Gregory Mulholland

Yesterday Kelly, Will, Jackie, and I went to London to see the famed Chinese Terracotta Army exhibit at the British Museum. We originally had planned a whole day to see the city after that, but we got so hung up in the rest of the museum that we ended up staying there for a majority of the day.

The British Museum is basically a history museum of every culture investigated by archaeologists from 1800 to the late 1900s when other museums really started to grab artifacts). There is lots of controversy about what should and should not be in its country of origin rather than Britain, but I can’t complain too much since I wouldn’t have been able to see much of it if it weren’t here. Their collection holds basically everything ever photographed for a Social Studies, History, Geography, or World Cultures textbook. It is a really cool place. We spent a great deal of the day there and only saw a portion of it.

The Roof
The museum formerly had an open courtyard in the middle. One has to wonder who came up with that brilliant idea in a country where it never seems to stop misting. Nevertheless, with the Millenium Project (the same one that built the London Eye), the courtyard was covered with a geodesic dome:

I took 1,000,000 pictures of the roof. You can see them here.

The Terracotta Army
The terracotta army exhibit was a really cool thing. Tickets have been on sale and sold out for a really long time now, but they release 700 every weekend morning for the general public (500 on weekday mornings). The four of us left Cambridge super early arrived at the museum a little before 8:00. The queue looked really long:

We did get tickets right away though and headed into the exhibit:

Here is a picture I took of the army:

Just kidding, that is actually a bunch of mini-soldiers that some schoolkids made for the museum. Cameras weren’t allowed in the exhibit, but it was really neat. The soldiers themselves were very intricate. Even the bottoms of their shoes were carved. There were also all kinds of other artifacts from China and surrounding areas. It was a great experience.

Egypt, Assyria, and other Ancient Civilizations
From China, we moved onto the rest of the world. At the front of the Egypt section, probably the most famous, was the Rosetta Stone:

(The cool thing about the museum is that you could take a picture of anything you want.) I never could find the English on the Rosetta Stone…how did they translate all those heiroglyphs.

After part 1 of Egypt, we took at look at Assyria and Greece. The Greek area has a famous bust of Pericles in it:

There were also some of sculptures from the front of the Parthenon:

We also saw some ancient jewelry:

Kelly beat me to the punch and exclaimed “gold leaf!” before I had a chance to. Touche.

We moved onto the rest of the Egypt exhibit. There were sarcophagi:

and the Egyptians really knew where cats belonged: in the afterlife

Finally on the way out of the museum, Kelly and Jackie struggled to figure out what this enormous metal “art” was supposed to be:

Then, they made some faces:

After the museum, we headed to a pub for lunch. It was a really plush sorta place.

Next to the pub was a famous umbrella store. We went in for a bit. The selection was amazing. It was everything a fop would need to survive. Umbrellas, walking sticks, and flasks. I’m sure if you looked hard enough you could find combination umbrella/flasks or walking stick/flasks. It was a crazy place.

We wanted to go see Westminster Abbey, which closes early, so we headed over to Piccadilly Circus by the tube and walked down through Trafalgar Square. On the way, we ran into a rally against women’s violence. It was pretty big and loud:

We beat them to Trafalgar Square and moved on. We got to see the Parliament buildings and Big Ben:

We also tried to see Westminster Abbey, but, like I said before, it was closed for the day. We decided to move on and see Evensong at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is a huge dome designed by Christopher Wren. The Evensong was pretty neat, even though there weren’t enough seats for us to sit close enough to the choir to hear them clearly. Around this time, too, it started to clea up:

Finally, we decided to take a walk down toward the Tower of London. It, too was closed, but we decided to explore around it anyway. I got a few neat pictures of the city, but it was really hard to get too many because it was really windy.

On the way back to the train station, we stopped for dinner. Near our restaurant was a Lamborghini dealership. I couldn’t resist taking a few photos:

As always, there are more photos at the Photos link on the right and more stories to come I’m sure.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite