First Day of Break: London!

"By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show."

--Samuel Johnson

Well, now that I'm a majestic nearly TWO weeks late posting about my trip, my internet connection and my patience level WITH said internet connection coincided well enough that I thought I'd blog about the first day of my trip: London.

Plus, I'm heading into London again this Saturday, and it would be positively shameful to not post about the first London trip before the second. (First and second here are not exactly the correct terms. I've technically been to London five times: when I was a senior in high school, when I got into Heathrow in early September, when my Sussex in September program took us all to the Globe Theatre in mid-September, the time I'm blogging about now, and a stopover on my way back from this trip. So technically this was the fourth time and the day trip this Saturday will be the sixth, but whatever. I'm an English major. I don't do counting.) So yeah. Rewind really quickly to Friday, September 24th.

I got up at 7:15. Dressed, bed made, Facebook checked, packed up, peanut butter toast made for breakfast and consumed. It was drizzly, and I wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a bad omen or not, but fortunately the man at the Falmer ticket window was nice (Falmer is the train station directly adjacent to campus), and the train ride went smoothly despite a wailing toddler, and I managed to find the Ticket on Departure machines pretty easily and got my tickets for the trip between Brighton and London. The Brighton train station is a lot larger than the Falmer station (which is literally the size of my freshman year dorm room)--it has restaurants and everything--but it still has the flower boxes which seem to be a ubiquitous train station item around here, and I found that very encouraging. It was not difficult to find my train, even though I worried about it. That's just my way of doing things--worry about them until they turn out right. It will probably give me high blood pressure in ten years or so, but until then it seems to work well enough.

The train to London stopped and started so frequently that it made me feel a bit ill. The consolation here is that it's much, much quicker than the coach I've now taken twice before. I'd almost rather take the train back to London for my trip back to Heathrow in December, if it weren't for the luggage thing and the having to take the tube to Heathrow from St. Pancras (with luggage) thing. I'm pretty sure I can't handle that. Instead, I'll take the taxi to the coach station, pay the driver the obligatory twelve pounds, pay my twenty-five pounds to take an early evening coach to Heathrow and have them stow my suitcase under the bus, and then wait at Heathrow all night, go through passport control and security at like four in the morning, find my gate, chill there until 7:30am or so, and then board. At 8:30,am, I'll be on the way back to the USA and sleeping the whole way there.

Not that I've spent time thinking about this or anything. Of course not.

Ok, so maybe I have. But wow. Off-topic, much? Sorry. Back to London. And just ignore me when I start typing things like that. It's just that I don't like deleting things after I write them, because when I read through them later it amuses me to see how much drivel I come up with.

Well, I got there. And then I walked confusedly around the station (St. Pancras) for a minute, and then I went to go find Euston (the station I'd be leaving from late that night). It was a straight shot, if a mite further than I had expected, and I went ahead in once I found it and used the machine to get my tickets to Edinburgh for later and found a London Center map. It was around ten in the morning by then, and I decided that since I'd passed the British Library on the way in (and thus knew where it was), I could go to that later, and should go ahead and find the British Museum.

It was still drizzly--but I don't mind drizzly. It's good that it didn't rain harder than that, though, because I walked around for about a million years trying to find the British Museum. Who woiuld really think that the British version of the Smithsonian (so, obviously huge) would be so hard to find when you have a MAP? I'll tell you I did walk all over the place before eventually realizing that I just wasn't walking far enough--so I walked father. And then, still not finding it and beginning to feel a bit upset, I found a park called Bloomsbury Gardens or something like that, and there were some nice families and little kids running around, so I went in to collapse on a bench and try once again to figure out what magical path I had totally missed on the map.

Just an aside--it would be WAY easier to find my way around if the British would just put some street signs up and not expect you to have the inherent knowledge that you're on Marylebone Road or Tottenham Court Road or whatever. Same goes for Brighton. I didn't notice is to much in Bath or Lewes, but both times I was with a lot of people so it wasn't me trying to find stuff. And Lewes is pretty small. But really, what is the point of having maps if there aren't going to be any street names posted anywhere? End of aside.

The map told me exactly what it had told me before: "The British Museum is around here and you can't find it! Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah!" If I weren't a muggle, a tongue totally would've raised up from the map and stuck out at me. But then, if I weren't a muggle, I wouldn't've been lost anyhow, because I would've just apparated to the British Museum gate in the first place. (I'm sorry--the Harry Potter references just jump out of this country right and left, and I can't help but record them.) Anyway, I went over and looked at the sign for the garden, figuring that I might as well start learning something. And it turns out that I did learn quite a bit about how London's garden squares were planned and how this one was used in WWII and how it was restored in the '70s, etc. I learned something else, too--that the British Museum was directly across the street. Like, directly. Oh.

So, I traipsed on over.

The British Museum actually looks much like the Smithsonian buildings, just more gray and less white. Colossal columns, wrought-iron gate, walls and an iron fence surrounding the museum with huge postery things advertising upcoming exhibits. Apparently the Book of the Dead is coming soon. Best of all, in my opinion, it's free. Donations encouraged. I didn't donate. I'm a terrible person.

You get to pass through the gate, cross through the stone courtyard (through vendors selling caramel peanuts and roasted chestnuts and something smelling like funnel cake), and enter between the massive pillars into a veritable world of polished marble. The first room is all black.

The second room, though, which is basically the hub of the museum, is all white, with an impressively high ceiling (or ceiling-like thing; I think there may be another ceiling on top of that) formed in glass triangles, which webs from the top of a gigantic circular room in the center of the larger white room, and extends to the edges of the big white room (let's just go ahead and call it the BWR, ok?). It reminded me vaguely of the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre if they rolled it out and draped it over the museum. Which of course would never happen because the French are incredibly touchy and don't want to change anything or change it back once it has been changed, and plus it's impossible, but that's not the point and I digress.

Anyway, out of the BWR I ambled through the spotlight exhibit, which is called Life and Death and explores living and dying at different times and in different cultures throughout the world. The first think on the way in is this big Easter Island head thing, but what I actually thought was most interesting was the long, long, long display in the center of the room. It was a long piece of netting with clusters of pills sewn into every inch. Along the sides were pictures and stories and small vials of medicines and hypodermic needles and such. The display told the stories--birth to present (which is death for one; the other is 84) of two British citizens, a Tom and a Susie, and included reproductions of every single pill/bit of medicine they took throughout their lives. So every one of Susie's birth control pills was there, and there were her kindergarten shots, and treatment for breast cancer, and her daughter Ruby's birth certificate. Tom has high blood pressure, so there were pills for that. The display was meant to illustrate how much medicine is prescribed to every person nowadays through the course of their lives. Personally, I felt it was brilliant.

After that exhibit, I went to check out the classics collection, which is sort of like an exhibit about exhibiting, if that makes any sense. It's housed in a huge long room, beautifully styled with elaborate crown molding and elegant tan walls and chandeliers and mahogany bookcases floor-to-frescoed-ceiling, all glass-fronted so you can admire the antique leather bound books they house. Books with titles like "Antiquis Roma, Vol XIV" and on like that. There are display cases everywhere, lit up, which hold some of the museum's earliest acquisitions. This doesn't mean the oldest stuff in the museum at all. It means the stuff that has been in the museum the longest. Some of the things are even fakes! Of course, in the 1700s-1800s when the stuff came to the museum, the curators didn't know that or have the scientific advantage of carbon dating, etc.

The exhibits' contents are explained, but they are also explained in context of their acquisition, so you learn why there's so much stuff from India and China, and you learn what the curators thought such-and-such meant and why they thought that, and you learn who collected this from whom, and what all of this meant in the Age of Enlightenment. It was very interesting.

I got lunch right after that in the BWR--a hot ham and cheese sub with nasty lettucey stuff and those weird dried tomato things I don't like. I picked that stuff off and ate the rest sitting cross-legged on the floor by one of the big pillars, though, because I was really hungry and there were no seats left. And plus it meant I got to take off my big heavy backpack for a little bit and rest. I spent some time after that in the shops, not buying anything but enjoying looking around. They have some nice stuff! I'm sort of flummoxed as to what to get for everybody for Christmas/gifts. So I go in lots of shops, and I enjoy it, but I don't usually actually buy anything.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I totally bypassed the Egyptian/African/Asian/South American/American exhibits, as nice as I'm sure they were, and went straight for the Britain/Europe through the Ages section, which encompasses like twenty rooms. It walks you through Britain's history from back when it was still attached to the mainland, to its earliest residents and their lifestyles on to raids and migrations in from different locations (Vikings, Germanic tribes), to the development of farming and through the jewelry and treasures of hundreds of hoards and burial grounds.

Just the information about the hoards is fascinating--cremations, mounds, ship burials, cart burials, tombs, and so on. Death is a great creative art in so many cultures. The exhibit continued to talk about the Romans, the advent of Christianity, the Normans, the Viking raids, the middle ages, the Renaissance, all the kings and queens, Mary and Elizabeth, the nineteenth century and industrialism, the age of inventions.

Which is where it ended. I would have liked to have seen it capped with a WWII display, but I guess maybe it's more of a US thing to have museums charging right on up to the present? I know at the Smithsonian they have the flag they hung at Ground Zero in 2001 and I'm pretty sure they have Michelle's inaugural ballgown, so that's going up to 2009. It's equally possible that I just didn't visit that particular branch of the museum or that there's another museum that houses artifacts from the nineteenth century to the present. Anyway. It was a wonderful display, and I think I learned a lot even though I already had a strong basis in the subject. It's always different to learn about something and to actually learn about it while you're seeing it.

The jewelry and weaponry were very interesting, and so was the Bog Man, although that also grossed me out a little. As the timeline progressed I appreciated the stuff a little less, I think, because I've seen Roman stuff before, and it's great but I still feel like it doesn't belong in Britain, and the jewelry at the end is beautiful, but cameos and coral bracelets just aren't as novel to me as golden torques and leather shields.

I did particularly love the room--two rooms, really--filled entirely with clocks. Grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks, and an insanely comprehensive selection of watches, both pocket and wrist. The room positively gleams of polished wood, gold, brass, and glass watch faces. Some of the clocks are very, very intricate indeed. The room was warmly lit, and I felt very Victorian. I also felt that when I stood still that all the clocks were ticking around me like a heartbeat. I think Dedaddy and Daddy would have loved it.

Lastly, I went to the Rosetta Stone, which is really cool but which is also just a big black rock. I enjoyed the (extremely accurate) facsimile nearby more, because it wasn't in a case, it wasn't buried under Asian tourists taking eighty pictures of it apiece (come ON, people), and I could actually touch it and interact with it.

The totem pools were pretty cool, too, and I took some pictures for Daddy.

The store was my last stop, and I did stop and sit a while, just to get the backpack off--it was miserably heavy and made my back and shoulders just ache. They have some nice little souvenirs, but I ultimately just got some very small trinkets.

(this is me right before I left the museum)

I'd already passed the British Library, like I said way up at the top of the post, and so I knew where it was and it took me just a few minutes to get there. But oh. My. Gosh. HOW I loved it. I like the building and courtyard themselves, because they're interesting and because there are big signs everywhere with quotes about reading and knowledge.

And I have no idea how you'd set about checking out a book, even though it's a working (and HUGE) library. It's the archive that is so incredible. Actually, I sat in the room and wrote all about it.

This isn't the archive; but it's pretty cool. There's also a museum about modern British inventions in the library, which I did go through. But mostly, it was all about the archives.

THIS is the entrance to the archives. No photos allowed. But do let me tell you about it, straight out of my journal, because I am lazy and don't want to reformat anything.

"The British Library is shockingly amazing. It's like being dipped into an alternate world, a wishing well hiding all the glittery rich dollops of literary amazingness at the bottom and then being shown an old wooden bucket so you can squeak down and actually see it for yourself rather than leaning over the edge straining to glimpse a folio corner or an ornate drop cap. This Gallery is a violet-carpeted paradise. And just to add to its majestic impression, the floor lights are purple and the cabinets are lacquered black. All the glass in the room is lit up so it looks like ice. And the floor-to-ceiling glass displays are etched with a collage of bluish text and illustrations. "Music," says one. "Historical Documents," says another. I am sitting between these two on a padded gray bench listening to a schoolteacher of some sort explain to what looks like a bunch of high school students of college first-years the importance of handwriting and the flexibility and liveliness of the English language. I know everything he's saying already, but I'm enjoying the free lecture.

More than that, though. I just saw pages from the manuscript of Beowulf. And Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, whose illustrations are much brighter and more gorgeous than I'd expected. And i saw pages of sheet music from the 1700s. And pages on which the Beatles took notes. I saw the first manuscript--the one given to Alice Liddell--of Alice's Adventures Underground, and I saw two of LEWIS CARROLL's nine PRIVATE DIARIES, one of which was opened to the page of the real golden afternoon!!! I also saw about fifteen other copies of Alice, including Salvador Dali's, and the printing-blocks of Tenniel's illustrations. There is a map over here of "Longe Isleland" from the 1600s. There are covers gilded, engraved, tooled, painted, inlaid...they are art, and they're being treated like it here. THERE ARE MIRROR-SCRIPT PAGES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF LEONARDO DA VINCI! Audobon's life-size Birds of America is here. Priceless illuminated manuscripts.

Sacred Buddhist and Jainist texts on scrolls; sacred Hindu texts on panels. The re-bound Codex Sinaiticus, as well as the Codex Alexandrinus, and fragments of a papyrus codex in Greek of the gospel of St. John. Sultan Baybar's Qur'an, which is one of the most intricate and beautiful books I have ever seen. The sumptuously colorful Golden Hagadah. A copy of the Gospels well over a thousand years old. The Ramsey Psalter, and the Eadui Psalter. The Arnstein Bible. A stunning Bestiary. The Sherborne Missal! It's lovely--you could spend an eternity on any one page. Victorian naturalist books, and huge painting/writing combinations from old China. The Dering Roll, which is incredible, simply incredible. The exquisitely-calligraphied Macclesfield Alphabet Book. Prints from India, Persia, and Tukey.

Darwin's letters. A letter by Ada Lovelace which sets out in writing for the first time the principles of a computer program. A manuscript by Freud. Documents from British expeditions to Antarctica alongside Henry VIII's prayer roll. SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST FOLIO, among other quartos and copies of Shakespearean plays. Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, CHAUCER, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson. Two out of the four existing copies of THE MAGNA CARTA. Handwritten manuscripts of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," Lord Jim, the Commonplace Book of John Milton, John Dryden's An Opera. Jane Austen's teenage notebook, opened to a story dedicated to her sister Cassandra called "Catharine, or the Bower," JANE AUSTEN'S WRITING DESK (it's a laptop or desktop affair, very small). Wordsworth's "Poem of Childhood" and CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S JANE EYRE opened to the conclusion where (in excellent handwriting), she has written "Reader, I married him."

I am amazed. I am flat-out flabbergasted. And rather humbled. I keep feeling that if I closed my eyes, I'd be able to hear the murmurs and chuckles and broods and "little weeps" of the writers and illustrators who labored so long over the workds here displayed. They put so much of themselves into these things--it's practically tangible. You can nearly hear Falstaff's wisecracking, hear Alice's plaintive "What's the use of a book without pictures or conversations?" hear the low chants behind the monk laboriously applying ink to parchment in a cold monastery.

I remember feeling a little bit of this when my class at Davidson (I was twelve; it was a summer program) took a field trip to that very fancy library in Charlotte or Raleigh or wherever it was, and we were allowed to see a first-edition copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and marvel at the vast collection of colored spines on the shelves. I wanted to live there, too."

Please forgive me excessive wordiness and vomit of the pen. I may be an English/poly sci double, but in my heart it's all about the books, not the news channel. That's just how it goes.

The gallery closed at five, but the library didn't close until six, so I sat on a bench outside the gallery doors and read Enid Blyton's Book of Brownies (which was delightful and something I will definitely read to my children someday) until they began to kick everyone out.

This little stowaway is one of the touches from home I brought with me to Brighton, and the only one I brought on this trip. I thought she might enjoy being my Flat Stanley character now and then. And really, I think she looks pretty happy chilling here beneath the railing.

I never actually checked to see who these guys were, but they looked very literary and imposing as they stared at me that entire last hour.

And I'm sorry, but this is absolutely the cutest possible name for a cafe you see exiting the library, is it not? If it hadn't been closed, I would definitely have gone in and had some hot chocolate.

Then I went back to Euston.

And it was there that, for ninety-nine pence, Millie's Cookies gave me the best cookie in the world. It was an orange chocolate-chip cookie, and I have GOT to find out either the recipe or if they have stores in North Carolina, because Mama would love it. It was like a chocolate orange in cookie form. Then I ended up getting a chicken bites meal at Burger Kind (exotic, huh?) and sitting in there until nearly ten writing and making lists and such.

London's a funny place, I've decided. It's dichotomous--it holds what is perhaps the West's most confusing airport and marks none of the streets adequately, yet it's the capitol of one of the world's most orderly country. You see people in suits, because London is a city of businessmen, and you see teenagers in the most utterly outlandish outfits rocking out on the street. It's incredibly urban, yet there are parks on every corner. It's also incredibly historic, yet so, so modern, with simply a ton of steel and glass and sleep skyscrapers. It's a bit confusing, too, that it's the quintessential British city, yet I heard just as much Chinese and Japanese and Spanish and Italian and Polish and French as I heard English.

Also, I'm really not used to cities. At all.

I had a long time to ponder this, since my train didn't leave until around 11:40pm, so it's like being in a smallish but crazy busy airport, and you can people-watch. After I left Burger King I sat next to a Taiwanese foreign exchange student and a British lady, but of whom were very nice. My train (the Caledonian Sleeper) finally started boarding around 11:20pm, and i wasa very pleased to find that my standard seat (which I'd been picturing as an uncomfortable airplane-style seat) was actually really wide and cushy, with a footrest and those flap things on the headrest so you can sleep just leaning your head to the side.

It was a beautiful experience. Plus, it was warm.

And since I woke up in Edinburgh, that belongs in another post!