27th, Thursday

We went to a makeup shop to check to see if an order Roxy had put in had arrived, and while we were there we wandered into some stores that sold books and pop culture merchandise. We also went into some vintage clothing stores. Afterwards we went to the War Museum, which featured exhibits from almost all the wars Britain has been involved in. Admission was free (it might have only been free past a certain time, I can't remember) and they searched our bags briefly before we went in. The first room has airplanes, tanks, and a trolly while outside the building itself is a giant cannon. I took some photos for a man and his mother in front of one of the tanks. They were from Australia and the man said he had just spent two months in America (Delaware and some other more eastern state) for training for volunteering to help starving kids and that sort of thing.

They had models of houses from WWII, models of clothing, food, toys, and they had simulated trenches (including the smell!) along with a lot of picture and movie exhibits. The trench simulation was in my opinion too short to really have any effect on a person but Aino had thought it was good. However my eyesight is quite good in the dark so I could see everywhere in the trench just fine anyway despite there being few lights (and the lights that were there were flickering). I really liked the models of the houses, it was surprising how small everything was. Even the beds were a lot smaller than we have today.

The gift shop had some nice things like postcards with old photos and some toy and candy replicas, but I was overall disappointed. I thought there would be more clothing replicas and just replicas in general, a lot of it was the same images printed on different things (like a postcard, t-shirt, fridge magnet, and mug). I bought some things for dad there.

After this we met up with some more friends who are also visiting London at the same time and we ate at Pizza Express near Victoria Station. It was good food, but it was a bit expensive and they only cut half of everyone's pizzas into slices, in addition they had immense trouble considering splitting a pizza into half with one half one type of pizza and the other another type. It was also extremely loud and we could only hear about half the table when we were trying to talk.

When we were done we went to Christine's house, who lives nearby, and talked for a while. We eventually caught the last train home but instead of the normal forty-or-so-minutes, the last train takes two hours and it goes to a bunch of stations no one had heard before. Most of the train got off at the first stop because they didn't recognize where it was going, but we stayed on and got home in the end.