day 2 in london: the british museum

We got to go to our first museum of the trip! I love museums, I think I could live in museums. The British Museum was excellent. I was almost bouncing up and down at the thought of all of the great things that I have studied and seen photos of in books that I was going to be able to see in person. The museum is huge and covers thousands of years of history from so many cultures. Each art history class had a packet with a question specific just for their class, and we each had the same general questions. We had 2 hours to explore the museums before meeting back together. Of course the first thing that hits you once you get into the core of the museum is the ceiling.

I was so distracted by the ceiling I forgot to get a good picture of the entire great court. Up first was the Rosetta Stone. Discovered by Napoleons army it lead to the ability to translate hieroglyphics since it said the same thing in Ancient Egyptin, a more modern Egyptian, and Greek. For me it was kind of like what I think the Mona Lisa is at the Louvre.

So many people trying to get close and to take pictures that if you wanted to get close you had to sort of squeeze in between people. It was underwhelming. Cool, important, but sort of eh especially when compared to everything else we saw. 

There we so many school groups, each with their different uniform. There assignments all seemed to be to draw they different things that they saw because they all had big sketchbooks and were sitting in front of the different exhibits drawing.

Aren't they cute. Why didn't we ever get to go on amazing field trips like this when I was in school?

Before this I had never seen Assyrian art in real life and I ended up wandering the Middle East area for a long time. There is so much detail in the bas reliefs and it was so interesting to see the stories on each of the wall panels. What surprised me was color.  I ended up finding a tiled panel from the east gate of the palace in Susa that was from the year 500 bc. It was crazy to me that I was standing in front of a part of a wall that Ester might have walked by every day. Even though it was so old the color was still vibrant. I always end up shooting a lot of close ups when I am in museums.

After the middle east came the Greek collection. The jewels of the collection are the Elgin marbles which Lord Elgin 'bought' from the Ottomans when they were ruling over Greece. My favorite piece comes from the right side of the pediment and is the three goddesses.

After the Parthenon Marbles I made my way back through the Egyptian collection and figured that I should probably find the stuff for my assignment. Two girls from the group were looking for the Byzantine room so I help them with their question since they hadn't really covered that in detail during the classroom lecture. Not wanting to waste time writing down my answer I ended up just taking photos of the pieces I'm going to discuss and the plaque with all of the information on it. Since I had all of the stuff I needed for the homework I spent the last part of my visit just wandering the rooms. I ran into Travis and Gustave in the mummies room. If you haven't met Gustave CLICK HERE. We quite like him. Some how while wandering around trying to find a bathroom I ended up in the Japanese collection. Not entirely into eastern art so I did a quick look round before I found Melanie and Kristin who had some how missed the Elgin Marbles. We detoured there before heading to meet up with the group out front. I feel like I need to go back and spend some more time upstairs because I missed so much. 2 hours isn't nearly enough time for me to spend in any museum just ask my sisters.

After we managed to get everyone back together we headed off to Borough Market.

Cheers.