If my iPhone’s pedometer is to be believed, I walked eleven miles on my first day in London. Eleven! That’s nearly the half marathon of tourism. I also felt like I had a cold coming on, or I had talked too much at the party the night previous…excellent.
Either way, the struggle to wake up before ten was real. Today’s plan was British Museum, tasty food somewhere, Camden Market (and ice cream!), a pub, and then I was off to meet up with coworkers before our work week began.
Many of the big museums in London are free, with the exception of special exhibitions, which charge a nominal entry fee. I suppose this makes up for the ludicrous fees everywhere else charged for entry, like Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament.
We started our day at the British National Museum, which has so much content you could take several days to view it all if your brain could handle so much consecutive museuming (mine cannot).
I was early again (no, I have not been body snatched) and watched the steady throng of people churning up the stairs and into the museum. I watched a woman who was set on using her selfie stick, but did so about a foot away from her face and to only take photos of things that were not herself. The world’s most patient boyfriend watched off to the side until she was done and they headed into the museum together.
After determined-to-use-selfie-stick-to-keep-up-with-the-kids lady left, my friends located my pink self and we joined the tourist hordes churning through the grandiose entrance.
Like everyone else, we made a beeline for the Rosetta Stone.
After that, we toured around the Assyrian collection, which I haven’t seen in too many museums. The Assyrian stuff is thousands of years old and stylistically marked by giant, elaborate beards on figures of kings and guardians of temple gates.
It was incredible to see the level of preservation on stone sculptures and artifacts that were more than 2000 years old from ancient Assyrian and Egyptian cultures. The mummy collection was the largest I’d seen, and many had excellent preservation on burial shrouds and sarcophaguses (sarcophagi?).
Sadly, the Greek stuff did not fare as well through the centuries. I assumed some of them served as models for those who thought they might want to touch some of the museums displays despite the 1000 posted polite signs.
After tasty Korean lunch, we went over to Camden Market. Camden was part open-air market, part labyrinthine alternative, artsy market in a warren of old streets and horse stables. It was Harajuku meets goth kids meets stuff tourists like meets food.
If I had not had a guide in and out, I would have certainly remained trapped in the shops for the rest of my life, lost amongst book shops, knick knacks, horse statues, and kitschy souvenir stands.
We wound our way through this impossibly disorienting maze to the world’s tastiest, nitrogen-frozen ice cream. I got a double caramel with sea salt on top as is the way of my people.
Before leaving this crowded place of many wonders, we went to Cyberdog, home of raver kid stuff, things that glowed, and wiggling dancers. Most of the store was under black light, which was excellent because I turned a more brilliant shade of glowing color. My friends would never lose me amongst the rest of the glowing shop items!
We hit up a pub before splitting ways for the week. It was charmingly British and had some good stuff on tap, and was also done up for Halloween. In the UK, I have learned that this means spiderwebs inside, and giant fake spiderwebs everywhere.
I finished the evening attempting to find my coworkers in central London. We met at the Tate just as it was closing. A single security guard was busy attempting to politely keep people from entering and chasing those inside out the doors so it could close at the impossibly early time of 6pm.
I am not entirely sure how my coworkers were still awake and able to function, but we took a short walk towards the London Eye along the Thames so we could take our touristy pics. We entertained the thought of going up in the Eye, but the line looked like it was at least an hour long (and it was like 30 dollars). Pass.
We wound our way back to a tube station to hit up our favorite ramen place, Ippudo, in Canary Wharf.
We had an exciting week of workshops workshops workshops ahead of us!
