The Wacky World of a Lazy Pig (AKA Simon)

Eurotrip Day 4 - Why does the British Musem have soo much stuff? Feet totally dead now.

The last full day was upon us. Today was the last day to see London for the entire day and just the check out the culture. I haven't gone drinking yet, but I will tonight.

Today's schedule was British Library and the British Museum. Since I only got a few hours of sleep, I was still very tired when i woke up at the regular time. We had our regular cheap breakfast, which we ate while we walked to the Library. We saved a day pass today because everything was within walkeable distance. On the way to the Museum, Roger asked me if people were looking at us weird. I told him that we shouldn't care and was being a little too self aware. I think that is the right way to describe it. Anyway, I told him again later on, but it was out of place. Now that I think about it, I am sorry. I think I lost a little patience there.

So what is interesting at a library? So much. I went there because it had a collection of the most important documents in the world and works by famous people. I even made a listing of the most interesting ones. The list will come soon. At the British Library, we learned the origin of the "Times New Roman" font. Very interesting. It was originally created for "The Times" and had gone through a lot of research and trials to get it right. I thought some idiot just came up with the font. There was also a litle exhibit of the history of mass printing and storage mediums from stone to paper.

The interesting part is from the following list:

Maps

• There was an original drawing of the map of England dated to 1250 AD
• Books on maps of the world which was withered, old and tattered
• Books with different types of bindings, each with their own distinctive design made primarily of goat skin or cow skin and gold tooling was the dominant technique used for decoration

Temporary Displays:

• The first ever bullet (ball) shot fired in the English Civil war that was wrapped in a small document
• A lock of hair from the head of Napoleon Bonaparte
• One of Beethoven's tuning forks used when he was deaf as well
• St. Thomas More's last letter to Henry VIII telling him to stop the nonesense of calling himself the head of the church instead of the pope

The Beatles:

• Original beatles song lyrics all written by hand on sheets of paper (like "Yesterday")
• Some lyrics written on the back of unused letter envelops

Music:

• Original Music books written by hand and bound
• One of the original copies of Hande's Messiah - revised for live performance
• Hand written/drawn works of Mozart
• The original Beethoven's 9th Symphony

Literature:

• Works all done on regular paper and then bound together (some with colour)
• The original Alice and Wonderland. The handwriting was really hard to read. But it seems like the adaptions of the story I have seen have never followed the original story very well
• The original "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens
• The original paper and bound sheets of Beowulf
• The written works of Shakespeare was also on display.

Chinese Literature:

• One of the original copies of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I don't know if it is hand written or printed. This was indeed amazing. I didn't know they came like this and I could read a bit of it. Hmm.. that is confusing, when I say I can read, it doesn't meant I understand. hehe
• Botanical Drawings from Amoy
• A book on Christianity that had some prayers and part of Ten commandments in it. Dates back to 17th-18th century. I copied down some of the text on paper to ask you guys later. This was all hand written.
• A book of Confucius and him teaching kids
• A book and record of all edible plants and which parts are edible - all hand written and drawn
• A book on Family Sayings from Confucius - all handwritten

Holy Books and Documents:

• Hand written Hebrew Bibles that dates to around 10th Century
• Hand Written Qu'rans (5 of them). One of which dated back to 9th century
• Original bibles with new Testament written in greek (Codex Sinaitica and Codex Alexandrias
• The very original papyrus of an unknown gospel written at around 100-150 AD. I have a drawn respresentation of how it looks like
• The book of Genisis handwritten on cotton, this is also called the Cotton Genesis. It dates back to 5th-6th Century. It it all ripped up and missing pieces. But it was amazing seeing this.
• A bunch of old latin books of Genesis
• And early book of Gospels from Italy with translations done by St. Jerome apparently
• Hand written bibles that were HUGE! They were like the size of a commerical laser printer
• All these had really nice covers and bindings.
• Manuscripts aobut Buddha from both India and China
• Maplike chinese scrolls

Magna Carta:

• The original parchments of the Magna Carta. Two original versions. One of the two were burnt in a fire. The magna carta is important because it declared the restrictions of the king. It signified that the King was under the law and not above the law. It was also important because King Edward was the one who passed it. Talk about giving up absolute power.

Earliest Printing:

• Earliest printing came from China at about 618AD
• Korean and Japan came soon after

Science:

• Leonardo Da vinci's notebook that has his original works - he was working on understanding weights, movement, frictions and pulleys. There were diagrams all over that show is work. All witten backwards of course.
• There was also work from Davinci on studying the concave + convex mirrors as well as drawings of musical instruments
• There was a large chinese accupuncture chart
• A book on wave theor and Calculus from Sir Issac Newton. It is the original book
• There was also a hand written letter related to "On the origin of Species" by Charles Darwin abut evolution

This is all I have about the Library. You would have been amzed to see this. There was a pretty big room with all this stuff in. It was sooo interesting I didn't have time to finish it because we had to head over to the British Museum

We kind of got lost while trying to find the way to the museum, but we made it. Now remember how on Day 2 I said tha the National Gallery had TOOOOOOOOOOOO much stuff to see? Well, The British Museum has atleast 10 times that amount. At first, it didn't look like much. I started in a small room that talked about the native americans that existed in the Arctice, west coast of Canada, Praries of Canada, easy coast of Canada, US area and Mexican area. These were spread out across 2-3 rooms. Each having tons and tons of information. I thought it was on par with The Nationl Gallery at first in terms of text and things to see. Until I hit a large room called "Enlightment". It is a room around 100meters long and 15 meters wide. All full of things to see. It took me 30 minutes to go through the entire room. While browsing, I also took a sneak picture with Steve of two Monks.

The the Enlightment room was indeed very very educational, it was only i wuls ay 2-3% of the entire musem. AHH!!! Next I went to look at the ancient egyptions monuments, statues, hieroglyphics and stone slabs, called Stelas. They had the original Rosetta Stone displayed. For those of you who don't know, the Rosetta Stone is the only reason why we can understand and decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Things in this room ranged from Statue heads from huge monuments to tombs and stone slabs in Pyramids. This room itself was larger than the Enlightment room by about 20-30 meters long. I lost my cool when Roger came running to me and told me to go with him to look at something. He took me to the bottom floor of the Museum, from there, I saw another Gigantic room full of Greek statues, statue heads and stne sculptures. There were so many that I realized that at that point, I wasn't going to be able to look at everything in detail.

For now, I will list out the interesting things I saw:

• The history of Clocks (the different types of mechanisms) - this place had collections of pocket watches, grand father clocks, funny old technology clocks. Most of them atleast 50-100 years old. Nothing was digital nor quartz related.
• Ancient Egyptian monuments, stones everything.
• Ancient Middle East Civilizations
• Ancient Greek Civilization - especially the Parthanon. They had a whole long hall dedcated for it. They had collected all the art the was on the Parthanon itself. They also lined them up for display to show how they all matched together in a series.
• Ancient Rome - before italy becuae the roman empire
• There was even an asian civilization with chinese and india stuff in it, but most of the stuff wasn't too interesting.
• When I get back with the pamphlets, I will remember more.

Any way, the absolute part that was the worst was the walking. I for one really really liked the stuff that was being shown. Each object or painting had their own unique characteristics that really made me think for a long time before moving onto the next piece. Roger and Steve were almost always ahead of me waiting for me to finish. They were real great sports for waiting and I am so thankful. But seriously, the walking was enough to say that I hiked for atleast 4-5 hours straight without stopping.

Steve and I had a beer in the bar at the hostel to celebrate the last day in london. Damn the beer was cheap, 1 pint for max 2.2° pounds. We drank and then went to the dorm. While just packing our things, Steve started talking to a German guy called Franz. He gave us a lot of tips about places to go to while we were in Germany. Seems like we are going to have to change our plans now.

Labels: eurotrip

posted by lazypig @ 12:14 PM