Day 5 – Thursday 26 May 2016

No more lazy starts, breakfast at 6.30am then a long slow walk to the British museum today, straight along Oxford Street, then left at Bloomsbury Street. We got there after only an hour of walking, so found a bench in Bloomsbury Park & rested our feet, enjoying the gardens in flower & the birdlife until the museum opened at 10am. What a large imposing building, the front of British Museum is huge & very impressive. After the mandatory security check we stepped inside & were amazed at the high glass roof over the very large courtyard. The first piece of history that we saw inside as we walked through the door blew me away – the Rosetta Stone – extraordinary. This was in the very large hall of large Egyptian artefacts, some of these are very large & the level of detail extraordinary. I don’t know how they managed to move them. Then followed the halls of Assyrian wall reliefs – again the level of detail and quality of work challenges my mind, the amount of time it must have taken to carve them from stone.

Next was the Greek hall and the highlight of this was the Elgin Marbles, wall friezes taken from the Parthenon in Athens. The scale of these and the detail is again extraordinary, the stone carvers were amazing people. It is very fortunate for history that Elgin did take custody of the wall friezes because over the next 100 years the amount of damage by vandals & souvenir hunters is scandalous. The comparisons of casts taken from friezes that Elgin took versus what they looked like after 100 years says it all. Now 300 years later the variation is even more marked with the effects of weathering & acid rain.

The museum is a mecca for school groups from all nations & at times the noise from the kids was deafening in French, Japanese, Arabic or English, the kids were equally as noisy. Then we would walk into another gallery & we were the only people in it, for a short time anyway. Another thing we were amazed by was the intricate detail, the quality of work & design of the ancient goldsmiths, made even more incredible that the pieces were created thousands of years ago. The written languages created by so many different civilisations thousands of years BC was another eye-opener, just to realize that there was such a depth of advanced civilisations so long ago. Seeing objects 8,000 years old reinforces how insignificant we all are.

We walked through gallery after gallery, up & down flights of stairs we wore our legs & feet out. We stopped for lunch before moving into the clock gallery & another feast of technology wonderment, some of these people were just so clever. A few more amazing galleries & we still didn’t want to go, but we were exhausted. I felt humbled that I didn’t commission a 22 carat gold font for the christening of my grandson, like the exquisite example we saw. The long slow walk back to our hotel seemed to take forever, a bit over an hour this time. A short rest then it was time to meet our tour director, (he is about our vintage, sounds very intelligent & he speaks all the languages where we are going, he promised us a very beautiful tour) & the rest of our tour group (they all look about our age too) for drinks at the hotel bar, then back to our room. I ducked out for a takeaway pizza ($36) from Pizza Hut

across the road, as that was the easiest. After that another hot bath for both of us to soak away our tired legs then bed by 10pm. Another long but amazing day.