Day 4 In London

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I think I'm finally getting into the swing of things...somewhat. My iPhone hasn't set itself to London time because I have it on airplane mode to avoid getting charged 50 million dollars for international fees. However, my iPhone is my alarm clock so in order to set my alarm I have to figure out what time I need to get up and convert it to California time. I think I was off by about an hour because my alarm didn't go off this morning and I scrambled to get ready for the day.

Anyways, they took us to the British museum today. I really like how almost every museum in London is free--it makes me feel much more enticed to go. Also, most of my experiences with museums were from my elementary and middle school days where they make you run around the museum to find things and write them down. Obviously you are more worried about being the first one done then actually looking at the museum. But even if you weren't as competitive as I am, when you're in elementary school I don't think you understand everything to the full extent you do when you're older.

The museum had a lot of really cool (but controversial) exhibits. One of their exhibits they take the most pride in are the Elgin Marbles. It's this huge collection of marble sculptures that were apart of the Ancient Greek Parthenon and other stuff from the Acropolis. What's it doing in Britian and not in Greece? My question exactly. Greece has been asking for their stuff back since 1980 but I'm pretty sure that's not happening any time soon.

We also got to see the rosetta stone, which was a lot smaller than I had expected. Maybe it's just because I'd rather have the modern day rosetta stone so I can learn Mandarin before I'm thrown into China where I don't speak the language.

One of many people's favorite exhibits was the money exhibit (to be expected because we're all Babson students). They showed the evolution of both paper and coin money, and at the end they had a huge spiral of coins from all of the different countries around the world. Actually, the museum was mostly about other countries around the world, with almost nothing about Britian in it.

My favorite exhibit in the museum was one that they just built for the Olympics. It's a really small exhibit but they have on display the medals that are going to be awarded to the Olympic and Paralympics this summer. They also showed how they went about making them and where they got the metal and stuff. They also had pictures of the last time the Olympics were in London.

After a quick break, we met up with everyone to go out for thai food. I had some smoked chicken with noodles and chinese broccoli and mmmm it was delicious! Afterwards, we hiked to the Queen's Rose Garden. It was beautiful and definitely worth the ridiculously long walk. After wandering around and taking a ton of pictures, we headed into the Open Air Theatre to see a production of Ragtime. I read and watched the book and movie in high school, and I wasn't too big of a fan. However, I've never seen an outdoor musical before, and I absolutely love musicals. The cast was amazing and the songs made up for the lack of an interesting plot.

And now I'm off to plan the rest of my two months here in London, which are filling up quite quickly. For now, we have Scotland, France, and the Olympics to look forward to, but I'm sure I'll be sneaking in Wicked and Phantom of the Opera (my two favorite musicals of all time!)

More soon,

Chelsea

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Photos

The British Museum
The inside of the museum. A famous architect covered the entire thing.

The Olympic medals!
This is what the 2012 Olympic medals are going to look like!

The Queen's Rose Garden
There are supposedly two black swans that frequent the area. I'll have to go back to try and find them. This was a random waterfall we found.

Flowers
Testing out my fancy new Ashton Kutcher camera.

Founatin
Fountain of some famous people I'm sure. But I thought it was just a pretty fountain.

Flowers!
There were flowers everywhere! It's a week or so past peek blooming time but it is still gorgeous everywhere you look.

Open Theatre
This was the first outside musical I've ever seen. It was interesting to see the British take on a very American subject--race relations in early 1900 America between whites and blacks. Plus, there were a couple of British actors who had to speak in a Boston accent--it was quite funny to hear!