After a lovely train ride from Bath to London we found our way to our London AirBnB apartment. It was fashionably ‘city grunge’ and nothing like the Cotswolds. I looked out the window onto the row of pubs lining both sides of our streets and knew we’d be in for a night full of hootin’ and hollerin’.
We were all kind of beat but wanted to make the most of our time in London so we drug our tired butts to the British Museum.
It was only a short walk but somehow turned into a long walk after a few missed turns and some anomalous digital blue dot city antics.
We finally arrived at the most overwhelming museum collection I’ve ever seen.
As I have visited various ancient sites throughout my life I’ve always have wondered, “Where had all the stuff gone?!”
Come to find out the British Museum has it all! And I mean ALL of it!
Room after room blew me away. Huge artifacts filled huge, seemingly endless, spaces. After many surprises startling me in ever room I started wondering if the next room would contain the Lost Tribe of Isreal, the UFO from the Roswell crash site, and maybe Napoleon’s mummified remains.
Oh…and they have the Rosetta Stone. And all of Babylon. And Egypt.
At some point during 800 BC Kaety got cranky. She said, “Assyrian wall panels are making me hungry. I want to eat now!”
Unfortunately ‘Eating now’ isn’t something you just do in London. It seems hard to believe but among the 18,000 restaurants in the city, 17,000 of them are farther than walking distance, and the other 10,000 near you don’t have a table open until midnight.
While I made calls to find a reservation Kaety slumped on the floor under a cultural heirloom with a whole lot of other tired museum slumpers.
After many calls I found a seemingly mediocre Italian place that had an opening.
As we emerged from the museum the sky opened up and it began to pour!
We dashed across the street and into a shop – walking out with a matching set of the tackiest umbrellas ever. We had a moment of frustration and consternation when a lagging Symone was standing half a block back, soaking wet, fumbling with her umbrella. Kaety yelled back at her, “What are you doing?!”
Symone yelled back over the sound of the rain, “I’ve never used one of these things before!”
