Day at the Museum

I have returned from Oslo and somehow made it through my stressful week: four papers, two presentations, and a whole lot of lost sleep. BUT! I still haven't finished telling you about London, so that is what I will now do.

The second day in London, Alex and I (after breakfast at a cafe where I discovered the majesty of Johnson's Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice) decided to check out the British Museum. One of the reasons the British Museum is so cool, besides the fact that it is free, is that the British empire pretty much took cool things from all over the world and claimed them for England. That way, I could see Egyptian art and Greek stuff in one building.

The Museum was planning an exhibit for the Day of the Dead (Nov. 1). It was brightly colored.

First stop was the famous Rosetta Stone. No, not the language learning tool--the stone that lets us translate Egyptian hieroglyphs because it had Greek right under it.


There was also the huge bust of Ramses II, which inspired the poem "Ozymandias":
"...I am Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on ye mighty and despair!
Nothing besides remains."

That's about all I memorized from my British literature class from last year.



I liked this dog statue in the Greek room.
Socrates!
The two Alexander(re) the Greats.
Alex was going to try to eat this bull made out of stone.

This was part of the wall paneling in the Parthenon in Greece:

We moved onto another area, where I found this statue of King George III, the one we overthrew. "Why the tyrant King George, of course!"
There was this crazy awesome library that I decided I wanted to steal all of.

There was also an interesting exhibit on Mexican prints, which included propaganda posters.





WARNING FOR KATE: MUMMIES

There was a spooky mummy room which was totally crowded.

We moved onto the clock/watch room. There some bizarre timepieces.



We had a few hours to kill after the museum, so we went over to the Covent Garden market. There were crowds of people and street performers. The market is housed in a domed glass building which is really cool. We wandered around there until it got dark, eating the free samples from street vendors and even stopping in the souvenir shop of the transportation museum. All very fun.

That night, we went to Picadilly Circus to see the sights and find a good Indian restaurant. It was all lit up like Times Square.

On our way to the restaurant, we got sidetracked in a silly souvenir store. Alex put on a money hat.

I became P.C. Jenna Johnson. I had to convince myself not to buy this bobby helmet...

The Indian restaurant we ate at was good, but they definitely tried to get you to spend more money than you wanted to. It didn't matter after I devoured my chicken tikka marsala and fresh-from-the-oven naan--not to mention the spicy vegetable curry which was the first spicy food I had had in weeks. Yum.

We had an early morning the next day to see the changing of the guards, so back we went on the underground. We didn't forget to "mind the gap".