england: the british museum
the british museum is amazing. i cannot say enough good things about it...but i will try:) i am in love with this space below but more on that anon.
but before we get to that, a quick mention of the sign language get together. the group in eastbourne have an unusually large number of young ones. the group is wonderful and do a lot of things together, so one of the things they had planned was a play put on by all the youth. it was about joseph, and the kids did a brilliant job. anyone who has kids or has kids in their lives should consider arranging something similar - its fun for all involved. here are josephs brothers bowing to a rather pleased looking joseph.
the following day the group kindly invited us to join them for their trip to the british museum. the imposing entrance to the british museum was apparently modelled closely on a temple to athena, a greek goddess.
through the door and we come to my favorite place - the great court. the roof was built in 2000 and is the largest covered square in europe. by 1857 the collections in the museum had grown so much that the court was felt to be a waste of space and the reading room at the center was built. this had space for a million books. people who have read in this room include some chaps you may have heard of: mark twain, oscar wilde, rudyard kipling, h.g. wells, lenin and gandhi. i think its such a wonderful juxtaposition of beautiful old stone and high-tech new steel and glass, and it all works. there is a panorama at the end of this post, but for now have a look at 2 modern researchers - toby and george - in front of the reading room.
the british museum contains 13,000,000 objects. 13,000,000 objects! to put that in perspective, if you could look at 1 object a minute, it would take you 24 years to look at everything. this is assuming you would not eat, sleep or have a shower during that period. they only display less than 1% of what they have, and this is still 50,000 objects.
we had a guided tour that primarily dealt with the gladiators of ancient rome and the boxing tournaments where the boxers would grasp balls of lead to give a more brutal blow, bringing to mind pauls illustration in 1 corinthians 9:26,27.
this is a statue at the entrance, one of the moai (statues from easter island) that were done in 1200 and no one seems to know why, or how they were moved. this is one of the smaller ones at 2.4m tall and 'only' 4 tons. the average height is usually about 4m and 12 tons. heres the thing. its just one of the many fascinating objects. we only had time to snatch a quick photo and yet there are vast collections of objects (especially many with biblical significance) that we would like to have seen but time was short. for the panorama below, click to see it in all its glory (i havent yet figured out how to display panos properly on blogger)
