London Day 1

London
Day 1
Up and breakfast at the hotel. The breakfast is more than adequate but not the Full English Breakfast we have been offered up to now. The first thing to do was to decide if we should get an Oyster card. An Oyster is a pass that lets you on and off all forms of transport –subway, bus, light rail. It has reduced rates and thus it make “the world” and in this case London, “your Oyster”. I had scouted out the area the evening before, and we went down to Pimlico Underground Station, (subway) not quite as busy as Victoria Station, and the very helpful Underground Clerk explained the process and helped us buy our Oyster passes. A problem is that many of the older stations are not handicapped assessable and don’t even have escalators, so you can be faced with a really long set of stairs to get in and out.
First stop was the British Library, where they have exhibits of rare books and documents, like the Magna Charter, illuminated Bibles form over 1600 years ago, and one of the interesting thing was Beatles materials, where they have written songs on the backs on envelops, birthday cards and any bit of paper that might be available. One of the really interesting exhibits was about how they preserve and repair books, audio and other materials, so that they can be used without falling apart or degrading unnecessarily. This was very precise work and something both Marci and Lydia were interested in and thought they might like to try. Lydia especially loves those old leather bound books.
We had a great lunch here in the cafeteria at the British Library and then made our way over to the British Museum. This must be one of the largest museums in the world – free too, like the Smithsonian. Basically, when the UK expanded their empire if they saw some old stuff they might dig it up and cart it off to London. Two of the most famous exhibits are the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles. The Rosetta stone has Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics of the same text (some decree about a prince which they carved in 3 languages to make sure all the locals got the message) and although it took 25 years to crack the code of the Egyptian Heiroglyphs they could use one or other language to help decipher the meaning of the hieroglyphics. The Elgin Marbles are pieces of sculpture looted from the Parthenon in Athens that Lord Elgin gathered up and shipped over. Weirdly, Lydia was at the Parthenon last summer on her Greece school trip, and saw the shell of the building. Apparently, the locals at some point in history, had been using the building to store gunpowder (?) and there was an explosion that damaged the carved decorations (elgin marbles), so out of the goodness of his heart, Lord Elgin stole them for safekeeping. In the 1600’s I think. Now the Greeks want them back, but England has built this lovely room in the museum just for them, so you see it is quite impossible. As will all museums of this size, one needs time and a guide would be helpful to understand the exhibits.
After this Marci and Lydia wanted to get in a little shopping, so Amos and Granny rode on back to the hotel for some rest. Later, at 5 PM we all meet up at Westminster Abby. We then walked through St. James and Green Park, strolled by Buckingham Palace (the Queen was in town) (but we were too busy to stop in for tea) lazed around on the lawn of the palace people watching – lots of people jogging home from work (backpack of work clothes) and then used our Oyster to get back to the hotel for supper at a local Italian restaurant. Pretty authentic Italian- it was even a relief to be surrounded by Italian talking, as it becomes tiring to almost understand the various English accents surrounding us. Is it English or a foreign language? We can’t always tell… We spent the rest of the evening planning for our next day outings and finally getting tickets for the theatre to see the show Wicked on the next evening. We used a website a fellow traveler recommended at breakfast at the last B&B – www.lastminute.com.