British Museum

This building was beyond belief both in architecture and what it contained. Since we had spent most of the morning already at the Victoria & Albert Museum we were all a little brain-fried which is not the way to enter this museum.

There are so many archaeological wonders to be seen here and we only had 2 hours to see the best of them and digest what we could. First stop, of course, was the famed Rosetta Stone. Needless to say we were not the only ones who wanted to see the stone responsible for deciphering languages and hieroglyphs so we had to do the best we could with what we could see through the crush of people.

I know, the picture isn't so good, but it's not bad considering that I took it from the 3rd row back from the stone, through museum glass that is known for it's reflective glare despite the fact that I was not using a flash on my camera.

As we looked around and saw all the Ancient Egypt and Greek statues we headed off to the Nereid Monument and the Parthenon Sculptures. Fabulous works of art from around the world.

Having viewed the artwork and wondered just what it would have taken to move these great monuments to England from their homeland, we decided to opt for something equally ancient but somewhat closer to this country and found ourselves exploring the rooms of the Romans. The contractor in me was surprised to find out that the Romans had used glass in their windows as well . . what happened to those construction methods for all the years between the Romans and the "modern technology we already enjoy?

They also had a beautiful mosaic of what is believed to be Christ . . Amazing!!

By the same token I was floored seeing the Roman "diploma" or "discharge papers" for service.

Having suitably no more brain power to contain any more information, we decided to come forward in time a bit and visited the Jewelry Room which afforded Lisa and I with lots of ideas and pictures of period appropriate jewelry for the Civil War time period. The craftsmanship was amazingly detailed!

Once we'd looked as closely as the museum glass allowed at the Jewelry while David waited patiently, we opted to allow him some time with his choice of study for this trip - Japanese Armor & Weapons.

At this point, I'll be honest, we'd all been walking so much and looking so intently and studying so hard throughout our week that not only were we completely unable to retain one more thing in our memory banks (thank goodness for the cameras) but we were all hobbling to some extent or another and you could hear the sigh of relief when we found a bench to alite upon after viewing the Japanese display. Having reached this point, we decided it was time to head back to the hotel room for relaxation and perhaps a swim or sauna to sooth aching muscles.

Of course, once we were on the train headed back toward the hotel, we started reviewing our plans for the next day and it came to light that we were quickly running out of time for everything that we wanted to see and do. So we opted to just view a few of the well known monuments from the outside since they'd already closed for the day, but that is another story for another blog (so as to avoid contaminating this one with too many pictures).

P.S. If you are interested in all the pictures that we took in the British Museum, please click the slideshow below. Please note that I do realize that there isn't any captions yet . . they are forthcoming (someday, if I can remember what we saw)