England! Day 6

So. I did something silly today. Eddy, Alexis, Andrew and I all went to London today. I packed my camera, with extra batteries just in case, but as I got to the British Museum, I realized that I had left my camera card in Eddy's computer. Oh no! I was able to take about 13 pictures using the camera's internal memory, but I have no idea how to upload them onto the computer. Sadly, I have no pictures for you today.

Despite my silliness, we had a lovely day today! We took the high-speed train into London, which took about 40 minutes. It really didn't seem that fast to me, but it got us there and that's all that really matters. Eddy and I headed off first to the British Library, which was about a block from the train station. The British Library not only houses thousands of archival texts, but has a large museumish display of precious documents. My favorites were the medieval illuminated manuscripts; they had the Lindisfarne Gospel on display, which is just truly stunning. They also have the Cotton MS Vitellius A xv - which contains the oldest copy of Beowulf among other texts - and I really enjoyed seeing that. It was much smaller than I thought it would be, and quite tattered around the edges, but it was still really cool.

After we spent about 2 hours in the British Library, we trekked our way over to the British Museum! It was only about a mile away, and a lovely walk at that. We saw the early European exhibit - which displays the artifacts from the Sutton Hoo dig - as well as the Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Mexican, North American, Assyrian and a little bit of the Ancient Greek exhibits. Of course, I wish I had been able to take pictures of all of them. The British Museum is seriously overwhelming. Not only is it so enormous that you have no idea where to go first, there are immense numbers of people trying to see whatever it is that you want to see. The rooms with the Egyptian mummies were completely insane - you had to shove your way through just to get from one end of the room to the other. Actually looking at a display was another trial all together. We busted out our pointy elbows, though, and made our way through!

We had burgers at a nearby pub when the museum closed - they were out of fish, so no fish and chips! - and then made our way back to the train station. After we got back to Hawkinge, we finished our day with tea and were thoroughly trounced at Trivial Pursuit by Eddy's Nana. I don't think the game was fair though, because it was clearly prejudiced against Americans!

No plans for tomorrow, but we'll see what happens!