2001. May 20. - British Museum
The pictures were made by LaLa. The thumbnails were generated by IrfanView.If you want to, I can send you the original, 1152x864 size pictures in email (about 300KB/picture).
Although my little alarm clock tried to wake me up relatively early, it couldn't. I decided to stay in bed and make the most of the last day of my vacation. As it turned out, my delayed wake-up turned out to be a good decision, even though Mrs. Thor's hired maid in the morning (and thus, Mrs. Thor herself) wasn't very pleased about that. Oh, well, sue me.
It was, I think, around 11:30 when I got to the British Museum. The building was more or less what I expected, except for its interior: the Great Court was a covered atrium with a huge round library in it under a dome! Fantastic! (BTW, this is where Karl Marx got all the material for his work The Capital.) Another surprise: there's no entrance fee to the museum! Amazing!
The exhibitions were equally fascinating. There is a ton of stuff to see in the museum, literally thousands of articles, objects and things. Although I bought the audio tour, it was pretty much worthless - a huge turnoff after Westminster Abbey's most informative and superbly done audio guide. This one didn't tell me anything new or anything special, it wasn't even a well organized guided tour, as I had to hunt down the highlighted treasures myself. Really stupid.
But as I said, the exhibition rooms were fantastic. The original, real Rosetta Stone on display, tons of statues and artifacts from Egypt and Greece, other exhibitions highlighted the European history throughout the centuries, there was one exhibition about Asia with great Shiva and Buddha statues, tons of stuff from all around the world...
I was really, really sad and sort of angry to see the Parthenon exhibit in the west wing. There's the great Acropolis, with the Parthenon on top of it, yet, all of its galleries and most of its statues and figures are right here in the British Museum. If I were Greek, I would be absolutely outraged! I can understand perfectly why they want to get all of it back so bad. Although it was great to see those artifacts here, their place is really back on the Acropolis or in Athens in a museum. Because to be honest, the Egyptian artifacts had a lot more impact when I saw them in Egypt than in here. It's just too bad...
It was about 2:30pm when the alarm sounded inside the museum. Luckily, it turned out to be a false fire alarm, but nevertheless, it broke the rhythm of my visit as we all had to go outside the museum's building and delayed my visit there by about 20 minutes. But it wasn't that bad. I was admiring an ancient 13th century chess set when it happened.
I thought I will spend about 2 hours in the museum (the horrible audio tour was supposed to take 90 minutes), but it wasn't until before 4pm that I left. It was one heck of a rush thru the museum.
From here I decided to go to Speakers' Corner first, as the sun was starting to shine thru the clouds. By the time I got there, it was sunshine all around, with very few clouds on the sky. The Speakers' Corner is definitely a fascinating place, in fact, I was tempted to get a stall for myself and declare how crap popmusic is and why SID music is so much better, and then I would've started blasting out remixes of SID tune, he-he... But, alas, I didn't have time for that.
Most of the speakers were talking about God or Satan, good vs. evil, be a Christian or a Muslim, what is life and that sort of thing. I expected a lot more variety in the topics, but there was some politics discussed, too. It was fascinating.
Behind the Speakers' Corner was a huge open park, at least 2 times as big as Grant Park in Chicago. The event of the day (or week?) was a Japanese festival celebrating Japan and its culture. Due to the huge spread of the event tents, I didn't go thru it, as it would've taken me at least an hour if not more.
In fact, that was a constant problem (theme) with my visit in London: everything took at least 2-3 times as long as I planned! The city is simply huge, there are many-many things to see there, and the things to be seen are usually deep, too.
From here I went back to take a picture of the not-too-impressive Marble Arch (but hey, Vangelis' Nemo Studios used to be around here somewhere!), then hopped on the Tube and went to the Dome in North Greenwich. What a disappointment that was! To see this huge, expensive, ultramodern structure all but abandoned on the right bank of the river Thames. Of course, I can see why it went bankrupt: they couldn't have put it to a worse place! It's like putting the World's Fair to Csepel in Budapest (wait, they actually tried that!...), or putting an impressive building in the courtyard of the LKM in Miskolc. Only politicians can be this dumb. I mean, what the hell did they expect?
From the little I could see, they did the thing right: a nice bike+pedestrian path along the river leads to the Dome, from the other side a nicely done park with fountains and many trees leads another road to it, and the Dome's immediate surrounding seemed to have been done nicely, too. But all of this is surrounded by a filthy river bank, rusting steel and growing weed and an industrial area that's part of the Docklands, ... Well, I hope they learn from their mistakes!
That's it! I saw all of London! Well, most of it. My only remaining thing to do was to get back to Victoria, from there I took a train to Bromley-South. Before that I had some time and I bought an F1 Racing magazine at a newsstand.
At Bromley I called Chris, and we went back to his house immediately as Futurama was on. A new one. They are watching it religiously, too... It was also on at 7pm - pretty much the same time slot as that on Fox! (Also owned by Rupert Murdoch maybe?) Then we hopped back to the guesthouse to get my laptop, I downloaded my emails on Chris' phone line (only 95 this time, 10-15 of which were spams), listened to BIT3, talked about it (obviously, Chris is very passionate about it), then... Well, then I said goodbye to Tanya, then to Chris as he dropped me off at the guesthouse. I thanked him for everything - and I truly meant it. He helped me a lot, he even ordered me the car this evening. What a class act! I hope I can repay his kindness sometimes.
It's a bit sad that I have to leave this great city so soon. I am certainly amazed by it. I don't quite think I'd want to live there, but I certainly wouldn't mind if the opportunity came along. It was one helluva week that turned out to be surprising, and really, really good!
