The last weeks of my traineeship at EMBL-EBI basically consisted of fixing some (often hidden) bugs and making some minor improvements to the output of the scripts. During my last full working week I also wrote my abstract and prepared my PowerPoint presentation that I would use for my defence speech at Howest.
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After visiting London once, it became obvious to me that there were just too many places to see in a single day. Therefore, my British friend and I decided to go to London once again during one of the last weekends of my stay, to explore the locations that we were unable to visit last time. We had two major things scheduled: in the morning the Tower of London and in the afternoon the World War 2 warship HMS Belfast.
We met at 11 am at the entrance of Waterloo station. After taking the Underground to the Tower of London stop, we first purchased our tickets. Visiting the fortress is not cheap, with tickets for an adult costing around 33 pounds. The fortress is composed out of a moat (that no longer contains water), a double layer of fortress walls and several buildings located in the courtyard, including the Royal Mint, the armoury and the garrison barracks. One of the buildings also contains the crown jewels.
The first building we visited was the Royal Mint. This complex, located just next to the entrance of the fortress, was responsible for almost 700 years of British coin production. Afterwards, we made a full circle around the castle by taking a walk on the inner fortress walls.
We also wanted to visit the crown jewels. However, since the estimated queue time was around 2 hours, we decided to skip this. Instead we took a look at the armoury, located at the centre of the courtyard. The armoury contains the (decorative) armoured suits of all English kings, originating from the end of the Middle Ages and later periods. The armoured equipment (both for man and horse) was made with a very high skill and craftmanship. All the detailed decorative inscriptions in the armours were highly impressive.
After taking a short fish and chips break at 1 pm, we crossed the Tower Bridge to visit the HMS Belfast, a World War 2 cruiser that is permanently docked at the quay of the Thames. The interior of this old warship is pretty cramped, especially when we take into account that 800 people used to live onboard for many weeks. It was interesting to see how the original shipbuilder assigned a specific function to every single corner of the ship, without wasting precious space. It was clearly not designed for people larger than 1 meter 80, as my friend bumped his head around 3-4 times due to the low sealing, which was a very funny sight. It took almost 2 hours to explore all the decks of the ship. After doing this, we called it the day.
Visiting London a second time was a good idea, since there are so many interesting places to see in the capital. A must do when you are in the United Kingdom!
On Saturday I went to the Duxford Air Show. The decommissioned RAF airfield at Duxford annually hosts multiple air shows. It is also the site of several aeronautical museums. The complex belongs to the heritage of the Imperial War Museum, just like the museum in London and the warship HMS Belfast. I arrived in Duxford with a shuttlebus put on especially for that event. The bus drove from Cambridge train station to the entrance of the airport. It was completely full. After passing the security and receiving the event guide-book (containing the flight hours of each air exhibition), I walked amid the human crowd and explored the site.
The airfield consists of a lot of aircraft sheds and hangars. Each building lodges a museum that focuses on certain aspects of aviation and/or on British military events: for example, the general evolution of flying , a history of civil aviation, an exhibition about battles of Britain, and many other information about the aeronautic world… In total there are seven different museums, each treating a specific topic. Along the runway you could find all kind of stands selling food, goodies and souvenirs.
There certainly were a few thousand spectators watching the show, you could almost walk over the heads of the large crowd! The air show itself only started at 1pm, so I took advantage of the first three hours to visit each museum. For lunch I went to one of the food stands that was selling fish and chips.
It was a perfect day for an air show: a cloudless sky, warm and nice weather (so warm, that I treated myself to an ice-cream). The show itself was a combination of stunt aircraft performing tricks, historical aircraft flybys and helicopter presentations by the Royal Air Force.
Below you can find some photos of the aircraft on display. Because my smartphone was not strong enough to take photos of planes from far away, I have posted some images from the website instead.
It was a spectacular show! I really enjoyed the air show and would recommend everyone to go to one of the air events that are yearly organized in Duxford.
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