The British Museum (morning day 4, Saturday, Sept. 3)

The front of the British Museum sits there with its two wings flanking the entrance like the paws of a giant sphinx. It just fills you with a massive sense of a holy temple of knowledge (but with ice cream) and I have to admit I teared up just a little entering the building. It’s one of those times when you feel proud of mankind’s yearning for knowledge, even if you know or suspect the backstory of how the museum acquired many of it’s treasures. Click the pictures to enlarge.

Exterior British Museum

Jim and I squeezed in our trip just before Lee and her brother Jim arrived about 11 a.m. Sept. 3, which is like saying we tried to cram all of Western civilization into two hours (we skipped Asian and American parts of the museum this time). We did manage to arrive there about 15 minutes before it opened at 10 a.m. We took the Picadilly Line train from our hotel in Kensington, exiting at Russell Square station and crossing through the square (stupidly I took no photos) and then along Montague and Great Russell streets. Again the crowds were pretty light and the weather remained beautiful. The front of the main entrance contained two “Traditional Ice Cream” trucks and another van that sold crépes and coffee, and Jim naturally needed another cup of coffee before we could enter the museum (notice how closely his coat matches the stone of the museum).

Jim outside the British MuseumGreat Court in the British Museum

After admiring the Great Court, which is still the most stunning interior space I’ve ever seen, we hurried to see Jim’s favorite object in the museum, Ram in a Thicket, found in the Great Death Pit at Ur from about 2500 BC, which certainly has a great title going for it. Followed closely by the Standard of Ur, found at another grave site.

Ram in Thicket Standard of Ur

Afterward, I wanted to make sure I had photos of the Elgin marbles (which Lord Elgin either stole or rescued from the Parthenon in Greece) and the Rosetta Stone (I’m sure Zahi Hawass still wants it back; it’s now behind glass) and the fragments from two of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, and of course no visit would be complete without a quick look at the Sutton Hoo treasures and the Lewis chessmen. I also dearly wanted a better photo of the Reading Room from the original British Library, which is the round building with the Great Court. We also ran through the Egyptian and Assyrian halls, me madly taking photos of everything and hoping it would make sense when we returned home.

The Elgin Marbles room Part of the frieze that ran along the Parthenon

Column from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus Frieze from the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos

Helmet/mask from Sutton Hoo treasure Lewis Chessmen

The Egyptian Hall Jim admires a relief in the Assyrian Hall

Unfortunately I was stymied in my wish to take a better picture of the Reading Room, being informed that the space was now used to house special exhibitions, the current one being Treasures of Heaven: saints, relics and devotion in medieval Europe. The British Museum, like most of the premier museums in London, is free, but they do charge money for their special exhibitions (and also charge a pound to buy the museum map).

And because we were so pressed for time, we didn’t enter the special exhibit. I doubt it would look anything like the picture I took in 2001, just a year after the interior quadrangle of the museum was glassed over with the former British Library sitting in the middle. UPDATE: I have since found a photo at wikipedia from 2006 that shows the Reading Room intact.

Finally we got Lee’s phone call telling us she’d arrived (about 11:30 a.m.) and would be taking the Heathrow Express into Paddington Station and from there by tube to Waterloo Station and the Union Jack Club. So we stayed at the museum another 30 minutes, took the tube back to the Park International Hotel in Kensington, picked up our luggage, and joined Lee and her brother Jim at the Union Jack Club.

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Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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