Day 70: Imperial War Museum, London

Entering on the ground floor, the imperial war museum, housed in the former home of the Bedlam Lunatic Asylum, comes across as an Imperial Boy Museum. The place is full of groups of British schoolboys in matching outfits, thronging and clamoring around an impressive assortment of the machines of war. Fighter jets, tanks, V1 and V2 rockets, pint sized personal submarines, huge bombs-all are packed into the large exhibits floor. It's a prepubescent boy's dream, except that the tanks can't be started up and driven away, and there's no live ammo.

piece of the Berlin Wall

submariner's 'escape suit'

Upstairs, the museum takes on a much more sober tone. We spent a couple of hours in the holocaust exhibit, a very well produced walk through the horrible history, punctuated with poignant video accounts from survivors of Auschwitz and Birkenau. At the very end of the exhibit, one of the women talked about what she says when asked if she will ever forget. "It's like throwing a stone in a lake. Eventually the ripples subside and it looks normal, but there is a stone at the bottom. I still carry a stone in my heart."