Saturday! This was to be my lazy day. I woke up around 10am
(heavenly), ate lunch around 12pm (more heavenly) and then decided, hey, I’m in
London I’m not going to sit around all day, let’s go see some OLD STUFF
(heavenly for some). So Keira, James and I set off for Tottenham Court Rd. station
and ended up at the British Museum! Definitely one of the most grandiose
museums I’ve been to as of yet. The inside is all stone and the ceiling is
glass, quite a sight. I had three things on my agenda for the British Museum,
(1) See the Rosetta stone (2) See some mummies, and (3) Get a hotdog from the
food truck outside. I’m happy to say that all 3 items were met and all three
have a lovely story.
(1)
The Rosetta stone is a small child sized rock
that has writing of ancient Egyptian upon it. That’s what it is and it was very
useful to scholars trying to translate ruins. What I thought the Rosetta stone
was, was a giant boulder from outer space that had an alien language on it that
stumped scholars and was originally at Area 51 and was now, for the first time
ever, at a museum. That’s what I truly believed. That’s what the Nickleodeon
show “Jimmy Neutron” taught me, and that’s what I told Keira who was also
unaware of what the stone actually was. When I finally saw the rock I was
slightly disappointed. Did I confuse Roswell space crash thing for the Rosetta
stone? Maybe. Am I leaving this museum with actual new knowledge that I’ll
hopefully remember for some time? Hopefully.
(2)
I’m quite The Mummy-buff. The reason why I
capitalized “the” and “mummy” is because I’m not an expert on mummies but if I
don’t have the Brendan Fraiser epic trilogy of The Mummy damn near memorized by
this point then I’ve wasted 10 years of my life. My Brendan Fraiser/Rock
O’Connell obsession has dated all the way back to my kindergarten diary where
“CHRISTINA LOVE RICK” can be quoted. I recently as a college student watched
the movies and the love returned after a solid 3 year lull. Mummies! How very
interesting they are and I was quite excited to get to see some disgusting
greenish bandaged bodies. However this is a free family museum and I’m sure
showing dead bodies is somewhat traumatic to children (I guess). So my friend
and I got to see some lovely Egyptian tombs. Still cool, dead bodies still
would’ve been cooler.
(3)
After we saw all the housewares and gear from
the 1200s and beyond we headed outside into the pouring rain and went to the
hotdog vendor. At the time I was wearing bright, white bell-bottoms and because
of the rain the bottoms of them got soaked and dirty. So, like any American
trying to make new friends in weird places (the hot dog place not the country),
I said to the vendor “Man, I can’t believe my pants are wet! What a shame,
these were nice too”, to which he aptly replied “Your pants are wet?”, “Yeah!
And these were my mom’s too, oh well”. Not of course realizing that the word
“pants” in London meant “underwear”, I had apparently just revealed to a
stranger that my undergarments were quite wet and previously owned to my
mother. What a lovely image for a man handing a young girl a hot dog…After Keira and James finished snickering at me, we headed home.
