Sue Weir is a little crazy...

...but she's well-meaning. The best way I can describe her is as an uptight old woman who lacks patience simply because she has so much to share. Anyways, she gave us a tour of the city today, stopping at places that I believe are generally intended for medical students - I don't know how we got tangled up in it.

We first got to see an old operating room while Sue told us the gruesome details of how one would amputate a leg before anesthetic was discovered. She even had the eeire tools and operating table to help the ambiance. Things like this make me realize how squeamish I really am, since I had to consciously set my mind upon other topics to avoid becoming sick. The speculum was a particularly disturbing tool.

As if the first display wasn't enough, we were then taken to the Hunterian Museum. John Hunter was an 18th century surgeon and anatomist who collected and collected and collected. What did he collect? Body parts, animal parts, fetus bits, diseased things - all soaked in alcohol in neatly categorized glass jars. We had a nice long stroll through the rows and shelves of body bits, and even learned a little bit of the history behind them. Unfortunately the combination of a hot room and dissected things in jars made more people that just me a little nauseated. Alas, we pulled through and made it out of the museum without any vomiting.

Our final stop on Sue's tour (though I've left out a few of the stops in the middle) was the house of Samuel Johnson. It's fascinating to think that this is where our dictionary really got its start. It is a tall, but not very wide house (I think there were four floors) with a really innovative swinging wall on one of the floors that would have allowed Johnson to connect or seperate some of his rooms at a whim. I also got to watch my friends being foolish as they tried on the children's sized period costumes in the house; we had a quite a time of it with putting on a little "play" and all.

After the tour, we were free to do as we chose. Naturally, I decided to go to a musical. The original plan was for a group of us to go see Phantom of the Opera, but the tickets were sold out. Everybody else then switched modes to go see Mama Mia, but since I've already seen it and the tickets were rather pricy, I opted out. Instead, I went to see The Lion King on my own. It was my first real experience in London completely alone. It was great though, that when I'm not with a massive group of American tourists, people simply assume that I live here, which I suppose I do for the time being. The play was fantastic. I was really impressed by the creative costuming involved and the new set of songs that are not in the Disney movie (though those are in there too!).