London - 31 Jan 06

31 January 2006, Tuesday

I finally made it into the British Museum yesterday with another tour, courtesy of Bob. He knows so much. Anyway, the museum would be a good place to go with Kate. They have an awesome library, Egyptian artifacts, and the Rosetta Stone. The museum is another magnificent building that is surreal to walk through because with every step you take you wonder at a human’s ability to build such monuments to science, history, education, and especially religion.

Yesterday ended with two great conversations with Kate and then my parents. They were especially enjoyable because they were only 5 pence a minute. That is a lot better than 20 pence a minute, the rate I was getting with Orange, a huge cellular company over here.

A tour of Parliament was the first thing on for today. There was high security of course, but very much worth it. We got to see the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The House of Lords is almost all gold it seems. Everything gold is either solid gold, or gold leaf; no fake crap in the House of Lords.

I spend a little time during the week trying to solve sudoku puzzles out of the Metro, the free Tube paper, but I am not good at them at all.

Tomorrow I go to The Producers. I hear it is a funny show. Friday is my birthday. I really don’t know what I will be doing exactly, but I will figure something out for sure.

This isn’t really a problem for long term residents of London, but three months isn’t enough time to explore the depths of all the museums and galleries in London. They are endless, and impossibly huge. I went to the British Museum three times and I saw half of the exhibits…maybe. Every museum I visited in the UK, and especially in Paris, was too big for a day’s visit.

The rate with Orange was horrendous. After the conversion I was spending 35 cents a minute to talk with Kate and the parents until this entry, the first day I had my new cell with much better service.

Honestly, some of this writing sounds like it is straight out of a 13-year-old’s journal. I am so tempted to edit the older entries, or to just scratch sentences and paragraphs all together. As you can see, I didn’t worry about getting deep thoughts down. I never forgot that those would inevitably come at the end of this journey, and much longer after my return home.

I put the bit in about sudoku just as a reminder to myself that the British are obsessed with sudoku. There are sudoku puzzles in every paper, and often a paper offers multiple puzzles. I took them up, and by the end of the semester I wasn’t that bad.

The Producers show I saw wasn’t with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, but the actors in their stead, for the West End production, were great. Not much on stage can beat Springtime for Hitler.