The family had a few different techniques for addressing jet lag. Most of the family was in bed by 8:00p and I stayed up until about 10:00p. Most of us started waking up around 2:00a and drifted in and out of sleep. I tried to get back on track by spending some time outside in the garden as soon as the sun was up. It worked for a little while but there were several points during our first full day where I fell incredibly tired and not just ready for a nap tired. Hopefully the rule of thumb of 1 day for every hour difference doesn't hold up.
We had purposely not scheduled too many items for our trip and planned to wander around and take in sites from the outside instead. Our first scheduled event in London was the Royal British Museum. It was about a 45 minute walk from our hotel. We had hoped the walk would be interesting but much of it was through business districts without too much activity. Luckily Callie has a number of books that she reads that are set in London so we checked things out like Black Friars bridge and St. Paul's Cathedral on the way there.
We had reserved a 10:00a entrance time but when we got there we were a bit confused. The lineup went for four city blocks and we didn't see a difference between people who had just showed up and those with reserved times. The lines did diverge as we got into the gates but they were pretty much just letting everyone in. When we left we saw that the lineup of people just showing up had finally stopped and they were limiting people from entering. Lesson learned is that you can just show up early and get in right away.
Once we got in we were greeted by a very dramatic inner court yard. The museum is close to 300 years old and has obviously evolved via many new buildings. I'm assuming it originally had an open court yard and at some point they decided to cover it. The various entrances have tall doors and large columns and there are a few items in the covered areas including some Haida totem toles but it's mainly the gift shop, washrooms and cafeteria. The museum is free but they make up for it with the costs in the gift shop.
The first exhibit hall we went into had the Rosetta Stone. I've only been a little bit interested in history like Mesopotamia, Egypt etc. but I remember being very intrigued by the idea of the Rosetta stone when I was younger. The idea that there happened to be a single artifact that allowed for the translation between three ancient languages is fun to think about. Egyptian hieroglyphs went out of style several thousand years ago and were lost and the Rosetta Stone allowed them to determine they were a mixture of pictures and sounds.
Although I think they frown upon touching the artifacts, they only policed it in a few places and in the Egypt area the exhibits were almost impossible not to touch. There was a lot of people in a limited space and you could see where some exhibits have probably been touched millions of times over the centuries. It's a neat feeling to be able to actually touch a stone sarcophagus.
We spent several hours at the museum and I think we got to most areas though you would need a week to do it justice. We saw pretty much every chapter of my grade 4 to 7 Social Studies books including Egypt, China, Japan, Africa, and the Americas. In my Facebook posts for this day I joke that we were there to see stolen artifacts. The British refer to it as collecting and there were several examples where they had the permission of the government in charge at the time but there were a few sketchy comments about getting them from 'local vendors' AKA tomb robbers. There remains a lot of controversy over who owns some of the artifacts.
After the museum we wandered over to an area near Leichesire Square though it may have had another name. When you walk through London you can be in an area where there is no activity and then suddenly it opens up into a tourist haven with thousands of people walking and shopping. There was a Lego store, an M&M store and many other stores. We ate at Gordon Ramsey's Street Burger because Carter wanted to make sure we ate at one of Gordon's restaurants. The burger options were 'unique' and it wasn't cheap. $160 Canadian for four burgers and two cokes wasn't really worth it.
We finished off the day by walking back to our hotel past Cleopatra's Needle. The story on how they got this one was that it was 'prone in the desert' and that the local government said it was okay to take. It also sank on the way to the UK and had to be retrieved. I translate this as "the Egyptians weren't using it anyways and it was really hard to get here so it was okay for us to take it". The other interesting thing at this spot was that the water was over top the steps leading down to the river. London isn't very high above high tide.
Dinner at street burger
Trafalgar square
Cleopatra's needle (Thames very high)
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