Saturday, March 22, 2008

People, people everywhere!

Saturday we figured it might be time for a more cultural, non-animal related outing. However, the queues at the entrance to Madame Tussaud's led us to consider the value of a few hours of our lives, and we therefore made do with Sherlock Holmes' metal sculpture and headed off to the British Museum instead.

The ticket office is circled in the distance... and yes, the queue was 3-4 people wide!


"Elementary, my dear Watson!"

Even there, the crowds took us by surprise! We knew it was Easter Saturday, and everyone was on holiday, but even so... the British Museum is huge, and it still managed to feel packed! The Egyptian and Greek galleries on the ground floor were the busiest. After a look at some Abissinian murals, we squeezed a peep at the rosetta stone between the camera-pointing throngs, explored one of the larger Egyptian rooms, and then found ourselves in a room with sarcophagi and mummys, but almost no breathable air! We escaped the pressing crowds via the first door that presented itself, and after briefly consulting the map decided to head upstairs to an exhibition of Japanese artifacts. This was finally quiet enough for us to be able to fully appreciate its contents, and we spent a happy hour wandering around statues of dragons, miniature good-luck gods, samurai armour, swords and Japanese paintings...


"No, Hugo, you can't take a sword home with you!"

As we were being ushered out of the Museum at closing time, we passed an Easter island statue in a strange room we couldn't quite work out the theme of: hanging above the Easter island statue, for instance, were flying machines... I'll report further on this room once I've gone back and looked at it properly.

Notice the people actually have space to move...

Before we left, we spotted a mini terracota army, made by schoolchildren who had visited the exhibition before Christmas:
Aren't they cute... errr, menacing, I mean, menacing!

2 comments:

Rain said...

I saw the terracota army... la la la

It is quite amazing how we actually didn't queue for Madame Tussaud's in February. It was supposed to be some sort of holiday too.

Aurora said...

I saw the terracota army too, can't you see it in the photos? ;P