Unexplorable

Lena, who is allowing us to sleep in her Fulham apartment, is a beautiful and extremely talkative German girl who recently moved to London and speaks with a strong American accent.  She's preparing an interview so she can study musical theatre. She's vegan, too, and describes cooking as her form of therapy.  Her entire studio apartment is decked out in pastel furnishings, she wears a wardrobe of strictly pastel clothing and her hair is pink.  She's a walking, talking, singing, dancing fairyfloss.

Our first proper meal in London was a vegan buffet, where we ate way too much 'cheesy' broccoli and garlic mashed potatoes.  We jumped onto a double decker bus (!!!) and rode to the Natural History to combat impending jetlag with the utter radness of a blue whale skeleton and the most complete stegosaurus in the whole world.  Maybe because it was nearing bedtime in Australia and maybe because it was 25m long, I sat on a platform feeling completely overwhelmed staring at a blue whale for close to half an hour.  A lady and her daughter came and sat next to me.

"Where is the information on the blue whale?" the mother asked.

"There is none.  Just that plaque that says Balaenoptera Musculus," the girl replied.

"That's stupid.  We don't know anything about them.  Are they really that big?"

"They can't be.  That's too big to move." 

Wrong. This specimen is indicative of the average size, but they grow to 30m.  I had read this earlier on a plaque.

"How many do you think there are?"

"There can't be a million.  Then there'd be no room for me to swim in the ocean."

Due to whaling in the early 20th century, numbers diminished dramatically until there were around 1000 blue whales living in the ocean.

Then they got up and left in a huff.

Nick's Scottish childhood friend from Mackay met up with us and we scoped out the dinosaurs.  Apparently there is usually a line to get into the dinosaur exhibit, but because it was an hour until closing, we were in the clear.  The lighting was really dramatic and cast eerie shadows all over the wall, giving it a Jurassic Park vibe.

Did you know that for a working professional to live within 30 minutes commute of London CBD, they're looking at paying around 1300 pounds? For a room in a shared house.  With other young professionals.  London is ridiculous.

The next day we decided to get the tube (Mind The Gap) to Westminster to have a little look at Big Ben and the bridge, before heading to the National Gallery.  At Big Ben, Nicholas offered to take a picture of some tourists (his picture was pristine, centred, colour balanced, straight) and they returned the favour (it was terrible).  We decided to walk the scenic route to the gallery.  Typically, we went the wrong scenic route, ended up the the wrong gallery so we got in a less scenic bus trip straight to Trafalgar Square.

The first half of the National Gallery was beautiful.  They had a Peter Balke retrospective on in their temporary space.  I had seen one of his paintings during a lecture in my Politics of Art and the Environment class in third year university, but this time they were so different and the light was so beautiful and all the crashing oceans made me so excited to get up to the Arctic Circle.  He had done a pilgrimage up to the north of Norway, near Russia, and done hundreds of landscape paintings that basically informed the rest of his art career.  Nick and I added a couple of places to our To Visit In Norway list.

Commemorate your trip to the National Gallery with a Giant Rembrandt Chocolate Coin

By mid-afternoon, we were completely delirious with exhaustion (it would be nearing 2am in Melbourne) and had found ourselves surrounded by Renaissance paintings of leering baby Jesus' and bizarrely proportioned men.  I was giggling so hard I was nearly crying and worried I was going to be kicked out of the gallery.

We had a few hours until sunset and thought the "brisk" weather would wake us up, so we wandered through St James Park, past geese, goslings and the aptly named Duck Island to Buckingham Palace. Queue selfie sticks and teenage girls and anglophiles and Nicholas insisting we take photographs on things that we could see on a 10p postcard.