The British Museum, 10.04.2008.

Segment II, Day II: the British Museum. I was quite methodical about my time in London...I won't really go through it day by day, hour by hour, but I tried to do one major event each day. The rest of the day was spent noodling in Starbucks, wandering the streets, hitting various pubs with a friend....or being sick in the hotel (I caught a cold 7 days in).

A little background story to my British Museum trip: it was cold and rainy that day. Not unusual for London by any means, but unusual for this trip. As mentioned before, I was getting used to the sun. Rain doesn't suit me. Living in Los Angeles for 11 years will do funny things to a person, like make them forget that socks exist, forget that hair products don't hold up in mist, and forget that high heeled boots are a BAD idea when considering inclement weather. I looked at a map and it seemed close enough to the Tottenham Court Rd. station, so I thought, "Well, why not...I feel all skirty and boots-ish today." Not counting on getting terribly, terribly lost. After my pride was wounded enough, I stopped at a vendor and purchased the map I'm referring to right now to write this entry. My mistake was thinking I could spot the museum from a distance, despite not having any idea what it looked like in the first place. Silly. I would have crossed paths with Bugs and ended up at Pismo Beach at the rate I was messing up. The map vendor pointed me in the right direction. Unfortunately, by this point my boots had eaten away at my ankles enough to draw blood. So my memories of the British Museum are a bit patchy as I limped my way through for a few hours. Needless to say, nought was done the rest of the night...other than tending wounded feet.

The museum itself? Imposing. It was cold, wet and crowded. It felt quite good to get inside after navigating the iron gates, wobbling up the wet steps and shaking my umbrella in unison with 50 other people. The interior? Daunting. Huge. I just followed my nose, and thus probably missed some excellent exhibits from massive and now-extinct cultures. I was most impressed by the Egyptian, Indian and Chinese collections. The Assyrians always impress - their tendency toward zoomorphism is exciting to me. Lion and hawk-headed deities wielding sickles and daggers...very threatening, and there's a slight fear of the completely unknown as well. Why I feel I understand the ancient Egyptians better is anyone's guess. Everything seemed massive and desperately imposing...huge granite busts and sphinxes (plural also being sphinges, which I may like better), lions, wolves; renditions of serene and/or exceptionally vexed rulers...huge tablets of unknown scrawl from this empire and that. Made one feel quite small and insignificant. Heck, I thought we needed the cosmos for that. I wonder who made these items...who modeled for them (and, naughty me, quite interested in finding out who modeled for that fallen soldier in the Greek collection), what they were like, what their lives were like. It leads me to a slight melancholy most times, and sadness at mortality.

The Indian and Chinese exhibits, however, make me think about life and love and sex, and the joys we have in front of us each day. So things started looking up. Pottery dishes to eat good food out of, statuary teaching us grace and divine peace, vases to extend the life of that flower or twig just a bit longer...and the death gods: even them dancing and rampantly jolly whilst treading on their victims. And my favorite god of all, Ganesha, dancing with trunk slightly lifted; stomach jutting in front of him. There is a statue of Ganesha in LACMA's collection whose belly is dark and of a high polish from all the hands that rubbed it for good luck over the centuries. By the time I'd wound my way to the end of the Chinese collection (and those amazing life-sized ceramic statues), I was knackered. And my feet hurt abysmally. Almost time to go.

I made one more stop on my way out....into the library area. Oh, the books of it all! I was jealous. There. I admit it. The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte is kind of a wet dream fantasy for me; if I collect anything, it is books. So the library was difficult. But beautiful. Many, many objet d'arte mini-collections behind glass - I can't possibly do it any sort of justice; no notes, tired, and good golly, nearly four months have flown by! But at least the photos below can give you a glimmer :)

It was time for me to leave then...as it is time for me to leave now. More soon!