There’s a lot to do in London and today I tried to get a couple of things checked off on my list of things to do. The first was to go to two museums, The Tate and the Imperial War Museum. The Tate is pretty much known worldwide as being one of the better museums, so it is a must-see for me. The other one, The Imperial War Museum somebody told me about here at the hostel and it sounded interesting. The war museum is fairly close to the hostel so I headed there first. I won’t go too much into the details but let me just say that I think it was one of the best that I’ve been to. There were interactive exhibits, walk-in exhibits, movies, and lots of interesting items. There were tanks, V1 Rockets, Little Man (a-bomb), submarines, and then lots of specialty exhibits like the Holocaust, WWI, WWII, MI6, and more. I ended up staying there for about three hours which meant that I didn’t have time to go to The Tate, but I’ll go tomorrow.

Another to-do item was to go see Piccadilly Circus at night. I’ve been walking around London for the last three days and I’m feeling pretty good about getting where I want to go without using a map. Tonight though I even took a map with me but nothing seemed to help me find Soho. Soho is the neighborhood where Piccadilly Circus is located. I felt like such an idiot. I was right at the start of Soho, I saw it on the map, I had land references, and felt confident I knew which way to go. An hour later I finally gave up, swallowed my pride, and asked a guy for directions. It appears that I did a huge loop around Soho never really going into the neighborhood. I did the same thing I always do, I turned right when I should have turned left. You can probably imagine my humiliation when I was heading home and I arrived at the spot where I made my ill fated choice to the right instead of the left, in about 4 minutes from Piccadilly Circus. Anyway, the guy’s directions were spot on and I got the pictures that I wanted. Oh, and I forgot to mention that it was raining hard most of the time I was walking around. In some ways when it rains like that it’s kind of fun, people are huddled in door alcoves, under café awnings, and those individuals with umbrellas keep trudging on. I don’t think I could ever really enjoy living in a place that gets the kind of rain that London gets though.