Discovering the Routemaster

One sunny Sunday, a good day to head to Finsbury park for the Routemaster 60, a parade celebrating the iconic buses on their 60th anniversary. I went to the par expecting to see a few old buses, but what was displayed turned out to be such a treat!

There were more than a hundred buses at least on display, they looked almost surreal, like a row of toy buses neatly stacked together by a child in his playroom. Shiny and polished, they seemed to be in mint condition, even taking tourists on short rides around the park. The old bus drivers, re living the nostalgia.

It was an afternoon well spent, and on the side, Finsbury park is actually quite lovely. I wouldn't mind coming down here more often and spending long hours on the grass with a book.

Discovering the Hunterian

What's super awesome about the city are the free museums. I'm trying to visit as many as I can on the weekends. This Saturday we went to the Hunterian Museum. I had read about the museum on TimeOut, and it sounded interesting.

As we entered we were confronted with enormous glass displays of the weirdest specimens in jars. Animal parts to human, random stuff like an ox heart or a lizards intestines. Dissection of diseased body parts, bones affected with cancer, cross section of a foot! monkey heads, wooden planks with the nervous system, and even a skeleton of an Irish giant! What freaked me out was the foetus in different stages, looked almost alien like.

There were some sections that were truly morbid. Two headed creatures, animals with four legs, John hunter might have been a genius no doubt, but he surely was a freak. And apparently this was not even one fourth of his entire collection. The Historical Surgery Instrument display is totally worth the visit to Hunterian. There are instruments dating back to the 17th century. Some more recent used by the Japanese during the world war.

The collection is so extensive, after a while we were just skimming through the sections, but I can imagine how fascinating it would be for students of science and biology. Or perhaps Dexter.

It's definitely worth a visit once, and when it's free, why not?

 how glorious it must have been