Today we went to the Imperial War Museum! I had gone once before, but I hardly need to tell you that I will never EVER get sick of going to this particular museum. It's so interesting and has a really good variety of different displays and artifacts to look at. Just off the top of my head: WWI; WWII; Between the Wars; Outbreak (stuff on the first few days of WWII); the Blitz experience; the Children's War (about child evacuees durings WWII); Secret War (about spies throughout British history); Submarines; the Merchant Navy; the Holocaust. A couple of those are temporary exhibits but most are permanent. As you can tell it focuses pretty heavily on this century and especially on WWII. It is SO COOL. Definitely one of the top places that you MUST take Joe, Mom, if you guys come to visit. I think you would like it alot too, but he would go NUTS.

One of the cool things there today that I hadn't noticed before, was that they have part of the fuselage of a WWII British bomber plane open to the public--you can 'walk through' it and part of it is cut away so that you can see all the inner workings of it, etc. VERY cool. I forget what the type of plane was called; I think it started with an H (I know, I know, Joe will be very disappointed in me). It was INSANELY cramped inside. Like, I'd read about how tight the conditions were inside bombers, but this was far beyond what I had imagined. I had to watch my head or I would have hit it on the ceiling, and I am not a tall person. One of the seats where someone would sit (I don't know if it would have been the pilot, I think so, but possibly a reconnaissance person or something?) had been left inside so you could see, and it was seriously the tiniest little space you've ever seen. Definitely gave me a whole new perspective on what it would have been like.

Anyway, I guess I should put up some pictures! On the way to the museum we stopped at a McDonald's for breakfast. You can't tell from this shot that we are actually at McDonald's, but you CAN see the really awesome stroller (AKA pushchair, that is what they call them here!) that we bought for Em last week. It was a little more money than we had wanted to pay, but I think it will totally be worth it; it's a three-wheeler (one bigger wheel in front, two in back) and it handles really really nicely. You can totally push it with one hand and it will go wherever you want it to! This sounds like a rather elementary thing but trust me, I have fought with enough difficult strollers in my life that I appreciate having one that will actually do my bidding. Haha.
This is at the museum...it is the smallest of all the private boats that took part in the Dunkirk evacuation!! It is called (as you can see) the Tamzine. It's part of a special display on right now about the year 1940, since it's the 70th anniversary now of that year and all that happened then (i.e. Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain).
Emrys is less excited than I about the Tamzine. (That's OK...give him time. I have a few years yet to work on him.)
As usual, Travis attempts to sabotage my photographic endeavors.
Apparently a cardgame that was put out during the first few months of WWII, as people adapted to the blackouts. I love the description ("The game to cheer you up! Everybody's playing it!"). I would be very intrigued to know how exactly it was played...
Here I am standing beside the eagle that was taken from on top of the Reichstag building in Berlin when the Russians took that city in 1945. There are bullet holes you can see in its wings from the final battle for Berlin. Seeing this eagle was super exciting for me because when Alice and I were in Berlin last year we went to the Reichstag and it was one of my favorite buildings there.
Me and Emrys chilling in the foyer.
Outside of the museum there are a couple of massive guns set up. They are really, really massive. I can't even explain how big they are. It will perhaps give you some idea when I tell you that these are the shells that they fire (with Travis and Em conveniently posing beside one, for size):
Emrys cleverly climbs the shell...
Matching faces! This picture is HILARIOUS.
The sweater that he is wearing in this picture is one that Alice knit from a WWII wartime pattern! So I thought it was quite fitting that he should wear it for this particular museum trip.

All for now! XO Becky.