Dinosaurs! WOW!

Friday, February 15, 2013

Hello!

Our front door

Today has been another great day, and it’s not over yet!  One of our favorite restaurants in London is the dining room at the British Museum.  And, we’ve got a 7 p.m. reservation!  We’ve never been in the museum after dark; it will be very interesting!  I thought I would blog about today, and that way, I can either do dinner when we get back, or, if I’m too tired, I can do it first thing in the morning.

Oh, first, laundry update:  Well, I let the “dryer” part of the washer/dryer go on for about half-an-hour, but to be honest, the noise was enough to drive ME crazy, so I finally got everything out and spread it out all over the apartment.  Fortunately, by the time we awoke this morning, everything was nice and dry.  So…will try some blue jeans tomorrow in the hope that they will have all day Sunday to dry.  I still haven’t seen a self-service Laundromat, although I know for a fact that there used to be one closer to South Kensington.

Natural History Museum

So…up about 7 to a lovely day with blue skies and sunshine!  Out about 9:30-ish for the trip over to South Kensington and the Natural History Museum.  Caught a bus which got us there in minutes, and we joined the queue in front of the Museum about 10 minutes to 10.  I was amazed at how many people were there, and they kept on coming!  I had read in a review of the Museum that it was a victim of its own success; that as a result of being “free” it was incredibly popular – and they were right!  This was our first time here (we’ve been to the Victoria & Albert Museum next door, but never to natural history) and this museum REALLY blew us away!

Main Hall

Dinosaur Exhibit - Upper Level

We walked in to their dinosaur exhibit, and WOW!  As we were there so early, we were able to enjoy the displays in a fairly uncrowded way.  By the time we left, the queue ran in lines all through the lobby; no idea how long it would take to get through!  (Brucato’s #1 rule:  Get there EARLY.)   Well…somebody at the museum came up with the tremendous idea of double-decking the area.  Thus, there were metal walkways all across the hall giving really terrific looks from above of the dinosaur skeletons which were everywhere.  We’ve never, ever seen such a great collection of finds, and that includes the BM as well as the Met in NYC.  This museum has done an outstanding job of displaying and – more important – explaining what is known and unknown about dinosaurs.  No other museum we have seen even comes close.  Once the school groups started to come in, the noise level reached a cacophony, but fortunately they were all behind us, and we never did get trampled underfoot.

From the dinosaurs, we headed down a long hallway that was absolutely covered, from floor to ceiling (and those ceilings are HIGH) with more fossils – mostly ancient marine life, many of them found around the U.K. over the past 150 years or so.  Just incredible!

At this point, we decided to have lunch at the museum’s restaurant.  Robert got a salad of arugula, artichoke hearts, cherry tomatoes and roasted peppers.  I had their spicy aubergine (eggplant) soup with whole grain bread – just yummy!  

To aid digestion, we thought we’d take a stroll through the mineral and gem collection, and look and see what was in The Vault.  However, before we got there, we encountered their Ancient People’s collection, tracing the fossil record of human evolution.  Here again, everything was very well marked and explained, and we were able to see examples of many of the different skull types from chimps, gorillas, Neanderthals, and first humans – a short course in comparative anatomy of hominids.  We were interested to learn of some new discoveries in the former soviet country of Georgia that may be from a group of hominids just recently discovered and still not placed on the tree of human evolution!  Very well done!

Then we made it to gems and minerals…Well…we seriously have never seen such a huge and complete collection.  There were gems, minerals of every description, as well as meteorites.  The Vault (which I’m assuming is locked up tightly every night!) held an incredible display … as Robert said, we may be missing some of the Tucson gem show, but we’re certainly not missing the gems!  I think that some parts of the collection had been assembled over 100 years ago, by people who were obviously very passionate about what they did; and they did a great job!

Once we had had our fill of rocks and minerals, we decided to head to the “Red Zone.”  (The museum is divided into four different zones of color which is then translated to the map, which does make things easier to find!)  The Red Zone, which is more about geology and the formation of the earth, is reached at this point (because of construction) out the door and around the corner into a very new wing.  (Honestly, we really loved the architecture of the original museum – old brick, very decorative; the new wing was rather steel and glass and doesn’t look like it is holding up nearly as well as old part!)  

Another great exhibition – from the long elevator going through a facsimile of the “earth” to wonderful displays on volcanoes and earthquakes … and finally, more gems and minerals!  Wow!  I’d certainly like to have some of those exhibits for myself! 

By this time, it was after 3 so we decided that 1) had to get to a bank as we desperately needed an ATM and 2) we wanted a little bit of “down” time before heading out to the BM.  Took a bus from South Kensington to Chelsea and found the Waitrose grocery store.  Really a nice store; much better than the Tesco Express from Tuesday.  We bought some basics and headed back to the flat.  Nice to kick the shoes off even for a short time!   Out again about 6!

More later!

m

xxx