Moo-see-ums.
    The day started ominously. I woke up blearily and ate sparingly, yet this didn’t prevent me from having extremely disgusting gastrointestinal pain. Thanks to imps jumping up and down my stomach, Mom and I had to catch up with Dad and my sisters in the Museum of Natural History (MNH).
    Fun, though, once we managed to catch up with them. T-rex and Pterodactyl and Mastodon bones, oh my! The mammal section had a huge, life-size replica of a Blue Whale (Balaenoptera Muscolus), which would be roughly equivalent to 2000 times Mikki’s weight. Whoah.
    The main feature of the MNH that kept if from merely being endless halls of boring displays and info boards thrown at you was the fact that it was interactive. Nearly every tidbit of knowledge was accompanied by a do-it-yourself demo. In the section about the human body, my sisters played a game that determined life or death (by regulating their oxygen, hydration and pace). I almost stayed 15 minutes in one section, engrossed as I was in the visually-arresting puzzles about perception and memory.
    I was in dork heaven.
    In the geography halls, one section surprised me. Plastered on the walls were blown-up newsprints of headlines about Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption. A large screen continuously played footages of that fateful day. Next to it was a car covered in soot, bursting out from the wall. The disaster was one of the worst natural catastrophes in the modern world.
    Cool.
    So, besides Pinatubo, there was an earthquake simulator. The stage was set to look like a Japanese grocery store; every ten minutes, the ground would start to shake, mimicking the Kobe Earthquake. Also, cool was the escalator that disappeared into a model of the earth, a giant, ancient, sequoia ring displayed in the topmost area of the center hall, and other cool stuff.     We ate lunch just outside the museum; most of it I spent trying to shoo the pigeons away (I swear, they’re getting more and more aggressive). At 2 o’clock, Dad went to Leicester Square to buy whatever discounted tickets were available on West End. The rest of us visited the Victoria & Albert Museum of Art and Design (V&A).

    The V&A is funky. Trodding museum after museum can get boring after awhile—they blend into a monotony of exhibits of old stuff. V&A however was different; it was a museum in a way that a chic boutique is a clothes shop. Ancient civilizations were presented like models from a fashion show—classy and elegant. Pseudo-classical English sculptures in cream-colored rooms; a Korean art gallery, sponsored by Samsung; John Mordejski’s Gardens; Frederic Leighton’s giant spirit-frescoes plastered on the walls.
V&A
Fashion
    My favorite section, though, was V&A’s Cast Courts. In 1873 the exhibit was set up for students who didn’t have the time or the money to visit the famous monuments for themselves.
    But what exactly are the Cast Courts? When I entered the 2nd floor skywalk, the huge sculptures took my breath away. Replicas of famous buildings and sculptures from around the ancient-classical world were captured once more in plaster, in nearly their exact sizes:

• Trajan’s Column from Rome (AD 113) was divided into Upper and Lower portions
• The Church of St. Leonard’s Tabernacle (Belgium, 1552)
• The Tomb of St. Sebaldus in his church (Nuremburg, Germany, 1519)
• The Portico de la Gloria from the Santiago de Compostella (Spain, 1188)
• The Doorway of San Petronio (Bologna, 1425)

Cast Courts
   ...These were places that I wished I could visit. Some of the places though I recognized. The Doors from Florence, the remains of Pisa’s Opera House, David…I could’ve spent hours in there, Ozymandias be damned.
    Eventually though I had to go back to the V&A lobby, which had a cool Chihuly sculpture hanging from the ceiling. Dad joined up with us at that point. He told us he managed to get discounts for We Will Rock You.