London: Day Seven

We’re pretty tired today. We’re not good at relaxing vacations. Instead, we’re too ambitious about trying to see everything and trek our kids miles and miles each day. Tired.

We started out the day with some bread and jam for breakfast that we got at Harrods. It was raining this morning for the first time since we’ve been in London, but as we guessed, it cleared up by the time we were ready to leave. We were able to sneak away without Sabine grabbing her purse. This is a good thing, as we’ve been worried about her dropping it as we’re jumping on and off tube trains and going up and down steps in the Underground.

The only thing we’d really planned for today was a visit to the Imperial War Museum, which had two new exhibitions that looked fun. One was the Terrible Trenches, which was about trench warfare. While this doesn’t sound like a child-centric exhibit, it was actually presented in a very family friendly way. In fact, it was geared toward children through cartoons and activities, etc. Instead of focusing on the actually war and blood and guts, it just focused on what life was like for the soldiers in the trenches.

Here’s a video of the kid smashing rats in the exhibit

Imperial War Museum: "But I'm sick of taking pictures"

The other exhibition that was interesting was the Ministry of Food. This is the type of thing Sammy really enjoys learning about. It was primarily about the rationing efforts during WWII and the “Dig for Victory” movement, which encouraged housewives to grow their own food to offset the meager rations during and after the war. It was actually pretty interesting and of course we came away with some WWII ration cookbooks. This was followed by an exhibit about what a 1940′s home looked like on the inside (full scale model) during the war, including the air raid structures that people kept in their houses.  So that was all cool. There was also a Holocaust section in the museum, which the museum worker tried to convince me that it wasn’t appropriate for my children. I then convinced him that my kids were both asleep (one in the stroller, one in my arms). It was interesting, but not as moving as the one in DC. Oh, and lunch was pretty good. They served food from the WWII ration cookbook. We both had some chicken stew with national bread.

Kids in the Terrible Trenches

"Ok but I'm not smiling"

This is always good to know.

"No more pictures!"

After the museum, we headed back to the apartment, exhausted as usual, and then walked around Covent Garden. While it’s been a really fun week, we’re both exhausted, and we probably should’ve had a recuperation day in the middle of the week.  Tomorrow, our train doesn’t leave until 5pm or something, so we just plan on hanging around Covent Garden and seeing some street performers. Luckily, the owners of the apartment are letting us keep our luggage in the place well after check out.

Beanie carries her new rat doll in her purse.

Instead of a proper post tomorrow, we’ll try to just upload photos directly from the iPhone throughout the day.

Bye.

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