Day 2 (Sept 9) - Full day in London
I managed to sleep through most of the night, with only a short wakeup time around midnight where I got up to brush my teeth. I’m guessing I just kinda fell asleep in place. Thankfully I had set an alarm since there is no natural light in the capsule at all due to it being a capsule.
I got out of my hotel and walked toward the parliament buildings since the last thing I did the previous night was to book a ticket for the aquarium nearby. The streets around Big Ben/Parliament were absolutely packed. I’m glad that I managed to see it and wonder around on a quieter day. I got a selfie with the tower though.
I love aquariums and I’ve tried to go to one in every city I’ve visited that had one. The pictures never turn out, so there’s not much to see, but I definitely enjoyed myself. Anyway, here’s a fish with a horn.
Also they had a penguin exhibit and one of them was just chilling near the window like it was waiting for people to take a picture. Of course I will never turn down an animal waiting for a picture so I got several.
After the aquarium, I thought I had more time before meeting up with some friends for sightseeing, so I decided to try and make it to the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. I got on the tube and got about halfway there before they said they would meet me in St James Park. I got off the train and got on the next one going the other way. Thankfully it was the same line, just going westbound instead of eastbound.
I met them at the playground at St James Park which was actually a pretty good playground for being in the middle of a large city. We spent a few minutes there watching their kids play on the slides. We talked about going to the Churchill War Room museum, but looked up the prices and decided against it. We decided to settle on just walking past the Churchill statue near the parliament buildings instead on our way to the Natural History Museum.
We took the tube to the Natural History Museum where we spent the next couple hours. It’s a really cool building and has a lot of interesting exhibits that we didn’t end up seeing due to the difficulty of keeping two very young kids engaged. The dinosaur exhibit went over pretty well, even if the t-rex part was unfortunately closed for maintenance.
We decided to split off and while one of my friends went back to the AirBnb with the kids, my other friend and I took the tube to the Sherlock Holmes Museum where they had recreated a lot of common rooms across multiple Sherlock Holmes adaptations. I believe they mostly focused on the Jeremy Brett adaptation from the 80’s, but I don’t know how strict they were with that. The gimmick levels were off the charts and they kept referring to Sherlock Holmes as if he was a real person, but didn’t fully maintain that tone as they mentioned different actors a few times. But overall it was a fun little display and I enjoyed looking around!
From there, we tried to find a pub for some fish and chips, however we tried a couple different ones that were either closed or not serving food. In the end, we settled on a place that was a lot more touristy, but had decent fish and chips.
We finally went our separate ways, ending another busy day. I went back to my capsule and he went back to his AirBnb.
With the rest of the evening, I spent a bunch of time drafting up the post for day 1, but obviously didn’t get very far at the time. I’m only writing this one about a week and a half later, so I’m quite behind. I’ll try and speed up my pace, but my days certainly haven’t been any less busy overall.
Last modified on 2026-09-20