museum
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Context! Bulgaria has a… complicated relationship with the Communist era. Of course it was an era of great hardship, repression and surveillance, but the Communist government also (broadly) brought security, stable jobs and improvements to public infrastructure. After Bulgaria moved to democracy, the country’s economy collapsed for several years – it’s still one of the…
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As someone who runs a blog specifically about weird/offbeat attractions, I have to confess that I found Edinburgh a lot more… pedestrian than Glasgow. It’s still a great city, don’t get me wrong! I loved Edinburgh Zoo and the Harryhausen exhibition, but I found it a bit tricky to find anything in Edinburgh that wasn’t…
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Context! If you’ve never heard of Ray Harryhausen, you may well have seen some of his work. If you haven’t seen any of his films, you’ve definitely, absolutely seen something influenced by him. Or maybe you’ve just seen snippets in the Malcolm in the Middle intro. Ray Harryhausen wasn’t an actor, writer or director –…
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Context! Mostly famous these days from a quote by someone else, David Livingstone was a Victorian Christian missionary who made several expeditions into Central Africa, recording the horrors of the slave trade there. He did help to pressure the British Empire into curtailing the Arab slavers in the region, and he was the first European…
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Context! The Hunterian Museum, part of the University of Glasgow, is the best University museum I’ve seen outside of Oxbridge. It’s a really beautiful building, free to enter, and has exhibits on basically everything. The Hunterian Collection is over two hundred years old, and has picked up some wild exhibits in its time. Some of…
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Context! Nottingham Castle’s biggest problem has always been the fact that it’s not actually a castle. This is a big problem for a city where so much of the tourism is based around Robin Hood – people expect to see the famous Nottingham castle, when it doesn’t actually exist. Actually this is only half true.…
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Context! At the height of the Cold War, the British Government constructed a network of sophisticated underground bunkers in the event of that a nuclear war broke out. These were designed to shield the government, scientists and other people they deemed important enough to save in the event of a nuclear holocaust, or at least…
