The British Museum is absolutely huge, and has a really amazing collection of artifacts. I was so excited to go and see it, and Elora was in absolute heaven with so many neat things to look at.
The best part were these small rooms where the walls were covered in carved murals. Oliver liked it because these rooms were less crowded and he could run back and forth, and Elora liked looking at the neat pictures and of course, asking tons of questions.
This is a statue of Ramses II. Elora loves pharoahs, so we spent quite awhile looking at this statue. And Oliver would just point and say, “Head! More head!” Meaning, I want to go find another statue of a big head…
Isn’t she cute? It is so fun to take her to museums, she is fascinated by everything she sees.
Especially the stone pigs. Very nice. I was glad there weren’t tons of museum employees following us around and frowning at the kids, that is what usually seems to happen. Although, the kids are really very good and understand that they are not supposed to touch. Oliver says, “No touch, jus look!”
Elora, come look at this picture on the wall of this huge statue! Isn’t this a neat picture? Okay, so the picture showed what the building this column came from would have looked like, so I thought Elora might be interested to see it, but Chris keeps making fun of me for having Elora look at a small picture when there was a huge statue right behind me…
This was one of my favorite spots in the museum. It is pretty crazy that they reconstructed an entire ancient Greek building right inside of their museum! Look how many people there are though. Once again, free museum – awesome! Huge crowds = only cool because no one noticed when the kids were shrieking, crying, or talking WAY too loud…
This room housed the Elgin Marbles, which are marble statues that were part of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis in Athens. They are called the Elgin Marbles because they were aquired by Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin in the late 1700s.
Elora checking out the Elgin Marbles. Very impressive collection, I wish I could have seen it when it was still part of the Parthenon… Apparently there were originally more statues in the early 1700s, but they were taken and burned to obtain lime for building. Interesting.
Another cool room with stone carved murals.
Oliver running and running and running…
This particular mural was of a lion hunt. Elora was very concerned and wanted to know why the men were shooting the lions with arrows. She didn’t think they were going to eat the lions, and determined that maybe the lions were mean. Or maybe the men were mean. It is so interesting to listen to her work out the possible meanings of things she sees.
And one of the items I really wanted to see because I remember learning about it in history class – the Rosetta Stone. This is as close as we got to it, the crowd never seemed to dissipate and it just didn’t seem worthwhile to wait around with cranky kids to get a better look. We even came back later, and it was still buried behind this huge crowd. Sort of anti-climactic, kind of like going to see the Mona Lisa…
Instead we headed off to check out an Easter Island statue, which Elora thought was very fun. Then Elora looked at our map and saw a picture of a stone snake, which looked so neat that she just had to see it! So off we went to find her stone snake.
And here it is, very fancy! She thought the pretty blue snake was fantastic, so we stayed here for a little while before deciding we should head out to a park or something for lunch.
On the way out we checked out the big totem poles in the reading room.
Here we are out front. I know there are supposed to be a lot of cool things to see in London, but this was by far my favorite part of the city. I wish it had been a bit less crowded, that would have been more enjoyable, but I still really loved the museum. We didn’t see even half of it, maybe someday we’ll get back and enjoy more of it!
