones necessary as the meat just fell off of them. Yum. After dinner kept on walking around for a while until I came to the Picadilly Circus area where my stupidity made me waste some money. As the evening was unusually warm, I thought I could still go for a nice coffee (I don't get real coffee outside of cafes as the British really seem to like the sad excuse of a coffee that is the instant version) and found a frozen yogurt parlour. Not looking at the prices (how much could it be?) I spent 10 GBP on a coffee and two scoops of icecream. Bitter.Those kind of things ususally don't happen to me as I am generally very alert when it's about money and prices and I make sure that something like that won't happen again in near future. 10 Pound is not a fortune, but it is more about me being undesigned wasteful that bugs me. In the end, I got into the tube at Picadilly and called it a night.

About guides. If you really don't know what to do and need some inspiration, there you go. While the walks described in mine seem to be well-thought-out, keep in mind that they can never be as recent as the day you set out for them so obstacles may occur. Considering them a vague guideline might be the best idea with the background information being interesting but seriously, who walks to check a book all the time when walking around?

Day 25: Kismet's Calling

Sometimes the best walks are the spontaneous ones.
I absolutely did not know what to do yesterday. I got up rather early for a Saturday (about 9 am), had the usual breakfast, took a shower, did the laundry, chatted on skype, did some blogging and so on. After checking the timeout London newsletter I considered seeing an expedition about experimental food for 5 pounds, but as it was afternoon already and it was about to end at 5 I abandoned the idea. Well, why not just go to Hyde Park, see what people at the Speaker's Corner had to say leave a little through my book.

That was the plan. I never got to Hyde Park. As they always try to only do construction works on the tube at the weekend, you need to be aware of that when being in London. While I am, the Northern Line always seemed to be very reliable so far and everything was roughly planned out (ok, rather in the "we'll see what happens" manner), so it was quite suprising when right before arriving Bank Station, an announcement was made that the station could not be serviced at his point. Fudge. So I got off at London Bridge Station for the hundredth time, seeing what I could do. Take the cruiser to Greenwich? Naaah, not in the mood. So I pretty much just kept on walking for a while, passing over Tower Bridge, walking in the sun along the waterside, eating an overpriced but luscious pistachio macaron from Paul's along with a mocha. As there was a Wagamama right around the corner I decided to have my late lunch/early breakfast there. No too good of an idea. The place was rather empty (maybe 5 more people inside) and the forcefully friendly waiter gave me one or too weird looks I could not really figure out. Dunno, hard to explain. I decided for the Wagamama Ramen along with duck dumplings as a side. Ramen: not really delicious (I did not feel like taking a picture, sorry). Watery miso soup, usual noodles with very little chicken, some half-assed fried tofu, one little slice of narutomaki with one sad little shrimp, nori and some undefinable fresh green stuff. Seemed like they just threw in the little rests they had. The duck dumplings really were tasty, especially that cherry-hoisin sauce that came long with it. I will definitely try to reproduce it at some point when I get back to Germany. Nevermind. I paid and walked further for a while until I reached Monument Station.

Monument Station is one of those stations you will come across more often than others as it is a junction for quite a few lines (along with Bank since they are interlinked) located directly in Central London. So I already changed lines a few times in the underground, but never actually got off there.

Although the station is called MONUMENT  - who would have thought... that there actually IS a MONUMENT right at the exit? Maybe I'm stupid. Maybe I just never gave it a thought. I mean, there is a station called Angel, but would you actually expect a seraphic figure there? Or Elephant and Castle...

The actual monument (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Great_Fire_of_London) is quite impressive with a height of about 61,6 metres. That was the moment where I decided why not taking a walk through the City of London from the monument to St. Pauls Cathedral - so I did. You would be amazed of how deserted the area is at Saturday evening. Really peaceful and calm - you could almost pass the streets withought checking the sides (ALMOST). So I took my time exploring the area, not taking the direct way but rather passing small alleys looking what might be to be found there (frankly, I could not name most of the sights I've seen. Maybe I should go back with a guide or something next time). It's fascinating how there are still old, historical buildings  side by side with recent (or at least post-war) ones. One of the unforeseen sights I saw was St. Mary Abchurch - hardly noticable between all those tall buildings so close there is no way to actual have a good few of it. The reproduction of boys' heads you can find there will haunt your dreams.

Sleep tight - we're waiting for you...

Further along I came across a variety of sights nameless for me, until I finally reached St. Paul's. I don't know why, but it always had a certain allure to me. Such a characteristic view for London, being the city's Notre Dame in my humble opinion. And while it is nice being right at its feet, walking through its small garden with roses and other plants as well as a spring and sculptures, and being able to see all those ornamental details at close range - St. Paul's real fascination really evolves when viewed from quite a distance.

Oh the horror! Not again...

And while it cannot keep up with its romanticization in Mary Poppins, the tune still lingered in my head.

So, passing the former wobbly bridge, enjoying the honestly engaging view of London and the Thames at Dusk (and being terribly annoyed by these stupid joggers that where on some kind if treasure hunt through the are  - I encountered the first ones already at Monument- sort of disturbing the atmosphere. I could swear one of them called me names at a certain point on the bridge. They constantly tried to walk by the pedestrians on the bridge withough losing speed.) I slowly walked back to London Bridge Station, passing more attractions such as Shakespeare's Globe.

So, although starting with little motivation to really make something out of the day, I think I had one of the nicest walks I've had so far - thanks to unforeseen coincidences.