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Saturday, July 5
We started off the day with a morning of "special family moments" revolving around our attempt to get discounted Lion King tickets to tonight's performance, only to discover after waiting in line for a half-hour at the famous "Tkts" booth in Leicester Square, that Lion King is the only production which doesn't release tickets for discounted sale. We hunkered down for a (too) late breakfast to get our blood sugar up and crankiness down, which was the slowest and most unsatisfactory meal we've had yet on the trip. Adding to the fun, was the post-breakfast search for the Lyceum Theater so we could pony up for the full-price tickets at the box office, rather than risk buying from the scalpers and the possibility of getting counterfeit tickets. Since better seats were to be had for Tuesday night's performance than tonight's, we purchased those, and will delay our gratification further. (On the upside we'll be going to the "theatre" two nights in a row, since we already have our Les Miserables tickets for Monday night.)
OK, now it's close to 11:00, and we FINALLY get to the British Library. What a gem! We loved seeing the great variety
of documents/books/music on display: from Beowolf to a short story written by a teenaged Jane Austen; from Handel's Music for Royal Fireworks to Beatles lyrics to A Hard Day's Night written on the back of a birthday card; from 3rd century papyrus fragments with a chapter from Hebrews written on them to Lenin's application for a British Museum Reading Room pass; from Galileo's sketch of constellations to Thomas More's last letter to Henry VIII. You get the idea...
We had to pull ourselves away to head over to the British Museum, just so we'd have enough time to barely skim the surface--which is exactly what we did using the audioguide version of the "Highlights" tour. We eventually found our balance between the selected items on the tour and quickly roaming around a few adjacent cases, but there was so much left unseen/unabsorbed. The place was wonderfully overwhelming, an archaeologist's dream... So many cultures and periods represented that I had studied over the years--so little retained from all that studying :-( We were there for 3 1/2 hours--they literally had to kick us out. A week there (with many hundreds fewer people) would possibly do it justice.
Shifting gears,
we tubed over to Covent Gardens area, where we wandered around, enjoying the market booths, musicians, jugglers, street artists, etc. We had wonderful pasta for dinner at a tiny Italian cafe in "Neal's Yard"--a colorful alleyway in the Seven Dials area of Covent Gardens, which was once a warehouse area, but now contains a handful of brightly painted restaurants.
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