London: A Learning Nerd's Wet Dream
London has a large collection of free museums which equates to hours and hours or days and days (if you have the time) of perusal of the past. The British Museum is probably one of the biggest and greatest of all museums in the world. It was founded as a “universal museum” and consists mainly of cultural art and antiquities from around the world. The Museum started in 1756, three years after its founder Sir Hans Sloane died. Sloane wrote in his will that when he died he wanted his collections and curiosities to be bought be King George II and shared, free of charge, with the people. He wanted the collection to be “something from everywhere for everyone.” The King didn’t want to pay for the collection that totaled some 71,000 objects, but a group of citizens that believed in the value of the collection raised the £20,000 sum and bought everything.
The museum is wonderful and probably one of the best museums that I have ever been to. The layout of the museum allows one to wander from Asia to Africa to the Americas and back again in a single day without getting completely lost (at least with a map). Everything is labeled and even contains commentary on the possible uses, history, or beliefs that surround various pieces. There are free tours that expand upon the written material and there are enough sections that you could happily live in the place for days.
In order to make sure that I go the most out of the free museums in London, I made sure to hit up the Tate (a modern art museum), the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A). I was one busy museum hopping tourist on this visit. I still need to go back though because I didn’t have enough time to explore all of these museums to their fullest nor did I have time to visit a few of the other free museums that the city has to offer, but I did take advantage of what I could during my stay.
In addition to the free museums, I decided to pay for one museum, the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Now who didn’t see that coming? I couldn’t go to London and not see Sherlock’s house. The Museum is really located at 221B Baker Street and set up just as the book describes, at least for the first floor. The second floor contains some creepy mannequins that portray characters and scenes from various stories and there is a book containing letters from people that have written to Sherlock asking for help. The place even had an eighty year old Sherlock that welcomes you to his home and tells you to take all the pictures that you want. He was so quiet though when he said this that at first I thought he was just another patron.
In order to balance out my time indoors exploring the past and to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather that followed me from Spain to London, I made sure to wander a few of London’s more well know areas. On my first full day in town I walked from the British Museum to the waterfront, across a bridge that I thought was the Millennium bridge (but turned out to just be a neat architectural design of no real consequence), and down to Parliament and Big Ben. I wasn’t really aiming for anywhere in particular, but saw what appeared to be a niffy looking clock tower and headed towards it. It turned out to be Big Ben. I tried to get one of the guards out front to take a picture with Mustacheio, but he looked at me like I was insane and stated that they were forbidden from taking pictures. I think he was just afraid of the little guy and what it would do to his image.
On my last day in town, after hitting up the Natural History Museum, the V&A, the Science Museum, and the Sherlock Holmes Museum, I walked across Regents Park and headed for Camden Town. Regents Park is one of the Royal Parks (used to belong to the Castle and was used as a hunting ground in the past). The park now is home to the London Zoo, Regents College, Sports fields, ponds, boating areas, beautiful houses by architect John Nash, and a pleasant way to cut from Westminster to Camden. It’s a nice place to go to relax and soak up the rays.
Camden Town was suggested by my cousin, Eli, as somewhere that I would like. He described it as a series of markets that made up the Haight-Ashbury of London. With a description like that, could I not go? The area is well known for it’s markets that sell everything from fashion clothing and accessories, to books, food, antiques, and photographs. Originally there was just the Inverness Street Market that catered to the local food scene, but times have changed and the markets have expanded to include the Camden Lock Market, the Buck Street Market, and the Stables Market, among others. It’s probably a good thing that I arrived at the markets only a few hours before closing time because I could easily have spent a good portion of a paycheck on miscellaneous goods here.
In between Thursday night when I arrived and Tuesday morning, when I left, there was the weekend, which I spent primarily with my cousin, Eli.
During the weekend, there are a number of farmer’s markets that crop up throughout London. I went with my cousin to the Borough’s Market and met up with a friend, Bex, who I had met last year while traveling in Guatemala. Borough’s Market is a series of food vendors that set up shop and entice you to buy their wares with free samples and scrumptious smells. After wandering around this wonderful place for a few hours, I finally settled on a Halumi cheese sandwich. It’s awesome to know that Halumi cheese is everywhere in London. If you’ve never tried this cheese, then you should…it’s excellent.
On Sunday, Eli and I set out on a tourist bus to see Windsor Castle, Bath, and Stonehenge. As our tour guide liked to repeat over and over again, “Windsor Castle is the Queen’s home….it’s not just a palace, but a home, like yours or mine…” If she meant a home that was decked out in gold, silk, gems, statues, frescos, and a miniature doll house with priceless works of art and full electricity and pluming, then yeah, it’s a home just like mine. The Castle was beautiful and the town in which it’s settled is quite picturesque, but as tours tend to go, your time is limited. We had barely enough time to see the main living quarters before we were racing back to the bus to depart for our next stop. There was a couple that didn’t make it back by the deadline and we left them in town. The tour guide was all shaken up for about 30 seconds, before switching back to her overtly cheerful tone and telling us about Bath.
Bath is about 97 miles from London and famous for a few reasons. The main one being the Roman Bath Houses; that were filled with natural spring waters and stated to care illnesses during the medieval period. The main bathhouse is now a tourist attraction in the center of the town. This town was once popular because of the baths, but then fell into disarray and unpopularity for a number of years, before being reborn as a tourist trap and home to movie stars and elite looking for a country home with the amenities of a bigger city.
Another thing that Bath is known for, although to a lesser extent, is a taxation law that has to do with windows. William Pitt the Younger introduced the “Window Tax” in the 17th century. Since glass was expensive and therefore a good estimator of a person’s wealth (the more windows, the more wealth) it was an easy tax to enforce. Some families, to avoid huge fees, created false windows. They’d brick up their existing windows and paint home scenes on the bricks or they’re paint windows in black paint so it looked like there were windows, when there actually weren’t. It’s definitely one of the weirder taxes out there. The lax was retracted in 1851.
Our last stop on the tourist bus was the mythical Stonehenge. Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument set in the center of one of the densest collections of Neolithic and Bronze Age earthworks, including numerous burial mounds. Archaeologist believe that the stones were placed in their current location between the years 2000 – 2400 BC, but that there may have been three separate building phases, the earliest of which could be 500 or 600 years older than this timeframe. The stones are massive and it’s mindboggling to imagine the cooperation and manpower that would have been needed to move them and set them up. And to what purpose? That is a mystery we’re going to have to wait for the advent of the time machine to answer.
Thus here ends my 2011 adventure to Spain and London. With one quick side note, that I was quite happy to be taken to a plethora of British pubs throughout London with the sole intent of trying their array of ciders, this is my last entry for this trip. Cider is wonderful and I wish the Americans would see that and include it in all of the bars here. Until next time.
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