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January 06, 2008
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The best picture I took on the trip.
A closeup of the original London wall.
There's something pretty incredible about coming into contact with those who came before you. I'm not just talking about your own ancestors, I mean all those people who have walked the same streets you walk, who have left their mark on the world in some way. I suppose that's one reason I love museums. And old books. Sometimes, even the sight of worn-down steps in a well-used building get to me. Knowing there were people living their lives long before I was even thought of gives me a sense of connection somehow. Even if we have nothing in common, even if they lived a long time ago in conditions I could never imagine.
I remember when I was in England in 1988, my then-boyfriend and I took a trip to York and Scarborough on a bank holiday weekend. Shortly after we got to York, we took a walk along the wall, and I remember marveling at the idea that the solid, manmade structure upon which I was standing was 500 years older than the country I came from. Some of those same kinds of thoughts may have been floating around David's head on Boxing Day, when I took him to see exposed bits of the original London wall.
This would be the unauthorized photo of Dave.
That thing on the other side of the street is the Tower of London. Or part of it, anyway.
I was so happy to be able to share that with him. For those of you visiting (or living in) London, this piece of wall is right outside (RIGHT outside) the Tower Hill tube station. It's around 1600 years old. And you can touch it. Which is really one of the coolest things ever. I don't know why I get such a thrill out of touching history, but being able to lay my hands on something gives me a connection to it I can't get just from looking.
Which is why, when we went to the British Museum the next day, I was so disappointed to discover that the Rosetta Stone was encased in glass. Because the last time I was there, it wasn't . Fortunately, there's a copy you can touch in the Enlightenment Room. And I had my hands all over it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Before we left for London, I spent some time figuring out the things I desperately needed to do while I was there, so that we could be sure to do them before doing our normal holiday thing (sleeping lots and wandering around aimlessly) ate up all the necessary time. I also knew that some of these things would involve opening and closing times (and knowing what was closed on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day--answer: everything), and I wanted to take that into consideration too.
When I got around to looking up the British Museum, my eyeballs almost popped out of my head. Because this was their special exhibition.
The Terracotta Soldiers. Oh. My. God. I have wanted to see those ever since I first read about them, but traveling to China just hasn't been in the cards thus far. And they don't get out of China very often. I knew that exhibition was one of the things I was going to have to see. But tickets were sold out before we left the U.S. Fortunately, the museum was also releasing 500 additional tickets each day, so we figured we had a shot at getting in.
We got up early on the 27th and headed to the British Museum. By the time we got there--about 15 minutes before the museum opened and tickets went on sale--there was already a line out the gate, all the way down the block and around the corner. Dave and I estimated we were very, very near the 500th place in line. And since it was a timed entry situation and we had tickets to The Country Wife that evening, we knew we might not get in. Especially if the only available tickets were at 7pm. We decided to take a shot anyway, after all, if they did sell out, we could always go back the next day.
We waited in line behind a scholarly sort of British man and a woman from, I'm guessing, South Africa. She spoke English like it was her first language, but with a fairly strong dialect. They were both very friendly (she was very funny), and though we didn't ever see him again, we kept running into her in the various rooms. After we'd been waiting for about an hour--we'd made it into the building and were standing in the newly remodeled Great Court--which is GORGEOUS--a woman from the museum came walking down the line, obviously counting, and said to the group of people just behind us, "We only have about 200 tickets left, there may not be any for you by the time you get to the front of the line. It's up to you whether you stay or go." And then she continued down the line, making that announcement every so often.
We opted to stay and wait, and half an hour later, had tickets for a 12:40 entry in our hot little hands. That gave us time to explore the museum a bit more, and to grab a quick (expensive and not very tasty) lunch in the cafe before going in. "So," said Dave, "What should we see first?" Of course, I knew immediately. There were just two items on my list of things in the British Museum that Dave needed to see, I felt, and so I checked the map and we were off. To find the Rosetta Stone.
I still remember the moment in March of 1988 when I realized that the interesting black rock full of carvings that I had been gazing at was the Rosetta Stone. It was like meeting Christopher Columbus face-to-face. When I was 10 years old, and people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, "An archaeologist." I don't even know where I learned that word, but that's what I wanted to do. And I read as much archaeological history as I could get my little hands on. Until I got a little bit older and decided that what I wanted to be when I grew up was married.
So I knew what the Rosetta Stone was. Can you imagine what it was like, then, to be in the same room as the thing that made reading hieroglyphs possible? Amazing. Based on his response to it, seeing the Rosetta Stone live and in person (if now shut up inside a glass box) had a similar effect on Dave. He looked at it for quite some time. Despite the crowd of other people who were looking at it.
It's a pretty extraordinary thing, to be in the same space as that kind of history.
And then we went in search of the Elgin Marbles, now called the Parthenon Marbles. Because that's what they came from.
I am going to take a moment (because at this point it's my main style choice for this blog, moments) and say that I have serious issues with the fact that those pieces are in a museum in London and not in Greece, at the Parthenon, where they belong. I am not alone in this. I am so not alone in this that the British Museum now provides a little pamphlet explaining their stance on the Marbles. But then again, much of the museum's collection of Egyptian, Greek and Assyrian artifacts are there based on the astonishing hubris and sense of entitlement possessed by the Victorian men who basically just hauled the stuff that interested them back home. Assuming that the locals couldn't be trusted to take care of it properly. Really, in the end, that's what it boils down to. All that said, don't hate me for taking advantage of the fact that the marbles are still in London. The are pretty incredible.
Dave thought so too. All of the stuff I wrote above . And then we checked our watches and realized we had just enough time to poke through the Enlightenment Room a bit and get some lunch.
The Enlightenment Room is brain-filling and mind-numbing. The Victorians collected everything. Honestly. If there was a way to categorize something, they collected it. And that's what the Enlightenment Room is all about. Collections. I don't even remember what-all we looked at in there because there was just so much of it. It's a pretty room, though. Dave and I decided we'd like one just like it for our library. Roughly that same size.
After lunch, we finally entered the First Emperor Exhibition.
I wish I had more to say about it. It was really cool. I learned a lot (none of which I can remember at the moment). I spent a long, long time just gazing at the soldiers. But you know what I remember most about the exhibit? How much my feet hurt.
My hiking boots, which kept my feet plenty comfy, had given me tendinitis because of the way they pressed against my achilles tendon. So I wore my Steve Madden boots. Not so much designed for the lots of walking and standing in line kind of activities. I swear to God they have absolutely no padding. I think the only thing between my precious delicate princess feet and the ground was the heel and the leather sole. Which means that by the time we'd walked to the Tube stop and from the Tube stop and stood in line and stood in line and wandered through the British museum, which isn't small, and all through the first part of the exhibit, all I wanted to do was to sit down and take a load off my poor abused feet. Even now, when I think about the exhibit, the soles of my feet remember the pain of that day.
So I don't have any pure and unsullied memories of the glory of the terracotta soldiers. In some ways, it was kind of anti-climactic. I mean, the Victorians had brought over an entire building (not the Parthenon, a different building), and this exhibit was less than thirty soldiers (and some other cool stuff), but there weren't that many of the figures. I think it's a scale thing. I was expecting to be awed by the soldiers because there are 7,000 of them, but I need to go to China to get that particular effect. So while it was pretty amazing to see it all, and to learn so much about the First Emperor, who did some fairly incredible things, all of that is filtered through the fog of my aching feet. (Afterwards, we had to sit in the Starbucks across the street from the museum for about 45 minutes for me to rest them enough to do some more walking.)
Also coloring my recollections of the day was the fact that post-museum, we saw a newspaper sandwich board which read "Bhutto Assasinated." The world doesn't stop turning just because you're on holiday.
We limped home (well, I limped), to order room service and put my feet up before the show, to which we took a cab. (Your holiday doesn't have to stop just because the world is turning.) And just like every other time we walked down the Albert Embankment, we saw this on the way:
Lambeth Palace, Home to the Archbishop of Canterbury,
I wonder what it would be like to live in a building that old and to touch history every day...
Posted by sally at January 6, 2008 01:18 PM
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