Marcus's Notepad

London Day 2

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:30:00 +0200

Marcus's Notepad http://www.marcusdyck.com/blog/posts/2026-09-14_london_day2/ -

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.

- http://www.marcusdyck.com/blog/posts/2026-09-14_london_day2/ - 2026 Marcus Dyck

London Day 1

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 21:00:00 +0100

Marcus's Notepad http://www.marcusdyck.com/blog/posts/2026-09-13_london_day1/ -

Day 0 (Sept 7) - The flights

Before I did anything in London, I had to GET to London first. Unfortunately for me, the cheapest flights that I could buy 3 months beforehand required me to spend 7 hours in the Toronto airport. Thankfully my brother flies a lot more than I do and was able to get me into the Maple Leaf lounge in the international section of Pearson. I felt really fancy there and it was nice that I didn’t have spend $30 on airport food.

Both my flight from Winnipeg to Toronto and Toronto to London were thankfully uneventful, but I only ended up only getting about 2-3 hours of sleep on the flight, so that really didn’t help me on the upcoming day. Oh well, on to the first actual day!

Day 1 (Sept 8) - Arriving in London and walking in the rain

First Excursion

I arrived at Heathrow at around 7am local time and took the underground from there directly to Picadilly Circus which is where I had booked my hotel.

I have taken a subway before in both New York and Edmonton, but I was last in New York back in 2011, and I had mostly taken the Bus in Edmonton. Being able to just tap your credit card to cover both payment and transfers is super handy and I really wish that Winnipeg could adopt that.

With that aside, my hotel is a capsule hotel that was directly in Picadilly Circus. It was pretty easy to check in and get to my capsule and it was certainly an interesting experience. It’s kind of nice to have a little pod to yourself and also gives me a lot more motivation to go out and explore and do things than a normal hotel since I don’t have anywhere to go in my “room”. It’s something I’d be willing to do again, but the rest of my trip is either an Airbnb with some friends, or hostels (which will also be a new experience).

After dumping my stuff in my capsule and fishing out my umbrella (it rained most of the day), I quickly grabbed some coffee from a nearby shop and started my walking tour.

I started off by glancing around Picadilly Circus. I’d say it’s neat, but it’s really just a whole bunch of digital bilboards with 24/7 ads playing with an ornate statue in the middle. I’ll mention stuff about the traffic later. I decided to head East and walked to Trafalgar Square, which is pretty dang close and mostly went against the rush hour crowds which seemed to mostly be going westward. I stopped and took a couple pictures, but didn’t stick around so I didn’t stick out.

Knowing a few interesting landmarks in the area from various Wikipedia deep-dives within the last year or so, I headed to the first place on my list which is Cleopatra’s needle. Unfortunately I took the wrong street towards it and instead ended up going across the Thames on a bridge too far East, but I had decided earlier on that if I made a navigation mistake, I would just roll with it and maybe find something new. I passed by the Southbank Centre which was hosting some kind of graduation ceremony and crossed the river to the North again using the Golden Jubilee walking bridge. I went back a bit East so I could stop by my original destination.

Cleopatra’s needle is an ancient Egyptian Obelisk from the New Kingdom era of Egypt that was gifted to British for helping the Egyptians fight off Napoleon. It was plonked down on the (then) newly finished Victoria Embankment. It’s a pretty big thing and impressive in a lot of ways, including how they managed to move it from Egypt to London and erect it way back in the 1800’s.

From there, I headed back West to the Parliament Buildings. It was still raining quite a bit and I was glad that I packed a good umbrella so I didn’t have to rush and find one in the rain. The rain had the nice effect of keeping the crowds away, but I didn’t really know that until the next day when I saw how many people could be there when the weather is clear.

I kept going West on a bit of a blind quest towards Buckingham palace, but my legs were getting a bit tired and I needed to find some food and a bathroom. I settled on a cafe south of the Parliament buildings that I stumbled upon. I had a sausage and egg biscuit and a dirty chai latte, both of which were pretty good, but I thought the biscuit was especially good (maybe I was just tired and hungry though). I sat there for probably half an hour or so, watching people and traffic go by while planning my next move, which I decided was still going to be Buckingham Palace.

Sidenote: I tried to find that Cafe on Google Maps and there’s nothing listed at that location. It’s on the North-East corner of Horseferry Rd and Dean Bradley St though, assuming it didn’t disappear into the ether as soon as it was out of my sight.

I walked north to Great Peter St (heh) and kept going until I got to Buckingham Gate, which I figured would probably get me to the Palace. On my way, I saw a very interesting bit of construction support holding up two adjacent buildings in a row while the middle was being replaced with something else. I always find it interesting seeing solutions to problems I didn’t know existed.

I finally stumbed my way to the area around Buckingham Palace and took a couple pictures. I didn’t stay around for changing of the guard because it wasn’t something that interested me, but it’s just neat to see big buildings and city planning and design from a completely different era and process.

At this point, I decided to head back to my hotel “room” and figure out my plans from there. On my way, I stumbled across the Burlington Arcade, which is a place of (high) fashion that I will never be rich enough to even think about buying something in. It’s pretty ornate and I was surprised that I wasn’t stopped from going in. Not sure if there’s a dress code, but it seemed like the type of place that would have one.

When I finally got back to my capsule, I took a bit of time to organize stuff and plan my next move. It was only about 1pm, so I still had the whole day ahead of me. I aimed to fall alseep around 7-9pm, so I needed to keep myself busy and active until then. I decided to book a ticket for the British museum for 14:00, to give myself some time to check out the National Gallery which was only about 200m away from where I was staying.

Took a quick picture of my capsule first though.

Second Excursion

I walked over to the National Gallery and spent a bunch of time in the Medieval and Renaissance area before I had to run to catch my bus to the British Museum. I would’ve liked to spend a bit more time there, but that won’t be likely on this trip unfortunately.

There was one artist in the gallery that I was especially taken in by that I might write a separate post on, but I wouldn’t count on me ever getting around to it. You can ask me in person if you want though.

British Museum

I took the bus to the British Museum next. I could’ve walked, but I was already beginning to get tired and this way I could sit for a bit before walking around the museum. When I got there, I was struck by how grand the whole building is. We have a few big and ornate buildings in Winnipeg, but nothing comes anywhere close to this level of grand. It’s an absolutely massive building that was built specifically to be a museum and it’s just really cool to see.

I beelined to the Egypt section of the museum because I’ve always been a bit fascinated with ancient Egyptian history and artifacts. I got the chance to see the sarcophogi on display and the various statues that they “acquired” from ancient Egypt. I somehow missed seeing the Rosetta Stone, but the exibit was extremely busy and so it was probably covered by the crowd somewhere.

The Babylonian exhibit was next which had a number of large steles and carvings covered in Cuneiform writings which is a very interesting way to explain the underlying art. Kind of like a visual novel maybe? But all carved and intricate.

Next was the Greek exhibit which had a number of both historical and recreated statues and parts of buildings, however by this time I was really starting to crash from a lack of sleep and finding it very hard to pay attention to what I was looking at. Turns out it’s really hard to pay attention to things when you’re running on 2-3 hours of sleep and walking around all morning. I left the Greek exhibit and headed over the opposite side of the museum which ended up being the enlightenment room, which was a recreation of how the museum would’ve looked over 100 years ago right after the current building was constructed. It was a cool room to see for sure, but I was absolutely exhausted by this point and had to sit down for a bit.

After my little break, I just kept walking in whatever direction looked interesting and found an interesting collection of Medieval artifacts which included a number of very small and detailed carvings that were used for devotional and various other religious purposes. Then I headed up to the second floor to see what was up there. There was a really cool timekeeping/clock exhibit that I looked at for a while up until it was announced that the museum was closing in 30 minutes. I rushed through the rest of the exibits to the second Egyption part where they had the mummies. I glanced at them, then started making my way out of the museum, admiring various parts of the building on the way out.

The crowds were ridiculous on the way out, but I managed to grab a nice picture of the front facade and ended up walking back to my hotel since I figured the busses would be fully packed. It was an uneventful walk through less touristy parts of central London and I got back to my room and relaxed a bit. I was exhausted and about to pass out, but it was only 5pm and I needed to get some supper before I fell asleep.

To my eternal shame, I just walked to the Five Guys next door for supper since I had no energy to go anywhere else. I had a quick supper, then went back to my pod and eventually passed out at 7pm.

So ended the tiring first day of my trip. This post is coming in a few days late as it’s been pretty busy and I haven’t had much time to write this all out before now.

The rest of the posts from my other days in the UK will be coming in short order as I won’t be moving at as breakneck of a speed through the rest of my trip. I’m sitting on the Eurostar from London to Paris as I write this, but I started writing this post on Sept 9th and I’m posting it on Sept 13th for context. It’s been busy.

- http://www.marcusdyck.com/blog/posts/2026-09-13_london_day1/ - 2026 Marcus Dyck

First Post

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 20:58:16 -0500

Marcus's Notepad http://www.marcusdyck.com/blog/posts/2026-09-05_firstpost/ -

I’m going to going on a trip through Europe shortly, so I’ll hopefully be posting on this daily(ish) once my life gets more exciting than normal.

I’ll be posting a small journal of the setup I went through for this site as well, then I’ll be posting a photo journal of my trip.

Goals

I want to make this to document some of the work I do on my hobbies and around the house, as well as share neat photos I take. Hopefully going to improve my writing as a side-effect as well.

Bonus Picture

In the mean time, here is a picture that I took of the partial lunar eclipse on August 27th.

- http://www.marcusdyck.com/blog/posts/2026-09-05_firstpost/ - 2026 Marcus Dyck