London, day one

Vincent van Gogh -
Self Portrait with a Bandaged Ear, 1889

Last year, my wife and I went to London as part of a two-week-long Europe trip. The first thing we noticed is how cool the city was. Literally. It was a clear sunny day in May but we still had to wear jackets outside. After checking in at The Thistle Marble Arch, we headed to the Somerset House to see the Courtauld Art Gallery. Admission is free on certain days, and the paintings alone are enough to make the visit worthwhile. We saw works by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Manet, among others.

Edouard Manet - A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, 1882

We stayed awhile to appreciate the paintings.  A great thing about this gallery is that if you come at the right time, there won't be much people at all and you'd be able to sit down and just stare at a painting for as long as you'd like without interruption.  We did just that for the painting by Edouard Manet to the left.  There's just something about the woman's expression that is so captivating.

Next we grabbed day passes for the London Underground and went to the British Museum.  The day pass gives you unlimited access for a day to all of the 11 underground tube lines for the price of 3 single tickets.  Although London is more than twice the size of Metro Manila, it felt as if it was only half as large because everything is within walking distance of a station.

Me and Quilin wearing the digital tour guide

 To help with our exploration of the British Museum, we paid for the audio-visual companion -- a gadget that you wear around your neck and comes with headphones. It's basically a virtual tour guide that knows everything about anything in the museum. It even has additional content in the form of video commentary for some of the exhibits.

The Rosetta Stone. Egypt, Ptolemaic Period, 196 BC

The British Museum is so huge that you could spend an entire day in it and only get to see less than half of the exhibits. We opted to see the Egyptian and Roman sections, where the most awesome piece is the Rosetta Stone.  This relic features a decree which was inscribed three times: in hieroglyphic, in demotic, and Greek.  This paved the way to translating Egyptian hieroglyphs.