War-themed Saturday

Now that I'm uploading pictures, I just realized how many places I went over the weekend.I decided that Saturday would be a war-themed day.

I started the morning off by visiting the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum, which is where winston Churchill and the war cabinet gave underground orders during the Blitz in the earlier part of World War II. It was a really cool place, as they preserved a lot of the offices as well as sleeping and dining quarters. The photos will explain better, but the rooms housed mannequins made to look like Churchill and his staff still at work. The adjacent Churchill Museum dedicated solely to you-know-who just opened last year, and I was really impressed by the interactivity of it. It gave me a greater respect of the man, not just as a war leader, but as a great writer and orator. I almost bought a CD of his great speeches, but then thought better of it and realized I could probably download them if I really wanted to keep them.

After a quick stop at heavily-gated Downing Street and a quick bite at a pub, I was off to the Imperial War Museum, another nice free museum that London offers. The main area houses old tanks, guns and planes, while the basement has a really good account of World War I and II, complete with loads of artifacts. The best parts were the Trench experience, where you walk through a World War I trench with mannequins, and the Blitz experience, which tries to
replicate a bomb attack on London under the Blitz.

The museum also houses a Human Rights violations wing and a Holocaust museum. The museum here is smaller than than the one in Washington D.C., but it was just as powerful I think.

Spending a day at these museums and talking to elderly people around London have made me realize how easy we have it today, not just our generation but in America in general. It's easy to forget as Americans that everyone over here was on the front lines of the war, not just those who fought. Women and children had to sleep underground during the Blitz, when so many lives were lost and so much had to be rebuilt. At the same time, some people over here (*cough*
French *cough*) easily forget how the brave men and women of America saved their arses and prevented everyone from speaking German.