Today I got an email from La Compagnie airlines saying that, due to the recent result of the EU referendum (i.e., Brexit), they are stopping their flights between London and Newark. So our December 15 flight has been cancelled. They offered us two choices, a refund of the return ticket, or a flight to New York via Paris. A cursory check of alternate flights from London showed that a one-way ticket would be a lot more than the refund we would be getting from the airline if we took that option. I guess I will be spending a good part of tomorrow trying to figure this out. But on to today.

I went to the Museum of London, which gives a history of the capital through nine galleries, beginning with Roman London (AD 50-410) to the present. Actually it begins even earlier, before it became London, as early as 450,000 BC. Thankfully I've grown out of my adolescent repugnance to anything remotely related to history. In fact, I quite like it now. And, had I visited this museum fifty years ago, I might have been surprised to find that I learned something and even enjoyed the process. This museum knows how to teach children about history.

Since I was interested in their special exhibition Fire! Fire! about the Great Fire of 1666, I went through that section first. Little did I know it would take me a couple of hours. The exhibition starts out by setting the scene: London was a city recovering from the plague of 1665; there were about 400,000 people living there; the country was at war with France and the Netherlands. Then visitors walk through a recreation of Pudding Lane where it all began in the baker's shop. There were a lot of interactive displays for children (and adults) and excellent audiovisual displays. They covered everything, the different theories of how the fire started, the conditions that made it the perfect storm, how they fought the fire, what happened after the fire was put out in just over four days (although it smoldered for months), what happened to the 100,000 homeless people. There were firsthand accounts, interesting stories. For example, I learned that Samuel Pepys kept his Parmesan cheese safe from the fire by burying it in the garden. I also learned that Christopher Wren, only 33 at the time of the fire and recently returned from studying architecture in Paris, designed most of the 51 churches (including St. Paul's) that were rebuilt--so I guess his career really took off as a result of the fire. The exhibition ends by giving visitors an idea of what London was like in 1711, 45 years later. The city is rebuilt with a skyline and new cathedral, the population is about 550,000, the country is at war with France and Spain.

I then started to go through the permanent collection of galleries but, after hearing an announcement about a highlights tour of the 18th century gallery, I decided to sign up. The 45-minute tour lasted over an hour, but was worth it. I then spent another 40 minutes in some of the galleries I had missed-- until closing time. I will have to go back to see the rest another day.

I walked back to the subway via the Barbican Highwalk and discovered the Barbican Estate, a whole residential complex of buildings surrounding these big green spaces, some with playing fields, some with playgrounds. I knew about the Barbican Centre, the large performing arts center, but I didn't know about these other concrete buildings. I later learned that this part of London was demolished during the war and, in the 1960s and 1970s, these concrete brutalist architecture structures were built on the 35-acre site.

I took the underground to Hampstead to meet Christina and her mother for dinner. We had a very pleasant evening.