London: British Museum

After a ten hour flight Saturday afternoon from SFO we arrived at Heathrow airport this sunny morning. As we exited, the air was filled with perfume in Terminal 5 from all the perfume shops, and a woman sweeping the floor wore a purple work jersey that proclaimed she was a "Hygiene Operative." Unlike the many airports I've been to, Heathrow does not cater to secondary languages. All was in the King's English. After catching up with Benjamin, who'd arrive separately from Dallas, we took the Underground Picadilly line to Russell Square on a busy older train that definitely had us feeling like we were in a tube. Once checked in to our hotel, it was a four minute walk to the British Museum. If you've been to the Met, then you have an apt comparison to the British Museum. Both amazing and overwhelming. While the Met has more rooms, the British Museum appears to have a respectable 90 rooms. We had two hours to get to some of the "don't miss" items in the collection, which our museum map helpfully laid out.

This included the medieval masterpiece, The Holy Thorn Reliquary. Small and intricate, it was a tour guide top draw, so we couldn't manage to see the front view due to the number of human bodies surrounding it.

But we were able to get good views of the Lewis Chessman, carved of walrus tusks circa 1150. The carvers had a sense of humor. The chess pieces are rather cheeky, to use the British phase.

Then we stumbled on the Sutton Hoo Helmet, a rare Anglo Saxon helmet, probably worn by a King. The actual helmet was reconstructed from fragments, but from the reconstructed version, you can tell how special it was. The helmet and the boat he was buried in were discovered in 1939 by a private land owner and amateur archeologist, Edith Pretty, somewhere in the English countryside.

We then took a detour to the see the Egyptian mummies, because well, that's mandatory when you visit the British Museum. Two rooms full of mummies. An overabundance of mummies. Everyone and their uncle was in that room (it was Sunday afternoon, after all), and it would take some studying and doing to fully appreciate all these mummies. One intriguing display was of poorly done mummies from the Roman era. They didn't have the technique quite right. In a far corner were also some cat mummies. Plus some naturally preserved mummies and one young man beaten, thenthrown into a bog. Then off to see the Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering hieroglyics, and a pretty big statue of Rameses II, the famous pharoah that would not initially let Moses's people go. The British Museum is free, though donations are encouraged. If you have a week, you may be able to see all it offers.