London and Some Museums

Yesterday, I traveled to London for business reasons (robot shopping). Not really a particularly glamorous voyage, but the flight (British Airlines) was nice. This is a really obvious thing to say, but driving on the wrong side of the street was weird. My brain kept trying to explain it by assuming that the roads were one-way, but then a car would come and I'd have to just look away to avoid having a panic attack. We ate at some not-so-great pub thing. I ordered fish and chips, thinking that this was the appropriate thing to do in London, and I was greeted with something that was way more "chip" than "fish." Basically, there was a little bit of cod, surrounded by a brick of fried batter. One of the other guys with us got the same thing, and his was even worse than mine. Like a fish brick. So, my advice is, if you travel to London, don't eat.

The other thing about London is that everything costs about the same number of pounds as you'd expect to pay for things in dollars. But a pound is worth two dollars. So, basically, everything costs twice as much as it should. So again, my advice is, if you travel to London, don't eat. Or buy anything else.

So, that was London. I was only there for the day and we were driving from robot warehouse to robot warehouse, so there wasn't really time to see much.

Today, we went to some museums. The German History Museum and the Pergamon Museum. Both were great. To me, the coolest thing was probably the reconstructed Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum. There were other similarly impressive reconstructed structures as well. Some from Greece and others from early Islamic civilizations. The history museum was fine. Basically, it was like all other history museums, but with about 30% more suits of armor. I find that every time I walk through a history museum, the same thought always occurs to me: If there was an apocalypse and all the books and other people in the world were destroyed, such that there was no source of information other than what's in my head, how would I go about making anything out of metal? We always laugh about how primitive things were back in the middle ages or whatever, but I think if you ask any random passer-by today how to make, say, a shovel, they'd have no idea. I know it has something to do with heating up the metal and banging it into shape, but where the heck does metal come from in the first place? Mines? Would I have to go mining before I could build myself a shovel? If so, how the hell am I supposed to dig a mine without a shovel?

Tonight I'm going to try to make it back to Magnet Club to see Pop Levi. I haven't really listened to his music much, but he has an 80 on Metacritic, so I figure it's something to do.

Oh, and I found out what that awesome bombed-out place is called. It's called Tacheles. Here's a picture. The bar we went into is in the upper right part of the photo, where the two sloped openings to the outside are -- the top floor. There were old computer monitors everywhere. Very cool.