Wednesday, January 15 – London
More cars today! Apologies if I’m boring you! I stopped by The London Film Museum in Covent Garden, where the current exhibit is Bond in Motion, featuring the vehicles from the James Bond movies. It was a great collection; I spent a lot of time there. They were also showing a James Bond documentary on a continuous loop, so I stuck around to check that out as well.
Unfortunately, one of the cars missing from the exhibit was a fully restored version of the Aston Martin DB5 from the 1964 film Goldfinger. It sold at auction last fall for $6.4 million!
Following the Bond exhibit I made my way over to Trafalgar Square, just in time to attend a “Ten Minute Talk” at The National Gallery – this is where one of the museum’s curators chooses a single work from the collection to discuss. Fun stuff!
Next door is the National Portrait Gallery, and they have a painting there that has my all-time favorite title – Mike’s Brother, by Sam Walsh. So I headed over to revisit it for a laugh. Unfortunately it is not currently on display! Ugh! I found a picture of it online though…
This evening I attended a concert in the Royal Festival Hall at Southbank Centre. It was a performance of Ravi Shankar’s only opera – Sukanya, and featured the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It was very good, and included wonderful dancing.
Thursday, January 16 – London
Today was a day of rest! I ran a couple errands in town and did some trip planning and journal writing. Fun stuff, I know!
Through the first 9 days of the trip I’m averaging 15,360 steps per day. Ahead of my South America pace, but the average will drop after today, and I likely won’t be able to keep up the pace.
So, my Fitbit band broke the other day. That’s the third one that’s failed in the last few months. Fortunately I haven’t lost the tracker in any of those instances. I have a theory on the failures: A few years ago I bought several knockoff bands at the same time on eBay. I guess they’re just at the end of their (short but cheap!) useful life. I’ll probably trash all of them when I get home. I did bring a spare band with me on the trip. But I’m afraid to wear it! So I’ve just kept it in my pants pocket as I’ve walked around. Should give a pretty close result, right?
