Seeing the best of Greece and Egypt... in London

Howdy again! Today was lovely, yet rainy day in London. [comment by Jerry: So, had we purchased the Prada umbrella yesterday, Nick wouldn't have had to carry around a large umbrella that said "The Beaufort Hotel" on it, making it completely obvious that we were tourists]


We started late with a breakfast / lunch at Paul Patisserie. It's a chain around London with decent French food. If only we had chains this good in the states! And to think, people told me British food was bad. Good French for lunch and great Thai for dinner; we ate well today.


Anyway, today's only major task was to see the world. Or, at least, the parts of it the British stole and put in the British Museum.
The British Museum. 15 acres of land covered with three stories chock full of mummies, reliefs, statues, and everything else Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East have to offer. The first thing we saw was the Rosetta stone. Not so exciting in person.


It was in the middle of the Egypt section. It turns out, all the dead royalty from ancient Egypt were very carefully mummified and apparently shipped off to England. Maybe the air is better for you here. Cold and damp. Anyway, ignoring the tongue-in-cheek comments, it was really quite morbid to see. Lots of mummies and skeletons.
After that, we found the parthenon, none of which is in Athens, contrary to my previous understanding.

They had almost the entire relief found on the exterior of the Parthenon, which, as far as I could tell, told the story of men fighting centaurs...oh and someone was herding cattle. It makes us wonder what the actual site of the Parthenon has right now if the British Museum is housing a lot of it. Another thing that we noticed was that separate portions of a specific figure were housed in different museums. For example, the body of a centaur was in the British Museum, but the head was located in Wurstburg.

From Greece, we headed to Rome. There wasn't anything too memorable in their exhibit. Some busts of people, jewelry, and housewares:


We ended our visit to the museum in the Asia collection. Seeing the Japanese collection was particularly underwhelming given our trip to Japan last year--we had seen everything that was being shown. Afterwards, we passed through the west end and saw some theatres:


We bought tickets to see Wicked tomorrow night. You know, pretty much all the same shows are here as on Broadway. That's cool, though. We've been wanting to see Wicked for a while, so we're excited. We had good Thai food for dinner, as mentioned at the start of this one. Forgot to take a picture, but on the way out, I couldn't but help notice the following "Bistrovich":


Mm, borscht. Anyway, more from us tomorrow!