Nerd Fest

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If you give a teacher access to some of the world’s best museums and time to kill, what do you expect to happen? I spent most of my final two days in London nerding out with hordes of people amongst incredible collections of stuff. We had two full days before we flew out. On the first one, I started at the British Museum. They had to build an enormous building to store all of the priceless artefacts they stole in the name of colonialism.

There was a long line to enter, but it moved pretty quickly. When I got inside, I started in the Egyptian section. I wanted to see the Rosetta Stone. So did everyone else. I needed to push to get to the front to see the message written in three different languages. The hieroglyphic part has been damaged a bit, but I can see how they used the other two languages to begin to decipher the written language that had been lost until this stone was discovered by Napoleon’s Egyptologists in 1799, only to be pinched by the Brits when they arrived the following year.

From there I headed to the late Mesopotamian room and found out as much as I could about King Nebuchadnezzar II, as he has piqued my interest of late. I was racing around from Assyrian to Levant and back to Mesopotamia to figure out what I wanted to know about the Jewish population that Nebuchadnezzar is reputed to have captured and taken back to Babylon as slaves. As I said, I was nerding out in a big way. I had no one to stop me, as Mum had taken herself on a bus to Camden and Regent’s Park and Leanne and Nathan were on the other side of the world, sleeping. Did you know that our alphabet, which is derived from the Greek alphabet, in turn was derived from the Cananite alphabet? Sorry, still being nerdy.

In the afternoon of my first day I planned to visit the Natural History Museum. But the line was two hours long. All these places are free to visit and that is part of the reason why they are so popular. I decided to leave that for another time. Leanne and Nathan can enjoy it with me someday! Instead, I crossed the road and checked out the Victoria and Albert collection on design, which covered everything from fashion to jewelry to tableware. No queues but less interesting than the big three, British, Natural History and Science Museums. From there I had a nice stroll through Kensington Gardens and popped in to see the Dianna memorial in the panorama above.

That was day one. Mum and I caught up for a pub meal, more pies and pints then rested up for our last day of the trip. Science Museum Day started with us queue jumping. I learned that if you’re organised, you can book an entry time and walk to the front of the line and it’s still free! This museum was nearly as ginormous as the British Museum. In a few hours, we saw one and a bit levels of the four-storey collection. Highlights include a Soyuz space capsule that was used to return three astro/cosmonauts from the ISS in 2016. You always hear about these capsules, and I was interested to see how scorched it was from re-entry as well as its size. Not very big, but it was used for only a few hours to return the occupants to Earth. As a passenger, you’d put a lot of faith in its complex mechanisms to slow you down from thousands of km/h to 22 km/h when you hit the ground.

At the Science Museum, there was also a V2 rocket from WWII. That was big. See the photo of me standing in front of it. It was the precursor to cold war intercontinental ballistic missiles and the space race. Frightening that these things were raining down on the Brits, French, and Belgians and people couldn’t hear them before they landed, because they traveled faster than the speed of sound.

Then we went back to Borough Market for lunch, before having a look at Shakespeare’s Globe together. It is still used for performances every day. Impressive that it has stood the test of time like this. By then Mum needed to sit down and have a cool drink whilst I ticked off the last item on my list for curiosity’s sake. On the Southbank of the Thames, you’ll find a 10-story cubic slab or art called The Tate Modern. It’s not everybody’s scene, but the caftan-wearing hippies looked like they had set up camp for the week. Most people were snapping away at the pieces they found most inspiring, and I didn’t want to look out of place, so I followed suit. You can find my critiques of some of the ‘amazing’ pieces below.

One last troop to a tube station for mum and we were on the new Elizabeth line train to Heathrow Terminal 5. They run every 15 minutes and the journey from Paddington Station only takes 25 minutes. In a previous post, I complained about the process of getting from the Stansted airline counter to the plane. Well, Terminal 5 at Heathrow must be the best experience I’ve had. Super quick and efficient. You can self-check in and bag drop. Then using your boarding pass, you clear immigration without seeing a human. The security screening only had a 5-minute wait and then we could have been at our terminal in less than half an hour. Isn’t it nice when things just work? Plenty of time for one last pint before we returned to Oz!

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Photos

British Museum
It is absolutely huge and covers all sorts of history. See the panorama above for the concourse that was built behind the old part.

This poor fellow
He had his head crushed inside his helmet and he ended up in a museum thousands of years later.

V&A
A large silver swan

An iron lung
Invented to help people breath.

Soyuz Capsule
three people fit inside therre

Lunar lander
Replica of Apollo 11 lunar lander

Tate Modern
A very big building full of art

Clearly the best piece in the gallery
I would have liked the blue to have been a proper navy and a bold white CFC emblem in the centre.