Of Cube Fame: Days 53-55: Wizard Country (Spring break part I)

So my good buddy Ben from Olin came to visit me in Budapest for Olin Spring break. Unfortunately, I was busy with midterms (one take-home, in particular, was kicking my ass. Spoiler alert: I did pretty okay) and was therefore not a particularly good host. Also because I don't go out places and don't know things to do. Careful readers will find that I have yet to go to a single museum here in Budapest.

Anyway! Ben and I went to London when my break started! We took a plane early early Saturday morning. It involved an early early taxi, which meant driving past the people on the streets of Budapest that were still out for the night. There were a lot of them. Side note: the taxi driver told me that I said "Jó reggelt [good morning]" like a Hungarian, which made me really pleased for some reason.

Without further ado, London!

RED FLAVOR

King's Cross Station. Naturally, I had to make a pilgrimage. Seen here is the space between platforms 9 and 10.

There's a thing for people to take pictures. There were a lot of people. I didn't wait in line.

I came back later to get my obligatory photo. The cart looks a lot sadder like this without the trunk and owl cage or whatever they had.

Lookin' casual.

I went to the British Library! It was great because there was a museumy bit in addition to it being a library. And they had some really cool things that I didn't take pictures of! Like original documents and primary sources and things. Lyrics written by The Beatles! Letters from Darwin! Diaries from Jane Austen! Though, I have no idea how people managed to read some of the documents, most of the handwriting was awful.

The library also had a thing about mystery novels going on. All you need to know about this is that this is a list of rules for mysteries like 1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know. The real takeaway is 5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.

Books! They make me feel like I'm in a Dan Brown novel.

So I went into a phone booth partially to actually go into a phone booth, partially for protection from the elements as I tried to get wifi (Spoilers: I found lots of wifi but none that was free, alas), and partially for the irony of using my phone in a phone booth. This is what I found. Classy.

I hung out with some people from Wellesley/ MIT because Ben had a previous freak encounter with a Wellesley student. We went to a Jazz club. It was supposed to be famous, but it turns out that I'm just not that into Jazz. Oh well.

London is the most-watched city in the world.

We went to the British museum! It had lots of museum things. A non-trivial amount of it seemed like bullshit though. Like statues without any particular identifying features with descriptions like "Maybe this statue was of Bacchus. He's missing his right hand, but maybe it was holding a cup?" Where are you getting this, museum guys? How do you know what he was doing with his hand?

I liked this lion thing.

This centaur guy was doing a lot of fighting. I think you know what's going to happen to the lady that he's carrying away.

I thought this thing was really neat. They made miniatures to take the poses shown in that art thing. Sometimes they added things that definitely cannot be seen in the original. Hm.