Daleks and Tea

So apparently I've been in London for two weeks as of yesterday, wow. This week has been significantly less hectic than last week now that I'm settled in and able to sleep. That last fact due in large part because I switched rooms. When I first arrived I was placed in a quad with three other girls, and while they were very nice, we had completely opposite sleeping patterns. The three of them habitually stayed up until all hours of the morning which, though they weren't intending to, kept me up, and then they slept later then me and napped during the day and I'm sure I woke them up while I was moving around the room. After about a week of this I requested a room change. I moved to the building nest door, also owned by the school. I now have a single (pictured below) in a flat shared with thirteen students from Lewis and Clark University in Oregon.

I like my new setup much better except for one small detail. See the large window that makes up one of my walls in the first picture? That is in fact a door leading out onto a picturesqu balcony, and it is locked. Next to it there is a small box, like the kind you see around fire alarms, with a key inside it that's labeled "break glass for key"with, of course, the implication that this is to be done only in case of a fire. This means that despite how much I want to throw open the doors and stride out onto my adorable little balcony (preferably while singing either show tunes or Disney) I never can.

Moving past this disappointing realization, this week as part of a class field trip for British Politics I got to go to the Churchill War Rooms where Churchill and other major members of the British government sheltered from the Blitz and did much of the planning for World War II. The War Rooms were originally a basement that was fortified to be bomb resistant (not bomb proof, a direct hit would have taken them out) under the Foreign Office, Number 10 Downing Street, and some other government buildings. 

Everything in the War Rooms is either original or made to look like it would have during World War II.  In this hallway there was even a recording of Churchill (judging by the sound quality an actors protrayal) yelling at some soldiers for whistling, apparently it was a pet peeve of his.

Churchill and his wife both had rooms in the bunker where they could stay the night it needed (I don't know how often they had to). The room on the left was Mrs. Churchill's and the room on the left is Mr. Churchill's, his bedroom doubled as an office and was used to make some of his radio broadcasts to the public during the war. One of the rooms on the tour was an open area with some chairs where you could sit and listen to one of his more famous broadcasts.

This is the kitchen. Along the way there were TV screens playing interviews with people who had worked in the war rooms, and apparently the food wasn't very good. Because of rationing there wasn't very much of it and what there was for food was extremely plain.

 These pictures are all of charts and the communications room where much of the actual planning for the war occurred during the 1940s. Flying Bombs were what we would call ballistic missiles today.

 During the war this room would have been filled with smoke. Not only was it legal to smoke inside at the time (despite the terrible ventilation that the war rooms had) put the air that was pumped in from the outside was filled with smog. One of the women featured in the interviews they were playing said that she requested a transfer because she started to have trouble breathing because the air quality was so bad.

Part of the war rooms is a museum dedicated to Churchill, I didn't get to spend as much time exploring this part as I wanted to because we had to look at the exhibits the Professor wanted to highlight. (On a side note he is the most stereotypical English person I've met yet. Every day he wears a full tweed suit, with a matching overcoat, gloves, a briefcase, and a hat. And instead of getting the hat at a regular store he goes to a hat maker.) One thing I did manage to get a picture of was one of the cigars Churchill was known for having almost continually lit.

On a funny note as we were leaving I heard one of the people who works at the exhibit talking to someone about the average age of the people who come to see the War Rooms. The worker said it's a fairly consistent mix of older people and school field trips but then said (which made me so happy) "A couple of years ago we had a bunch of kids coming through in their shorts and t-shirts all of a sudden, I think Doctor Who did an episode on them or something like that, but now it's back to normal." Yes grumpy sir, yes they did and it was a wonderful episode full of Daleks offering people tea and robots working in the War Rooms thank you very much! 

The same day I also went on a field trip to Brixton, one of the other boroughs. Brixton was where many of the African and Caribbean immigrants settled when they moved here. We walked through the market area and saw Electric Avenue (yes the one mentioned in the song) which was the first street in London to use electric street lights (hence the name). It was mildly interesting but by the time we got there it was starting to get dark so I didn't take any pictures. We also went out for a Jamaican meal where I learned the jerk chicken is extremely spicy.

This weekend I'm going to the Sherlock Holmes Museum with some friends and to see some places around town where the BBC Sherlock series is filmed so I'm sure I'll have a ton of pictures and plenty of nerdy facts to share (because you know I really need to learn some more).