At easyHotel, they like to charge for wifi. Neither Jenna nor I like to pay for wifi, so we found free wifi at Costa Coffee - one of the 4 coffee shops that line each and every street in London. They also had breakfast for us! We figured out what we needed to figure out and went on our merry way to see really amazing things. Our first stop was the British Museum.
Here's the prologue for the British Museum: At one time, the British (specifically the English, because the Scottish were brutes, the Irish hated them and were brutes, and no body cared about the Welsh and their overuse of y's and l's), did whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted. They said to the world, "Jump!" and before the world could say, "How high?" the British asked their armies to throw them in the air instead. After a while of doing this, the British decided they were going to take whatever they thought was cool and put it all in one building in London where all Britons could admire it. That building is the British Museum.
The British Museum is massive. Housed in a neo-classical building (slash set of buildings?) near University College London, there are galleries devoted to Egypt, Greece, Rome, Iran, Babylon, the Aztec Empire, and Mexico. Oh yea, and Native Americans and Inuit. And probably more. As soon as we walked into the first gallery, there was a massive slab of stone - the Rosetta Stone! It was a very impressive thing to see. Without that, we would have no clue how to decipher hieroglyphics. Most people know that much about it (and that it is the name of a language acquisition program used by the State Department and UN!), but who knows what it actually says? I did not, but it turns out that one of the Ptolemys made a deal with the Egyptian priests, wherein the priests could keep on keepin' on and Ptolemy could start his own cult. "Cult" is the word used on the description tag, not my own biased addition.
We soon saw large sculptures of pharaohs, Egyptian gods, and other Egyptian things.
The next section was Greece. There were rooms of ornate sculptures, including a room devoted to Alexander the Great. Being a namesake, I felt honored. As you can see, I posed for a photo with him. It is called Alexander and Alexandre, Both Great. Also in this section is most of the decoration from the Parthenon! Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin (not Illinois), was in the area and noticed how poorly the Greeks treated the Parthenon, so he essentially said, "Children, if you can't play nicely with your ancient runes, I will take them away." And he did. There is an enormous room full of the sculpture that covered the top of the Parthenon, and it's amazing.
There was a whole exhibit on watches and clocks. There were pocket watches spanning the last 500 years and all sorts of mechanical clocks. One of these clocks used a small metal ball rolling back and forth as a second hand (very cool idea), but it wasn't very accurate.
One of the more enjoyable things I saw was a temporary exhibit on the cartoons, posters, and prints of Revolutionary Mexico. The "Revolutionary Mexico" that was being shown was mostly from around 1900-1920, as opposed to all of the other times Mexico had revolutions. These were great! I very much enjoyed the thick black lines of the woodcuts and the witty cartoons.
I ended up getting a couple souvenirs for myself there - a Rosetta Stone metal water bottle (so I can brush up on my Greek while hydrating myself) and a London Street Art book (because how could I not?!?).
Jenna and I hopped on the Tube and went to our next destination - Covent Garden. It used to be a fruit and veg market, but is now a shopping, eating, and entertaining arcade. There were entertaining street performers as well. From there, we went to Piccadilly Circus.
"The Times Square of London!" I had heard it called. Whoever said that had it pretty close. There were millions of people, bright signs the size of the Vatican, and advertisements for musicals everywhere. There's also a large statue of Eros, but I have no good photos to show for it. After walking around the circus and browsing souvenir stores for a while, I was huuuuungry. Jenna and I had picked out an Indian restaurant in the area that got good reviews, and we scurried out to find it. The food was delicious (I had garlic naan and lamb curry, Jenna had chicken tikka masala and naan, and we split veg curry). Once back at the easyHotel, we watched British TV. There was a show about the most famous English chef Heston Blumenthal trying to turn Little Chef back into a reputable roadside restaurant that was a fun watch. Maybe it's made its way onto BBC America and you have seen it already.
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