Today, after visiting the British Museum for class, Sarah D. and I went to the Imperial War Museum. This place is awesome. The musuem covers World War I and II with exhibits and the Secret War, which is about espionage and so on. The museum is free, however to see any special exhibits there is a fee. Sarah and I paid a £3 student fee to see the Great Escapes exhibit, which is obviously about some of the famous POW prison escapes during the wars. It first talked about the Mythology of escaping - what is true and what it not. For fans of the movie "
Chicken Run," they had on display several of the acutal plastine puppets and sets from the movie there. Then the exhibit talked about how POWs planned their escapes and showed things like records and playing cards that hid forged papers and German money that they would use once the were outside the prison camp.
Then after this we got into the specific escapes. First was the Stalag Luft III: The Wooden Horse. In this escape the plan was to hide diggers in a vaulting horse while it was placed in the yard where men would vault over it. While inside the horse two men would start digging the hole and then later the tunnel. Only three men escaped here, basically cause only three men could fit inside the horse.
The next escape is Stalag Luft III: The Great Escape. This escape was made famous by the movie "
The Great Escape" with Steve McQueen and James Garner. I found this really fascinating. For anyone who has seen the movie, the escape is pretty accurate. I saw reproductions of the contraption that gave the tunnel diggers air, and the type of little trolly they used to move around the dirt in the tunnel, and a reproduction of a pair of sandbags that men, called Pengiuns, wore inside their pants so that they could secretly spread the dirt from the tunnel around the camp grounds. Another note on this, other than the difference in color - the tunnel dirt is darker - the two dirts smell differnt (Yes, they did have examples of the dirt for you to smell). To mask this smell when they began to mix the dirt around the compound, the men would smoke pipes. Another thing I found really interesting was the artifacts that were found during an excavation of the tunnel "Dick" in 2003. There were tools, rope, shoes with little hidden compartments in the heels, rope, and all sorts of things. It was all very fasinating.
A little side note about the Great Escape - this is for people who are really interested in it (Sam and James this is for you!)- here is a list of items that they used to dig their tunnels. 4000 floor and bed boards, 1400 dried milk tins, 1699 blankets, 30 shovels, 304 meters of electrical wire, 200 meters of rope, and 582 forks.
The final escape that the exhibit talked about was the
Colditz Story. The prison is basically a castle in Germany. The prisoners tried to escape via tunnels, disguising themselves as German soldiers, jumping out of windows and so on. The most famous item from Colditz is the Colditz glider. This was a two man glider that two pilots built in a secret room in the prison. However, they never got to fly it cause by the time they had finished it the war was almost over. However, in 1999 the gilder was reconstructed and was flown. It would've worked if they had a chance.
After spending a good amount of time in the Great Escapes exhibit, we then went into The Children's War exhibit. This was all about the Second World War as seen by the children. There were letters from children who were sent to the country to their parents who were still in London, there was children toys and clothes. There was even a recreated two story house, that would've been like the house that would be on the outskirts of London, that you could walk through. It had all the details in the rooms, including a bomb shelter sitting in the living room.
From this exhibit we went to do the Blitz Experience. This has scheduled times of when you could attend - like a show. When you first go in you sit down in a recreated bomb shelter that you would have found, say in someone's backyard or wherever, and you listen to a simulated recording of what it would be like during a bombing - babies crying, people talking, and the actual sounds of the bombs. At one point the shelter shook. We then left the shelter to go into a room that was recreated to look like part of the city after it had just been bombed. It was actually sort of creepy. This whole experience lasted only ten minutes. I wish that it was a little longer and had more stuff to learn from, but it was still good.
Our last stop was The Holocaust Exhibition. This was very interesting. It talked about how the Nazi party grew to power after the first World War and the idea of the Master Race and all the hatred the Nazis had for people who were different from them. I found it ironic that there was a poster that showed a family tree of what the Master Race should be, but it was in the shape of a menorah, the Jewish seven branched candelabra. In the lower level there was an actual cattle train car that had transported so many people to the concentration camps. Then there was a model of what the camps would look like, and there were recordings of survivors who talked about how it was like to enter the camps where the soldiers pretended to be nice to them as they led some people immediately to the gas chambers that were disguised as showers. Finally there were literally hundreds of shoes, glasses, and other personal artifacts and prison issued clothing and special patches that signified what type of person you were (Jeweish, Pole, or a homosexual) on display. I was glad that it was the last stop in our visit. It is shocking how people could do such things to other people.
After the Holocaust exhibit Sarah and I were both physically and mentally tired. We took the Tube back to Kensington. We ate dinner and went our seperate ways. I quickly got ready and I left to go to the Globe Theater. I had signed up through the program to see the Shakespeare's Globe production of "Antony and Cleopatra." The ticket was only £3 (the original price was £5) cause it is a Yard Standing ticket. For these special tickets, you get to stand during the entire performance. I got there early so I could find a spot up against the stage. I found one that was left of the stage with a little bit of a blind spot. It was bad.
The show was good, however it could've been a lot better. I think that actors were too busy with thinking of their lines instead of creating a chemistry between themselves and the audience. Though I must note that some of the actors who had minor roles were better than the ones who had the starring roles. I did have some favorite bits though, only cause most of them were funny, like when Cleopatra attacks the messenger who tells her that Antony has married Ceasar's sister and when Antony, Ceasar, and their men are drinking with Pompey. They are all drunk, though I must say that guy who played Ceasar was the best drunk out of all of them, and then they began to dance. The other part that I really liked was at the very end of the show. Right after they the actors took their bows they began to do a traditional dance. It was like the end of the show farewell. It was really good.
I would like to go back to see another show at the Globe, though maybe pay a bit extra and get an actual seat. After standing for more than two hours for the show on top of being in the Imperial War Museum for three hours, my body aches and says "no more" to anything else. So I just went back to school.
London is considered one of the most haunted cities in the world. If one of your goals is to visit as many haunted sites as possible while in London, I recommend reading and bring Richard Jones' book Walking Haunted London: 25 Original Walks Exploring London's Ghostly Past with you.
