In which we hate the British Museum

Whenever anyone found out that we were going to London, they were always sure to tell us that we absolutely must go to the British Museum. After all, that was where they had the Elgin Marbles (for the big people) and mummies! for the not quite so big people, and it's the most visited tourist site in London and, therefore, must be really, really, really great, right?

To begin, Monday was the day that the Tour de France was in London, which meant lots of people, but also lots of road closures and public transportation disruptions and a suggestion on the tfl.gov.uk (Transport for London) website that the Green Park station, which we normally transit through, would be so insanely packed that they would actually have to actively manage the queue in order to make sure than nobody got trampled and everyone could get out if there were a fire. As that didn't sound very appealing, we decided that it would be a good day to go to the British Museum as that was best reached from our flat by a combination of Overground and bus.

After a bit of a tussle with the ticket machines to get day passes for Sapphire and Ezio, we were off to London's Euston station, and then by bus to Russell Park. (Which were, though I didn't realize it until later, very near the site of the 7/7 London bombings.) From there we walked to the British Museum.

I went in expecting to like it, and expecting the kids to like it fairly well also, and Blaise was really excited about seeing their Greek and Roman collection. After all, it's famous and has cool stuff, and everybody says you have to go there. It's also insanely packed, which meant that we saw glimpses of the Rosetta Stone from between the shoulders of taller (and ruder) people who shoved in front of us, and got pushed through the Marbles and the Assyrians. We had to choose between being close enough to the exhibits in those rooms to read the descriptions, or far enough back to see the art properly, because the crowds were not conducive to moving back and forth. The mummies were yet worse, because now the crowds of people were primarily kids, who seemed to be attempting to simulate Brownian motion, bumping off of people and cases and heading in appeared to be a randomly determined direction each time. After about an hour and a half of that, we decided that we'd had more than enough, and headed back to Russell Square for lunch, and then to the British Library.

Now, nobody told us that we absolutely must see the British Library while we were in London, and we didn't anticipate that our visit there would take more than fifteen or twenty minutes. We knew there was a copy of the Magna Carta, and that they had some old Bibles, but really, how long can it possibly take to look at a few books? An hour and a half later we had seen original scores by composers from Thomas Tallis to Mozart to Paul McCartney; dozens of illuminated Bibles and other sacred texts; diaries and sketches from Michelangelo; original copies of Beowulf and Shakespeare; and, of course, one of the four existing original copies of the Magna Carta. We'd also decided that Pope Innocent III was a bit of a jerk for issuing a papal bull that declared the original Magna Carta null.

An attempt to stop at the Wellcome Museum (a dedicated health sciences museum) failed because only the gift shop and cafe are open on Mondays, and so we headed for home, a bit earlier than expected.