Parliament & British Museum Trips

Ok before I delve into my city visits, I am very excited to announce that in addition to Barcelona and Paris, we have added ROME and DUBLIN to our itinerary as well for sometime in November and the first weekend in December!!!!!!! To say that I am excited is an understatement. I haven't been anywhere ever so anywhere I go, I'm excited to say "wow, I'm here". AHHH! So that was last night's excitement after we officially booked the trip.

Moving on!

Once again, our British Life and Cultures class took another field trip! This time to the epicenter of British government: Parliament. The building was beautiful. The first "room" if you want to call it that was the size of a football field, literally. Made entirely of stone with a wooden roof that miraculously has not eroded or burned down in the oh 1,000 years or so that this one room was. The rest of the original complex was rebuilt after a fire, but for the most part, it was old. I wasn't allowed to take photos inside Parliament, but take my word for it, it was huge cavernous rooms filled with gold leafing and history. We sat in the seats where the Lords of the House sit across from the opposing parties and argue about laws and British society. It was really really cool to see the interiors of this building that was always just on a postcard for me. ANNND I got to see Big Ben again which was just awesome!

The next day, Mel and I didn't have class until 5pm so around noon, we went with Rebs and her friend Dan from back home who is studying at UCL to visit the British Museum. On the way, we stopped for lunch at a Thai restaurant that smelled like a wet dog. It was really grossing me out. Exiting the restaurant, there was a very fine mist in the air, the first bit of precipitation that I had seen here in a long time. It stopped after a few minutes and we made our way into the great hall of the museum that boasted a huge rotunda with a soaring glass ceiling. Straight ahead of us was the ancient Egyptian and Greek artifacts rooms that opened with the Rosetta Stone. Such a cool museum piece! From the Egyptian wing, there was a lot of things that were excavated from various tombs and a recreation of on of the temples way back in the day. In the Greek wing, they had a huge Parthenon exhibit where pieces of stone from the site where taken to this museum and recreated to give a feel of what they looked like up in formation on the wall. The picture of the stone statues that slant in height that I included in this post were the original carvings from the top of the parthenon under the stone awning. Amazing to see in real life! After the museum, we headed back to class, but I want to go back seeing as though we only had about 2 hours...

For the weekend, seeing a show tomorrow night at Shakespeare's Globe theater for class and then Sunday we are going to visit Oxford. Bringing my camera for that little excursion because they filmed a lot of Harry Potter there!! Cheers!