London Day Two

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Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, British Museum, and the British Library

(RAIN)

This morning we started out going to Temple Church, which was in The DaVinci Code. It wasn’t really that great, but they did have tombs dating back to the 1200’s. I was sure that they had filmed the movie in a different church, because none of it seemed familiar. We walked to Big Ben and took some funny pictures, with all the 100,000 other tourists. We walked over to Westminster Abbey, where some people were protesting the war in Iraq. It was pretty expensive to go inside, so we just took photos outside and went into the smaller church next door, which was built at the same time and in the same spirit or whatever. We decided to go to the British Museum, but Carissa and I were starving so we got Subway for lunch. The only reason we got it was because we had a two for one coupon and London is very expensive. We did eat in the park, where the pigeons were getting dangerously close to Carissa. The mummy exhibit at the British Museum was amazing! I wanted to look at every piece and read about everything, but Michelle and Carissa were ready to go after like 10 minutes. The Egyptians mummified and preserved the bodies for the afterlife, or for some other place than the world they knew, and now we can go, 50,000 years later, and see them. It’s really amazing. I was apparently so lost in the mummies exhibit that Michelle and Carissa kept playing a game of “Where’s Amanda?” and whomever found me first got a point.

After the museum, we got Carissa ice cream as a treat for being a good girl at the museum. We took the subway to the King’s Cross train station, where we saw the Platform 9 ¾. Carissa thought we were absolutely insane for going to see something out of a children’s book that wasn’t even real. Then we walked to the British Library and I went absolutely crazy in the Rare Documents and Treasures room. I even made a list of most of the amazing documents they had.

Hand Composed music by Chopin, Beethoven (and his personal tuning fork), Bach, and Mozart
Beatles lyrics written on the backs of envelopes and cards
Lenin’s readership application under the fake name “Richter”
Two copies of the Magna Carta
Letters written by Keynes, Queen Elizabeth, Darwin, Sir Thomas Moore (to Henry VIII), Florence Nightingale, and Captain James Cook’s Journals
Handwritten rough drafts of pieces of literature by Samuel Coleridge, Virginia Woolfe, Oscar Wilde, Lope de Vega, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Lewis Carrol, Kipling, Seamus Heaney, Alexander Pope, Geoffrey Chaucer and W.B Yeats
The earliest collection of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets
Documents from the studies of Galileo, Newton, Da Vinci and Darwin
Christian, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu religious texts, including a Gutenberg Bible


The religious texts were absolutely amazing, because many of them were on loan from around the world since it was temporary addition to the exhibit. They had so many pieces I could have spent an entire day reading the little blurbs about each piece. Carissa and Michelle probably think we spent the whole day there, because when I finally left, they were playing phase 10 on some benches. We walked to Hyde Park and there was a White Stripes concert going on. Tickets were 30 pounds which was like $60 so we decided to just keep walking. We found out later that Jude law and Kiera Nightly were there. We were starving by this point so we hopped into this place called Scampers. I had lamb ribs with lime sauce, Michelle got spring rolls and Carissa got nachos. We drank wine and even got a free bottle. We sat and talked for a long while about life and memories of growing up. We were trying to remember all of our teachers we’d ever had and I couldn’t remember the name of my 6th grade teacher! I also told Carissa that I was mad at her in 4th grade for getting her name in glitter on the math board for doing more multiplication tables than me. I was second place and I just got my name up there.

Michelle’s bonus points: 2. Spanish French fries, lamb ribs

Amanda’s near death: 1, King’s Cross

“Where’s Amanda?” points: Carissa 3, museum, museum, library

Quotes of the day:

Carissa (while looking at a map of London): Where is the fountain?
Me: Buckingham fountain is in Chicago.
Carissa: Oh.
Michelle: You came all the way to Europe to see something that’s actually in Chicago.
Carissa: Whatever.
***
Michelle: Ok, what do you guys want to go see?
Carissa: I just want to see Birmingham palace.

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