British Life and Culture - #7

Today we were going to tour the British Museum. We all left at 9:30am and walked to the museum. It had gorgeous black iron and gold gates at the entrance. The museum itself was so beautiful and we found out it was built in the 1700s. It looked a little out of place though. It looked like it was in the middle of a neighborhood. After everyone got there, we met Sean, our tour guide, and went inside. We walked in and were amazed. The inside was huge and so pretty. The glass ceiling (which cost $154,000,000) lit up the entire room. We walked around and listened to Sean speak about the pieces in the museum. Surprisingly, it had more things from other countries than from Britain. We thought this was weird since it is called the British Museum.

My three favorite things we saw were the Rosetta Stone, the mummies, and the Picasso drawings. You could barely get within five feet of the Rosetta Stone, as Mary warned me. There were people swarming the case and it was almost impossible to get a picture of it without someone else blocking your view. But I finally did. After the tour with Sean, we sat for a few minutes downstairs and then went upstairs to see the mummies. This museum has the largest collection of mummies outside of Egypt. They were so cool. There were lots of them, both open and closed. There were even remains of an ancient body, which was gross and interesting. Then we went to see Picasso drawings. They were part of a collection made from 1930-1937. After that, we went downstairs to eat at the museum's cafeteria like Jose suggested.

We had a few hours to kill before we had tea so we walked to Trafalgar Square. We sat outside of The National Gallery and took pictures with the Olympics countdown clock. We watched little kids run around and play with the birds. We saw a little girl sound asleep in a stroller and we wished we were her because we were so tired. Then we saw a little boy in a stroller wrapped up in a sleeping bag and we wished we were him because we were so cold from the wind.

We went to St. Martin's In-the-Fields Church after that. We sat down in the pews and listened to the violin players practicing. Then we went downstairs for tea. We also had biscuits, fruit cake, and chocolate cake, which were all really good.

We went to the National Portrait Gallery after that and my favorite parts were the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and Diana. Tomorrow is our day trip to Bath and Stonehenge. Yay!