Museums and musical theatre

Previously, I saw the Mary Rose and then spent a ton of time on trains... 

The day after I got back from Portsmouth, I decided that it was about time I took myself to the British Museum. So I took the Tube to Holborn and then promptly got lost getting the whopping 500 metres from the Tube station to the museum.

It really shouldn't have been that difficult. There were sign posts pointing in the right direction, and I had Google Maps on my phone. AND YET. In the end, it took me the better part of half an hour and several "HOW IS THIS SO DIFFICULT WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME???" moments to eventually get in the door.

Well done, Kirsti. Well done.

Eventually I got there, though, and promptly headed into see the Egyptian collections, because that's what you do at the British Museum, yes?

Unfortunately, everyone else who visits the British Museum has basically the same idea, so the Egyptian section was horribly crowded. I made my way pretty quickly to the Assyrian collection, then through the Greek and Roman sections.

By the time I'd done all of that, my feet were pretty sore and it was basically lunchtime, so I headed to the cafeteria for a nice sit down. After a couscous salad and a Portuguese custard tart, I pressed on. Because the problem with the British Museum is that there's always more to see.

I made my way through the old library, which is now dedicated to displays about discovery and object collection through history, and which was easily the highlight for me. I think it's because it was such an eclectic mish-mash of stuff. You could wander up to any showcase and have absolutely no idea what it would contain. The books certainly didn't hurt!

Then it was on through the South and Central American collections to see some of my favourite objects (which I used in a mock exhibition at university in 2008!) before heading upstairs to the Anglo Saxon collections, especially the Sutton Hoo objects.

Next stop was the Lewis Chessmen, then through the displays of clocks and money - both of which were oddly fascinating - before heading into some of the newer Egyptian stuff. By the time I got there, I'd realised that I was basically going through the motions and wasn't really paying all that much attention to what I was seeing.

So I checked out the gift shops (obviously), bought precisely nothing because I decided that I had enough bookmarks, and made my way back to the Tube station - WITHOUT getting lost this time around. I headed to one of the numerous Prets for a hot chocolate and a sit down, then caught the train across to London Bridge to wait for C at his office. The view wasn't too shabby:

When C finished work, we caught the train around to Leicester Square and headed to a random Italian restaurant for an early dinner. I had lasagne because I'll basically always choose pasta if given the option, while C had a FREAKING ENORMOUS pizza. I wasn't convinced he could eat the whole thing by himself, but he was determined to prove me wrong...

What a dork.

Dinner over, it was on to our activity for the evening: The Book of Mormon.

And let me tell you, it was the most freaking magical thing I have ever seen in my life. I laughed basically non-stop from the time the curtain went up. I laughed so hard I ended up with a headache. And it's entirely possible that we spent an hour watching bits of it on YouTube when we got home. I loved literally every single second of it, and I would go and see it again in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's coming to Melbourne any time soon, so I guess I'll just have to go back to London to see it again!

Next up, I head to Greenwich which contains a sad lack of Thor. 

K xx

From the Bronze Age to the Romans to the Georgians

Previously: I flew from Lisbon to London and struggle bussed my way to Portsmouth. 

Sara and I hit the road a little later than we'd planned, but we were still determined to cram as much into the day as we could. We started with an hour and a bit's drive up to Stonehenge, which proved to be frightfully expensive, but something of a must-see. The drive in was fairly horrific due to cheapskates who don't want to pay the entry fee (totally understandable) crawling past at snail pace to get a glimpse of the henge.

We skipped the information centre, and headed straight to the minibus out to the henge because we had far too much to pack into the day. Prehistoric archaeology was never really my thing, but I still loved it.

Although I could have done without the fact that it started raining when we were about half way around the henge. But, you know, that just meant we got to play "Spot the moronic tourist who wasn't expecting rain in England". And I also got to play a fun game called "Try to hold the SLR with both hands while also juggling an umbrella", which was interesting.

Eventually, the rain got too heavy and we gave up on the last couple of stops on the audio tour and made a mad dash back to the minibus. We did a quick trip through the (incredibly packed) gift shop without buying anything, then hit the road for Bath.

We got there in time for lunch, and decided that the only possible option when in Bath was a tea room. Somehow, this turned into us both getting tea and scones with a side order of chips. Because obviously...

After lunch, we did a quick wander through Bath Abbey before strolling up to the Royal Crescent, because that's basically what one must do when one is in Bath!

Our next stop was the Roman baths, because obviously. We used to go reeeeeeeeally regularly when we lived in the UK, but I hadn't been since 1998, so it was interesting to see how much the museum had developed and changed over the year, while the baths themselves were much the same as ever!

The audio tour now includes snippets from Bill Bryson, which is a rather random but not unwelcome addition.

After a couple of hours at the baths, we'd exhausted pretty much every possibility. We stopped on the way out to taste the water - metallic and kind of sulphur-y and generally a bit gross - then detoured via the gift shop. We wandered back towards the car, and decided that we needed a snack to get us back to Portsmouth. So we stopped off at Shakeaway for a milkshake. It was the last day of the summer menu, so I figured I may as well make the most of it, and got a Deckchair Donna, which had Oreos and Peppermint Aero in it. And it was freaking delicious.

Milkshakes procured, we hit the road and headed straight back to Portsmouth. We thought about going out for dinner, but it was too much like hard work. So we thawed out some curry from the freezer, and settled in to spend the night watching North and South. Because obviously.

Next time: THE HARRY POTTER STUDIO TOUR OMG. 

K xx

She - H. Rider Haggard

Not the edition I read, sadly. Source.

I first read She in 2002, for a university subject titled "Archaeology in Film and Literature" (yes, the subject WAS the most awesome thing of ever, because I got to watch Indiana Jones and The Mummy for credit). It led me into a serious H. Rider Haggard jaunt, where I ploughed through all the Haggard books my university library had fairly quickly. I remembered enjoying this a lot and, given that it was basically the start of the "lost world" sub-genre, it seemed only appropriate that I add it to my Classics Club list.

Plot Summary:
Cambridge professor Horace Holly is surprised when a friend of his turns up, hands over a mysterious box and custody of his five year old son, Leo, and then promptly dies. Twenty years later, Leo - who's now smoking hot - opens the box to find that it contains an ancient piece of pottery and numerous documents, indicating that he's descended from an old Greek dude named Kallikrates, who was killed by a mysterious white queen in deepest Africa. On the pottery sherd, Kallikrates' wife, the Egyptian princess Amenartas, demands that her son and/or his descendants seek revenge.

So Holly and Leo set off for Africa with their trusty servant, Job. They get shipwrecked, contract malaria, and nearly get eaten by cannibals, but eventually they make it to the queen's home, near the ruined city of Kôr, which predates ancient Egypt by several thousand years. There, they meet Queen Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, who claims to have the secret of immortality (she's over 2000 years old) and who promptly falls in love with Leo, who's apparently a dead ringer for Kallikrates. Shenanigans ensue.

Thoughts:
Oy. This was kind of rough. The story took a long time to get going, partly due to the fact that the part where Leo's going through all the documents is filled with slabs of Greek and Latin and Medieval English. Much of the dialogue once they arrive in Africa is meant to take place in an antiquated form of Arabic, and is therefore written thusly: "blame me not if thou dost wear away thy little span with such a sick pain at the heart that thou wouldst fain have died before ever thy curious eyes were set upon me." (p. 144 in the crappy, independently published "YAY THIS IS OUT OF COPYRIGHT" edition that my library had)

So that made it quite difficult to get into the story because it was constantly flicking between nineteenth century English (for Holly's observations) and something resembling Shakespearean English for the dialogue. As a result, my brain struggled to keep up, and I found myself unable to read more than 25-30 pages at a time before my eyes started to glaze over.

It's really hard to read this type of book in the twenty first century without constant headdesking over the Victorian ideas about women and race. Here, the Amahagger people over whom Ayesha rules are billed as uneducated, cannibalistic savages who practice animal sacrifice. It's billed as a matriarchal society, but then we're told that every decade or so, the men rise up and kill off all the older women to put them back in their place again. Ayesha rules over them because she's white and educated, but even then, a lot of her ideas are billed as "the noble savage"-esque.

In Kôr, we're given a lost African civilisation, which YAY! But Ayesha shows Holly the catacombs of Kôr's citizens, and they're all white (Their perfectly preserved 4000 year old corpses also make excellent fire starters, apparently). Obviously, the idea of a lost civilisation that was highly educated AND populated by people of colour was too much for Victorian sensibilities to handle...

Ayesha's an interesting character. She's a woman in a position of power who's not afraid to use her beauty to convince men to do her bidding. Even Holly, who happily proclaims himself a misogynist, falls under her charms when he sees her face. But on the other hand, she's obsessed with the idea of her "lost love", despite the fact that Kallikrates chose his wife over Ayesha, and she killed him for it. It's her way or the highway - anyone who displeases her is rapidly put to death, and she considers all her subjects to effectively be primitive slaves. She uses her beauty as a weapon, and ultimately it betrays her.

Headdesking aside (because let's be honest - if we discounted books based on the attitudes of the times in which they were written, there would be an awful lot of classic books deemed not worth reading), the last 50-odd pages were pretty exciting stuff. Yes, it was still a little slow but FAR more thrilling than the book's early stages.

On the whole, it wasn't nearly as action packed as I remembered it being, and I can't help but feel like it would have been a lot more enjoyable if the dialogue hadn't been so formal and stilted a lot of the time...

Have you read it? What did you think?

K xx

Ancient history, Volume XXXIX

Previously, OH GOD, I'M DYING. Otherwise known as "Don't eat ice or sour cream in Latin America".

The following day, I was still sick, but not to the about-to-pass-out point, which was a vast improvement. Arizona Boy, Waterproof Trousers and Irish were heading off for the wilds of Honduras that morning, so I dragged myself out of bed and out to the lobby to say goodbye to them. A couple of hours after that, I had to dope myself up on Imodium, bid a very miserable farewell to my BFF Sara and board a minibus heading to Guatemala City. Once at the airport, I braved the first food I'd had in about 40 hours - McDonald's chips (that's fries to you, America).

Source

My logic in eating McDonald's chips was as follows:
1. Said chips are deep fried, and therefore very unlikely to result in a repeat upchucking performance;
2. Said chips are covered in salt, and salt is important when you're dehydrated;
3. Said chips would provide a large number of calories without me needing to eat very much.

Genius plan, no??

Anyway, the flight to Mexico City was relatively uneventful. Well, besides the fact that the flight contained the  Guatemalan under 10 soccer team, and that whichever member of the team was sitting behind me felt the need to kick the back of my seat for the ENTIRE flight. But once we landed in Mexico City? Things got...somewhat more interesting. We landed in the pouring rain, only to be told - after sitting on the runway for 20 minutes - that there were no air bridges available and that we'd need to disembark onto the runway and take buses to the terminal. Which would have been fine, except that half the plane - including myself - got stuck behind an old man who managed to walk down one step around every minute. So we were all rather drenched by the time we got to the terminal.

Upon arrival at the terminal, it seemed that around a millionty planes had arrived at once, and Mexico City only had about four staff working the immigration gates. The queue to get through immigration took over TWO HOURS, and by the end of that time, I was about to sit down on the floor and cry. About half way through the insanely long wait, there was a bit of a kerfuffle behind me, and a familiar figure ducked under the barriers. That figure?

Source

Okay, so it was Michael Richards and not Cosmo Kramer, but whatevs. Apparently he decided that being a celebrity(-ish. Seinfeld was more than a little passe by 2008!) should entitle him to queue jump. The Mexican authorities took great delight in giving him death stares and pointing to the back of the line.

Anyway, I eventually made it through the queue, claimed my luggage, and headed for the pick-up area. Only to find that two hours was apparently far too long for my $96 transfer driver to bother waiting. I attempted to find a phone number for the company to insist that they send the driver back, but the only number listed was in Peru. NOT particularly helpful. So I headed for the taxi rank, only to have half a dozen taxi drivers refuse to take me to my hotel because parts of the city were flooded. Thankfully, the concierge guy stepped in, and insisted that one of them take me.

So I eventually arrived at my hotel, arranged a tour to Teotihuacan, and collapsed into bed. Only to wake up the following morning with approximately a thousand mosquito bites on my back, thanks to a particularly bloodthirsty and unwelcome roommate.

I dragged myself out of bed and onto a tour bus. The tour consisted of me and three slightly mad Argentinian women who spent all day calling me Chris. I'm going to go ahead and just show you a bunch of pictures of Teotihuacan because I don't really remember that much about it on account of I hadn't eaten since the chips the previous day...

On the way back into Mexico City, we stopped off at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which I found rather hilarious. Why?
1. Because it looks like a football stadium from the outside.
2. It houses the original icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and in order to pray before her, you stand on a series of travelators. One goes left to right, the one behind that goes right to left, the one behind that goes left to right and so on. This ensured that everyone got a chance to pray without causing a traffic jam.

3. You could get yourself blessed with holy water outside the Basilica. Except that the holy water was housed in huge plastic rubbish bins, which just made it seem kind of gross.
4. There was a GIANT statue of Pope John Paul II and one of his Pope-mobiles outside.

Who doesn't love an unexpected statue of a dead Pope?!

Up next, the most enormous flag of ever, some weird happenings at the National Anthropology Museum, and I fly to Las Vegas.

K xx