Dani and Landon go to a really nice area of London.

After a late start and breakfast at my favourite coffee shop in the UK, Greggs, we hit the train to London. En route to the train, we were reminded that it was Remembrance Sunday in London (England is very much still a spiritual and religious country, so Remembrance Day is not only celebrated on November 11th, but also on the following Sunday morning). We followed some gun firing over to an outdoor church-lead Remembrance ceremony. The whole town of Dartford seemed to be in attendance. It is always nice to see so many people remembering just how important that war is to our history, and just how important our soldiers and vets are to the lives we lead in our countries now.
On that notes, we were determined to end up at the Imperial War Museum in London. We found our way to the nearest Tube stop (Elephant and Castle) and started to look for the museum. We followed a sign and walked up the street where we came to a 4-prong fork in the road. Asking for directions from random strangers (none of which knew the proper way) we finally found some dudes looking for the same destination who helped us find the way. Yay for NICE strangers.

The Imperial War Museum is UNREAL.

We spent the day learning A LOT about the World Wars (World War 2 being a particular area of interest for me). The museum features vehicles actually used in war, World War 1 exhibit leading to a "trench" simulation, a World War 2 Exhibit focusing on "The Blitz" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz), and a Holocaust exhibit. It was amazing.

Upon entering we saw a sign for an Anti-War speaker - getting very excited about this, and expecting some motivation and inspiration, we signed up to go. We then joined a tour by the world's most excited tour guide (he was walking around in circles, shouting about FREE TOURS! and everyone was ignoring him. Landon of course said excitedly "we'd like a free tour" which just amped him up even more). He gave a great tour, but we ducked out early to catch the speaker. BIG. MISTAKE.

The Anti-War Speaker droned on and on for a really long time about removing the troupes from the Middle East based on a technicality in the UK policy and blah blah blah in a monotonous voice that was devestatingly boring.



This guy sucked.



Landon Sleeping through the speech.



Landon fell asleep (snoring no less) during his speech and I got lots of dirty looks from the ladies behind us for laughing and taking his picture instead of waking him up.

FINALLY the guy on the end of our row (aka the guy preventing us from sneaking out) got up and left so we could get out of there and continue our tour of the cool parts of the museum.

All-in-All a fab museum and a hilarious day well spent.

Upon leaving we found out the true wonders of Elephant & Castle. Even though it was only 6pm, it was quite dark outside, and we were a bit of a ways from the nearest tube stop. The people around were looking sketchier and sketchier as we walked farther from the museum. Suddenly a man came up on Landon's side and started asking for money, pretty persistently. At one point he even grabbed Landon's coat sleeve, stating "This is a really nice jacket." I had a moment where I thought there was a possibility that Land was going to actually be in a physical fight with this man soon, but luckily he eventually just gave up on us. Thank god. Then walking through the tunnel to the tube we crossed a woman just unleashing hell fire on her 3-year-old child. Realizing we were not in Kansas anymore, we darted to the tube station, hopped on the tube and headed back home.

Later that week at school I was informed by my students of the three places to NEVER go in London. Top of the list, Elephant and Castle.

Woops!