Five London Museums in Two Days

Yes, this is ridiculous! But we all have this sense that London is so jam-packed full of things to do that we have to take advantage of as many of them as possible. Actually, that's probably just my sense, and I'm dragging Emma, John and David along with me. Yesterday, we managed to visit the Victoria & Albert, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, and today we made it to the Tate Modern and the Museum of London. Granted, our visit to the Natural History Museum was possibly in the running for the record for the shortest visit ever made to the museum (we basically trotted through the exhibits looking for the model of the blue whale that is the same length as three double-decker buses end to end, then left...) but we can now say that we have been there! And at this point, that's good enough!

I'm afraid that the fallout to all these museum visits packed together like this is that the kids are suffering from serious museum-burnout (and David too, probably, though he won't admit it.) On the Tube this morning, Emma turned to me with a pensive look on her face and asked if it was Tuesday. When I said yes, she sighed deeply and said, "Oh, that's too bad. We have used up almost all of our time in London and haven't done anything fun yet..." Though they won't admit it, I have caught them enjoying themselves a few times, though. Emma was quite impressed with the display on English pleasure gardens at the Museum of London and the exhibit on London theater at the V&A, while John enjoyed the hands-on activities in the Launching Pad at the Science Museum. He was also quite inspired by the surrealism at the Tate Modern, and with my camera took some surprisingly poignant photos of people standing in front of various Picassos and Rothkos and doing all kinds of things beside looking at the art in front of them. I don't think it was his intention to express the irony of the scene as much as a reflection of the discrepancy between his height and that of his subjects, but that probably doesn't matter in the end.

Our itinerary is just as jam-packed tomorrow, though we have run through our list of must-do museums (or at least those that are free!), and we're moving on. I'm taking the kids to see the Monument to the Great Fire of 1666 while David is going to the other side of town to visit a bookstore that was highly recommended (and he'll probably sneak off to the Abby Road tube stop too...). Then we're meeting for lunch at a Belgian restaurant before the matinee show of Lion King, which is very decidedly not free. After the show, we're going to dinner with our friends Peter and Ursula and their girls Joanna and Sophia, all of whom have been putting up with us for the last few days, to celebrate our last night in London!