Day 20 - London

Distance walked: 14km, Alcohol consumed: none (!)

Today the weather was lovely. Clear blue skies and mild weather - and it stayed that way all day. Unfortunately we were not a bright and perky as we could have been. I worked out that we went up and down the stairs to our 2nd floor flat 13 times yesterday. Eight of those trips were to or from the basement so that is an extra floor. Our legs were still very weary and made it clear they didn't like the idea of more stairs, but they just had to cope.

We started the day by taking the tube to Covent Garden and just puttering around, finding the location of the theatre we were going to tonight. We then took the tube to South Kensington to visit the V&A. This train was packed. I've only ever been so cramped in a Melbourne train when there have been cancellations and this was 10 in the morning! We met up with a tour guide from London Walks who took us on a 2 hour tour of the highlights of the V&A. She was an academic, lecturing in design or art, and was an interesting tour guide.  Some parts she gave excellent commentary, giving you a good idea of the significance of what you were seeing and pointing out things you would never had noticed. In other places, she wasn't so good, just pointing out an object without saying anything about why it was special. I'm guessing the difference was when something was when the object was in her area or not.

The V&A is fabulous. It is a museum of design and is a teaching tool, so it has many displays and information panels on how things are made or why they are important. The galleries are arranged around themes too so you can see how the particular art or craft has developed. After the tour, we went to Kensington Creperie for lunch, before heading back into the V&A for a closer look at the galleries we were particularly interested in.

For lunch we both had the galette with smoked salmon, capers and dill. These were more filling that we expected and I thought they were something You Could Eat. Mary was less keen.

By mid-afternoon we were flagging so we left the V&A and visited a nearby coffee shop for coffee & cake. It claimed to have coffee from Australia. That may have been true, but the barista certainly wasn't.

We then went to the Museum of Natural History. Mary wanted to see Darwin's finches. I expected to be bored but it was very entertaining. They had a fabulous exhibit on dinosaurs with displays asking questions, such as were they warm blooded and did they walk upright, and then examples of dinosaurs bones explaining how they came to their conclusions. The best bit was the animatronic dinosaur, something like a small velociraptor. It moved and growled and looked around. It was very life-like and seemed to respond to noise so it looked like it was looking at you. There was also a fun exhibition on human biology, with lots of interactive displays to entertain children. Fortunately, there weren't many children around so we got to play on them all.

We left at closing time and headed back to Covent Garden, passing a busker playing the harp. They have a higher class of busker in this part of town. The tube was crowded again. It is getting to be a theme. We picked up the tickets for the show we were seeing that night, Matilda, then headed off for a quick dinner. We settled on a nearby Thai place called, implausibly, Rosa's Thai Cafe. We had chicken pad thai and yum nuer yang. The dishes had only been moderately toned down for western tastes, so for essentially a suburban Thai place I'd rate the food as You Can Eat It. The service was speedy and cheap which was also a plus.

We then went to see Matilda. Given that is was based on a book by Roald Dahl and the music was by Tim Minchin it was never going to bad. However, musicals aren't my thing, so I felt it was fun but I could just as easily not have gone to see it. Mary is appalled.

Finally, we crammed back onto the tube and back to the flat. There must have been lots of plays ending around the same time as we physically couldn't get onto the first train that came. We only got onto the second by judicious use of elbows and tramping on toes. The tube system here is great, but perhaps there are a few too many people in London.