travel day 12: hanging out in London again

---

today was an interesting day. i noticed that my shoes that i usually wear everyday, were broken. this is hard to explain in words and i wish i could have taken a picture. the shoes themself werent broken, but the glue on the buckles were loose and the threading was loose too. i put on sneakers and we just found a local shoe repair guy that would repair them for 3 pounds which is a lot cheaper than buying a pair of shoes. we took the underground and then walked for a few minutes to the imperial war museum. now i didn't think it was going to be an interesting place, but it was. we spent a lot of time in the exhibiits on war and on submarines. I'm not really interested in that but i acted like i was lol. afterwards, we went upstairs and saw there was a 30 minute video on genocide and human rights being taken away. no one wanted to watch it but me. i spent a lot of time over there and watched about half the video. i didn't watch the rest because i thought my family just wanted to go out. we then went to the holocaust exhibit. now Ive been to many different places that discuss the holocaust and usually, its the same thing but i cant help but still spend a super long time in each place. if i could come out of each exhibits learning even one thing, then it was worth it. the section here at the imperial war museum was huge and really interesting. yes they spent most of the time discussing my people (and they should. we were the number one target), but they did go into talking about the gypsies, black Europeans (i always was fascinated by blacks living in Europe during this time), gays, Jehovah's witnesses, and the handicapped. i read and watched as much as i could there until my parents got upset and wanted to leave to eat lunch. i was angry that we had to go, but i agreed. we took the tube and went to the Waterloo stop and walked towards the area where the aquarium was because my dad is really into fish. we got a quick bite to eat by the London eye all kinda annoyed with each other. afterwards, we went to the aquarium. we went to the prepaid tickets booth and had some Slavic woman who didn't know what she was doing telling us we couldn't go in because they said our voucher was unfamiliar with them and COULD BE a forgery. now, why would a family of just 3 people who had a voucher with a number, address, signature, and credit card information lie and try to save money just to see some fucking fish? we were angry at this bitch because the place was closing soon and we had more shit to do. she kept us near her for about 15 minutes and kept saying she would get the manager who took her sweet time. the manager who had some brains (not much), said that they were having trouble with certain vouchers but just gave us the damn tickets to enter and said she would just call the company. why Slavic woman couldn't do this is beyond me.... spent about an hour and a half at the aquarium. it was alright i guess good if you have never been to an aquarium. i guess i am a spoiled American because all the aquariums i have been to in the united states (long beach, Baltimore, and new Orleans), were HUGE and you could spend hours there. this wasn't bad i mean. it was just very basic kind of like the smaller aquarium in San Pedro if you have ever been there. we left realizing we didn't have enough time to go to the British library to see some stuff we wanted to see. we decided just to skip some stuff we were going to see the day before we are going to leave London like Camden market (more overpriced stuff you could get at the valley indoor swap meet lol), Camden Jewish museum, and the Che Guevara exhibit i originally wanted to see at the Victoria and Albert museum to see the British library. we took the tube and headed back towards our flat to pick up my shoes. i also went to Anderson's travel to pick up some brochures and this magazine i really like. we got hungry (our lunch was really just a light snack because we didn't eat much) and went to this restaurant called Garfunkel's that we heard was good. it wasn't. their "famous" salad bar looked half the size of one from burger king lol. we then got a drink at Starbucks and some asshole took off with my frappachino! this Starbucks didn't take your names down. i now appreciate the united states taking names lol. we came back to the flat and i am going to leave here at about 9 pm to go to st. Paul's to take some pictures of things that were kinda Gothic. 😊

---