Catching my blog up with reality.

So it’s been a while since I’ve written, but the upside to this is that I’m done with the work I have to do in London, so I’m basically on vacation for the next two and a half weeks. We only have a week and a half left in London and there is still so much that I haven’t done yet. However, a lot has happened since my last email, so let’s see what I can remember.

Last Thursday, September 4, we went to the British Museums. The whole experience was really awesome. The building was huge and completely filled with artifacts. There were a couple of huge rooms with mummies and different artifacts from Egypt. They also had the Rosetta Stone, which is what was used to decipher the hieroglyphs. I was actually surprised to find an entire room dedicated to Native North Americans. It just goes to show that you can cross the ocean, but you can’t escape where you come from. The museum had a number of artifacts from China, Japan, and India, including symbols from Hinduism, Buddhism, and different Chinese religions. They also had a number of Greek and Roman marble sculptures that were very pretty.

Friday was a fun day. We had another day trip that was part of the seminar. This time we went up to Greenwich. We started out taking a boat down the Thames. We got to Greenwich in a little less than an hour. After arriving, we went to the Queen’s House, which is a building for two of the Queen’s of England. The house itself was beautiful. In the Great Hall, the builder, Inigo Jones, built the ceiling to match the shape of the marble tiles on the floor. After the tour, we went to the National Maritime Museum. There were a bunch of really cool exhibits about different chapters in British maritime history. We also ran into our tour guide from the first day. Surprisingly, he recognized us, but thought we were part of his tour that day and didn’t seem to realize we weren’t part of his tour, even after we tried explaining it to hi. From the museum, we walked up to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. This is where the Prime Meridian is marked, so we had fun taking pictures with people in different hemispheres. We also had a tour with the person in charge of taking care of the clocks in the museum. He showed us the room that was the Observatory when it was first built. We also saw the four clocks that helped to solve the problem of determining longitude, which was the topic of one of the book we read over the summer. After that we saw a show at the planetarium. We got home by taking a tunnel that runs under the Thames, which was fun.

Saturday was a pretty easy day. We went out to a huge flea market along Portabella Road in Notting Hill. There were really great prices on fruits and vegetables, which I used when I made dinner that night.

Sunday was our main adventure day. We got on a train out to Salisbury, England. From there we got on a bus and went out to Stonehenge. The whole experience was amazing and it is definitely one of my favorite trips so far. Our bus tickets included an announcer who told us about all of the different landmarks on our way up to Stonehenge. When we got there we were given an audio tour to take with us as we walked around the site. It told us what the different stones were made of and what they were used for. It also discussed some of the different myths and legends concerning the building and builders of Stonehenge. Some of them that were discussed were Merlin, Satan and aliens. It was pretty impressive to stand there and look at the stones that have been there for so long. When we left the henge, we discovered there was an archeological dig going on in the field across from the henge that was working to discover more about the origins of the henge. That was one of the most interesting parts of the visit. I also found out that the stones themselves are one third buried underneath the ground. They were also excavating what called Stonehenge Ave, which is a pathway is leading from the river, up to the henge, which points to the henge being used in some sort of processional. We got back on the bus and drove back through Amesbury, which is a very old earth-made fortress which was the first version of Salisbury. We also saw a bunch of burial mounds that surround the henge.

I’ll stop here for now, but a lot has happened since then and I will report back on it as soon as I can.