Beaucoup de French Kids

Up and out in good form this morning. Made it through our very fine breakfast and out the door to the British Museum not that long after it opened. That was a good plan as the museum just seemed to increasingly fill up as the day moved along.

I was mentioning to my loyal opposition that the one surprising thing about London is how few English people you run across hereabouts. I guess it makes sense that we tend to cluster around the tourist things, but perhaps this is the very first truly international city. It’s past, though, is thoroughly British Empire as we saw today with gallery upon gallery of the world’s archaeology. We took in some of the Assyrian and Greek stuff first off – including the Nereid tomb from Lycia (which has greater meaning having spent some time these past two summers in Lycia itself) and, of course, the Parthenon marbles. I enjoyed those and felt it is fine by me if UK holds onto those for now, my guide and contradictrice feels otherwise – but settling that one goes beyond the scope of my plans for this trip.

The museum itself was impressive. The dome that was built over the entire internal courtyard of the museum is really striking. The museum was thronged, unfortunately, with squads of little French kids being marched past things with “grand importance historique”. The English school kids wore dayglo green vests and seemed well managed; the French kids were more of a force – drumming on the sarcophagi or some of the teenagers smoking in the stairways. I’d imagine that smoking in a place like the Smithsonian is probably a felony now in the US – anyway, kids today…

I liked the early European galleries most of all. There was an intriguing exhibit of clocks and also lots of material from early Medieval or even stone age Britain. I was surprised to see what a large footprint the Byzantines had even in Medieval British art and artifacts. I gather their arts and artisans were sought after all through Europe.

We did not push the museum thing too far. The museums in the US – and particularly Boston – do a nice job with lots of the archaeological stuff as well – and the contemporary world beckoned. So, after a few hours of galleries we had a nice lunch down in the cafeteria and wandered out by foot and by tube to Trafalgar.

My memories and image of Trafalgar was of an utterly immense place, so I was surprised by its relatively modest scale. We spent a bit of time at St. Martin’s in the Field.

Probably the most remarkable thing today was tea at Claridge’s. This required swinging back by the hotel to put on a sport coat but it was a surprisingly nice experience. Nice tables in the back of the lobby, a five page menu of tea selections and a succession of little tea sandwiches, biscuits, little pastries are brought by the table over the space of an hour or so. Very nice place - mirrors, pianos playing with cellos, leather upholstering on the walls. Very nice and relaxing experience – my teas in Durham, NH are going to have to kick it up a notch starting with a bit more clotted cream, scones and black currant jam.

Also, I am happy to report more advances on the “getting around” front. The #13 bus is everything we need, running from next block on Baker Street down past Selfridges through Oxford Street and Oxford Circus down onto Regent Street, Piccadilly and Trafalgar – everything you need on one double decker run.

Photo: The Elgin Marbles in Lord Duveen’s Gallery at the British Museum