Penultimate day of school holidays

It was the penultimate day of the school holidays today. Today and tomorrow are daddy days for me and the kids. Mummy has started back at work, so it’s just the three of us. Last year we spent this day in ZSL the London Zoo and this year we decided to visit the London Aquarium (now called Sea Life or something like that) and the Natural History Museum.

Hope you enjoy the photos below. We walked from Waterloo Station past the London Eye to the aquarium. I didn’t take any photos in the aquarium, I don’t like flash photography when animals are close. What annoys me is that people just ignore the warnings when there are clear signs saying not to use flash. We walked over the bridge past the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Then a tube ride to the NHM. What a fine building it is, there are lots of stone creatures or gargoyles on the outside making it look like a cathedral. Inside there is a entrance hall and a cast of a diplodocus skeleton.

After visiting the dinosaur hall we visited an exhibition about the human body. The kids enjoyed it because there were lots of buttons to press, lights to turn on and off, levers to pull and plenty of interactive learning exhibits. The ones on perception and optical illusions were very good. I looked closely at a human brain and spinal cord in one case: the spine and brain stem are really like a trunk cable, lots of interwoven electrical cables. I found it surprising how it made me think of computer cables carrying data and that’s exactly what it does of course.

We had a full day and were all tired by the time we left to catch the train back home. As tomorrow is the final day of the holidays we’ll probably take it nice and easy, not quite sure what we’ll do but we’ll have fun. My parents leave to visit my brother in the USA this week, he lives in Massachusetts.