Toeing the Tourist Traps

While we new Londoners still had week-long Underground passes paid for by our study abroad program, we decided to put them to good use and see some of the sights over the weekend.

Thus, it was off to the British Museum on Saturday! The British Museum is by far the greatest museum I have ever visited. It is well worth even the hour you might be able to spend there if you ever travel to London. Extreme academics anywhere could easily spend a week cooped up in the Museum though.

Since we normal people are not usually too interested in every part of ancient history, here are some Must Sees at the British Museum:

1) The Rosetta Stone:

No. Not from the stupid infomercials. The real Rosetta Stone is the broken slab of stone that basically says the same thing in three different languages: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic script and Ancient Greek. It was discovered by French troops and transferred to the British during the Napoleonic Wars. It's also been the most-visited item at the British Museum since it went on display in 1802.


If you can't find it, it's the thing in the glass box that everyone is crowding around even though they can't get a good picture of it because it's surrounded by glass.


2) Mummies

There are a lot of mummies at the British Museum. And they do a lot of cool stuff like CAT scan sarcophagi (seriously, apparently that's the plural of sarcophagus) to see how the mummy died.

Plus it's just plain cool.



3) Greek Parthenon Statues



The British Museum has a huge section on statues and monuments taken from the Greek Parthenon. I think this part is the most impressive, because it was part of an old tomb in what is now Turkey.




And these three must-sees don't even include the sections on Asia, the Americas, Africa or modern art.

So seriously, if you go to London, take the time to be a little nerdy and go to the British Museum. You'll love it even if you don't know anything about history.

On Sunday, we had to visit all of the Iconic London scenes. When you picture London, you probably either see the London Eye, Big Ben, Parliament & Westminster, or Buckingham Palace.
Conveniently enough, they are all located within a roughly 20 minute walk of each other.


If you've been my Facebook friend for about two years, you've probably already seen these exact pictures. But I love them so much that I can't resist posting them everywhere anyway. Plus they're worth another glance, especially in person.

Still to come from this area: Westminster Abbey, the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace and just generally a ton of photos.

Anything I missed that I should check out?