London part 5

I spent this morning in the Museum of London. It has a very crappy exterior, all brown 70s brick, but the interior was very modern. The Museum, as you can probably guess, details the history of the city of London.

I was really disappointed with the Museum of London. Only one of the two floors is currently open to the public, as one of them is being refurbished at the moment. So this means that all of the displays from 1666 onwards are currently unavailable and won't be open to the public until Sept/Oct 2009!

Totally ridiculous.

I understand that it's hard to run a museum and do renovations at the same time, but you'd think they could shuffle around their exhibits a bit so they could have some information on all aspects of the history of London, particularly as it's unavailable for such a long period of time. They have a huge open foyer that has nothing in it that they could have used.

I also found that the exhibits were aimed at children, and not particularly designed for an adult crowd. The displays were gaudy and over-the-top and they provided little useful information. To top it all off, the museum was full of lots of screaming children bumping into you when you're trying to look at something and touching everything that they weren't supposed to. Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I know, I know, I'm highly intolerant.

All in all, not the best experience, and I would not recommend it as something for people to see when they came to London.

Once I'd left the Museum I headed down towards the river. I had my ticket to see A Midsummer Night's Dream and was getting rather excited.

It was seriously freezing today, so I'm very glad that I got a seat and didn't stand with all of the plebs. I even splashed out and hired a cushion so that I didn't have to sit on the hard wooden benches.

The performance was fantastic. The costumes were great and the actors were absolutely superb. I love Shakespeare and you could tell that the actors love Shakespeare as well because of the energy they put into their performance.

There was a lot of physical comedy in the play which made it even more enjoyable and the actors spent quite a bit of time in amongst the audience, not just on the stage, so you really felt as though you were a part of the action.

What I love about performances is watching the actors faces when they aren't the centre of the action and watching how they respond. I noticed today that during the last act when the terrible acting troupe performs their play for the court, the man playing the Duke was having a hard time not laughing at their performance, and by the end he had tears rolling down his cheeks. It made the play that much funnier because someone who has rehearsed it and seen it performed hundreds of times still finds it incredibly funny.

The play ended up being 3 hours long, but I never even noticed. At the end I was wishing that it would go just a little bit longer.

Anyway, I'm going to head off to bed. There is a rather long queue behind me for the computer (nothing unusual).

Tomorrow is my last day in London. I'm going to head to Kew gardens in the morning, as long as the weather is ok.

Sunday morning I'm checking out of my hostel and will be travelling to Victoria Station to catch a bus to Bath. It takes twice the amount of time as a train, but it's 3 times cheaper, and with the amount of money I spent in London - I need to save every cent!

More soon.