London, England and Back Home

Today was my last day of vacation. I flew back to Denver in the afternoon, and I am starting my job at The Trade Desk on Monday which is just two days away! But, that means that I had most of the morning to be in London. So, I decided to go over to Buckingham Palace and then to the British Museum.

I stored my bags at the hotel, and went to the supermarket to get some breakfast. Then, I took the Tube up to Buckingham Palace and walked around there a little bit.

I really like Buckingham Palace. I think the architecture of the main palace is very pretty and the grounds are so well kept. I also really like the gold statue in front of the palace.

Then, I walked over to the British Museum. My goal was to avoid all of the big “everyone takes a picture of this object” things, because I’d done that last time I was in London.

I decided to go over to the Greece section where much of the crown of the Parthenon is stored. I walked around looking at all of the different sculptures. I saw all of the Parthenon displays last time I was in London, but I wanted to take more time to read the plaques and see what each of the sculptures was portraying. The nice thing about going to the museum by myself was that I could spend as much time as I wanted looking at things, and my family wasn’t trying to get me to move on.

I also walked through the Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia exhibits, and then I want to a section of the museum that I don’t think is travelled as much: the Ancient Europe section which had a lot of interesting displays about the Germanic, Gaulish, and Nordic peoples from before the Christianisation of Europe.

Then, I spent a while over in the clocks exhibit which had a bunch of different old timepieces. I really liked one that kept time using a ball which went back and forth to keep the time.

After that, I walked down and looked at the exhibits about the Pacific islands and saw the big Easter Island statue.

By this time, it was late morning into the early afternoon, so I took the tube back to Victoria Station and went back to the hotel to get my bags. Then, I went back to Victoria Station to try and figure out how to get to the Gatwick Airport. After a bunch of wandering around, I found the right place to buy a ticket and then got on a train that I hoped was going in the right direction. There were tons of other people with suitcases as well, so I figured that it was the right train. It was, thankfully.

Getting through the airport and the entire flight were uneventful. I did get some good views of Greenland and Northern Canada out the window though.