We spent the morning at the British Museum today. There is more to see there than is possible in one day. We probably passed through less than a quarter of the museum before giving up for lunch!
We arrived just a minute or two before opening time. There was a long queue outside of the museum fence. The line moved pretty quickly though once they opened the gates.
There is a rather useless bag check to get in. “Do you have anything sharp?” Followed by a very brief look at the contents of each bag. Once we got past that, we went up the big steps and into the museum.
It wasn’t busy inside when we arrived. We decided to head upstairs as it seemed most people were starting on the first floor. Soon, once the school groups entered, certain rooms became extremely busy.
A guitar.
Lots of gold coins!
A little bird?
This clock was more interesting than all the other standard looking grandfather clocks and watches. The man on the left rotates to tell time. The woman milks the cow. And the cow actually outputs “milk!” It would have been neat to see it in action!
Dancing with sheep?
A plate with the first amendment to the United States Constitution.
Many little birds!
Some sort of parrot.
A 30kg grilled cheese press. OK, not really. We already forgot what this is supposed to be, but it does weigh 30kg. They also sold a model of it in the gift shop, one of the few gift shop items that we actually saw!
A ceramic pillow. Apparently this was a thing. The sign said it was surprisingly comfortable. I don’t know about that…
This is a modern creation. It looked pretty nice so we took a photo!
A calligraphy brush holder from China.
Two little cows, or at least, some sort of similar animal.
Two very old pieces of pottery, about 6,000 years old! They’re in really good shape!
A pair of elk, or something similar.
We saw too much to really remember any details. Perhaps we should have just found the most famous items in the museum? At any rate, below are the remaining photos we’re choosing to include here without any further commentary:
Eventually, we were pretty tired from walking around and hungry as it was well after lunch time. Time to leave.
We made our way to the center of the museum where there is an openish space, the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court. We visited the gift shop, where we noticed many things that we didn’t get to see, and left after buying a magnet and some postcards. The rest will have to wait for a future trip.