Remember, if you will, that in our two trips to the Natural History Museum (NHM) we still hadn't seen the entirety of its collections, even ignoring those that weren't on display and those that had admission fees, so on Friday we headed back to South Kensington station to go to the NHM and to the Victoria & Albert Museum (V & A) with whatever time was left. Halfway through the train ride I realized that my phone wasn't in my purse, and couldn't remember whether I had put it into my purse that morning (which would have been bad) or not (which would only have been annoying), and so for the rest of the ride I racked my brain to figure out how I would have managed to forget my phone, or, alternately, when someone would have had the opportunity to take my phone out of my purse without my noticing, given that the station and train hadn't been particularly busy, but without success. Fortunately, Blaise had his cell phone with him and my phone has Find My Friends switched on, and the NHM has free wifi, and so I decided that once we'd gotten to the museum I'd ask him to use his phone to try to locate mine, which meant admitting that I'd been scatterbrained enough to either forget my phone or get it stolen, neither of which reflected particularly well on me, but it seemed better than spending the entire day worrying about it.
And so, once we'd gotten to the museum and gone up to see the mineral collection, I asked Blaise to see if he could find my phone for me. An agonizing twenty minutes later, he finally managed to connect to the wifi (I never said it was good wifi) and located Cherry's iPad in our apartment, but not my phone. Of course, that didn't necessarily mean anything, but things weren't looking very good, and I knew that the entire day would be miserable for me if I had to spend the entire time worrying about where my phone had gotten to so I decided that the smart thing to do would be to go back to that apartment and look for my phone and then meet Blaise and the big kids (Cherry decided that she wanted to come with me) back at the museum. Before we left though, Blaise needed to use the restroom, so the kids and I walked though a bit more of the collection while we waited, and Ezio told me that he didn't think that Blaise should be mad at me if my phone got stolen because he (Papa) got his phone stolen in Madrid when he'd only had it for five months. After what seemed to be an interminable wait, Blaise returned from the bathroom with the news that, after several attempts, he had finally managed to get my phone to come up, in our apartment, and so we continued with our visit.
Now, imagine a room the size of a high school gymnasium or maybe a biggish church filled with display cases full of minerals of various types and sizes and colors and you'll have some sense of what the mineral collection at the museum looked like. And remember that this is really only part of their rock and mineral collection—much of it is housed in the red zone and we had already seen it. The cases were arranged by types: sulfates, sulfites, quartzes, zeolites, and on and on and on. Red, green, blue, purple, orange, yellow, iridescent and shiny metallic, cubes, octahedrons, tetrahedrons, anything you can imagine, almost, on display in the mineral room. And tucked away in the back, The Vault, repository of Martian meteorites, gigantic emeralds, and a collection of nearly 300 diamonds in every color they naturally take.
By then, we'd spent more than two hours in the mineral collection, so we headed downstairs to the picnic area for lunch, along with those school groups that also hadn't eaten at a reasonable hour, and then across the street to the V&A. We spent a couple of hours wandering through fabric and dishes and furniture and clothing from the last 500 years or so of British (and I suppose, more generally European) history while listening to alarms going off roughly every forty five seconds. Blaise proclaimed it a most excellent museum because the density of benches was very high. Cherry and Ezio liked the Clore Discovery areas where they could try on hoop skirts and Inverness capes and design monograms. And I'm glad that we can say that we went, but the twenty percent or so of the collection that we saw was ample. I have no desire whatsoever to go back.
No comments:
Post a Comment