Being Dodgy

Being a (bit of?) a dodgy fellow certainly has its advantages - walking after sunset in Mowbray for instance. It also leads to police interviews. This morning at Victoria Tube Station, I got stopped by the tube cops - it was a bit of my fault I guess - one of the pockets in my bag was opened; but they did the whole bag and jacket search thing and asked whether the wires were connected to the iPod. I thought it was quite amusing really ; especially the racial classification section - they have so many!

Spent most of my day in the Science museum - a fascinating place, and wish that I had more time to spend there. Went (after paying 6 quid) to the "Aliens" exhibition - which was very cool - looked at both the fictional roots of not only aliens but also other "beings" like devils, angels, ghosts etc. But the main part was really about the strangeness of life itself - bacteria that can survive at extreme heat and cold, even multicellular organisms that survive at near freezing conditions at incredible pressures under the oceans. If there is life in those conditions, there is a really high chance of other life out there. Whether it is "intelligent" and whether we will ever encounter them is however much less likely. There was also a very funky section on models of other worlds under different conditions (like air pressure etc) and how that would affect life.

After spending so much time at the museum (went to basically every section), there was not much time for other things to do - like visit the Natural History museum - which I must say has one of the most imposing entrances to any museums I have been to. Went to petticoat lane, but today not being Sunday, there wasn't much happening there, took a walk over to Liverpool Street (nice tube station) and took a tube to St Paul's Cathedral, where I was just in time to see it close in front of me. I am not religious by any means, but do enjoy looking inside churches and temples and wonder what drive people to pour so much money and time into the artworks (which are usually very beautiful admittedly). Seeing that there wasn't much else to do around there, I took the bus to Trafalgar Square and on the spur of the moment decided to go into the National Gallery.

So I can now boast of seeing some very famous original paintings, and while I was very impressed by some of the detail esp. in the landscape artists in the renaissance, I can't say I was that impressed with the more recent masters like Monet. Admittedly, their works do look good from far, but get close and they don't look great at all. Same goes for Van Gogh. But some of the artists from earlier periods had some amazing detail, which I thought was very cool.

Thus ends my London jaunt - I now hope to wake up some insane time (in about 5 hours) to make it to Heathrow in time (just my luck - morning planes = encountering morning rush hour to get to the airport). My next blog post will most probably be after I get back from India