"Well, I Think It's A Science Museum"
Because the sign says "Science Museum".
One of the things I was looking forward to visiting the most on this trip to London was checking out the Science Museum! Now, I am a fan of museums and especially science ones, so I already was very excited to go, however, wow. Like, wow. Like, I literally spent just the whole day thinking about all I'd seen and talking about it with my friends, wow.
So like, first of all, the museum is huge. At first we stayed for like 4.5 hours and were about to leave, until we noticed we had missed like three entire sections and stayed like 2 hours longer. And by the way, we didn't even check out any of the temporary exhibits, just the "main stuff".
The fact that I was able to stay at that museum for nearly 7 hours, reading as much stuff as possible, and have fun the entire way through is incredible. This is absolutely a place I can recommend anybody visit when they're in the city. (Also they had very good milkshakes, seriously)
Now, if I wrote about literally everything that I saw in the museum, or even just "a good part of it", this blog would be unbelievably long, so I will just show a few of my favourite things!
There was a video game exhibition which I didn't actually go to, but the shops did have a lot of merchandise from it, and there was one that really interested me, which was a book called "Video Game of the Year" by Jordan Minor, which I decided to get since it is about a topic I really like! It features a list of very influential video games from each year between 1977 and 2022! And its "game of the year" for 1999 was System Shock 2, which I am only bringing up because of something that happened earlier:
We only really had a guide talk to us about something for one specific object in the museum, being a literal actual V-2 rocket on display! I really love learning about WWII and Cold War history, and so it was extremely fascinating actually seeing one. More specifically, it was nice to be able to learn about it from a place that was actually affected by it, as they could talk about things in a more direct way! For example they mentioned the fact that you couldn't actually hear the missiles from their target location due to them being supersonic, so if people couldn't hear one after a while they knew they had to evacuate.
(Btw, the connection between this and System Shock 2 is that the ship where the game takes place is the UNN Von Braun, named after Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who helped develop the V-2s and went on to work with the Americans after the war.)
(Whoops. I didn't actually take a picture of it, I don't know how I forgot, but here it is in the background of another image. It's the black and white missile below the plane.)
Also a bit before this I had a very nice encounter with a lady while looking at a DNA model made by Francis Crick and Jame Watson, who were the ones to discover its double helix formation.
She talked about how she remembered that there was a bit of a rush when developing the technology since there was a serial killer on the loose at the time. I don't know why exactly but I found the general exchange pretty nice! I didn't know her, but we just talked a bit after I tried to take a picture of the model (which she said was "a little hard to get, isn't it?") and I got an interesting story!
There were also a lot of scale models of trains, boats, and planes! My favourite was probably the boats though, simply due to their visibly intricate level of detail.
There were a lot of relics from the past, but absolutely my favourite to see were the board games! I am already a huge board game enthusiast, and so seeing some of the ones from back in the day was extremely cool! And even smaller things like seeing what a standard deck of cards looked like from over 2 centuries ago (they didn't have numbers and the court cards only had one head!)
And lastly (seriously, I loved literally every single section of the museum, but I have to restrain myself) I wanted to mention specifically the section about engineers and technicians, which I found extremely inspirational. It was covered with amazing artwork, creations, interactive games, and it just gave off an aura of curiosity and exploration.
I don't know why exactly, but this section specifically stuck with me more than any other, perhaps because I've also been an extremely curious and creative person, and I wish to be able to work like that some day.
In general, as I said, I loved basically every single part of this museum, even the parts that weren't about things I was directly interested in, such as medicine. This place was seriously amazing and I have nothing but good things to say about it. It is 100% a place to go if you're ever in London, and I am so glad I've had the opportunity to go.
Here below I will leave their website for if you want to check them out! On their blogs they have entries on a lot of things, including some I mentioned, which I will also have linked down bellow. Please check them out!
(Btw, don't be surprised if someday I write a second part of this where I share even more stuff, I'm sure my brain will get the urge to share even more later.)
