Britain Trip, Day 3

Sunday 7 March 2010

We spent the day in the British Museum.  This museum is too large to see in one day, even if you come at opening time and stay until closing time.  It’s also a lot of walking.  But we tried to see as much as we could, and I think we did see a lot of it.  And Rachel tried to hurry and not read every single sign.  There were a lot of signs she did not read!

There was the Egyptian room with the mummies and a Japan room, China room, Africa room, North America room, Europe room, Greek and Roman room, Middle Eastern room, etc.  Note: Some of these “rooms” are actually three or four or five galleries.  I was impressed by the three galleries of library.  King George III donated his library to the museum–well, actually it was his son donating it on his behalf after his death–minor detail.  The books there weren’t all his–there were books from other sources too I think.  And there were displays of stuffed birds and marble samples and medicines and fossils and all manner of stuff that an 18th or 19th century gentleman might have in his library.  Apparently libraries weren’t just a gentleman’s collection of books–they were also private museums, or could be.  It was really interesting.  But I was most impressed by the sheer number of books.  I’ve seen public libraries without that many books.  Imagine three large hall sized rooms lined with book shelves.  Half of the bookshelf space has books, the other half has displays.  Now imagine a second story with half the number of bookshelves (spaced alternately with large windows) but these are completely filled with books.  Isn’t that a lot of books?  I looked at the titles.  Most were in English, but some were in other languages.  I was also amazed at the sheer number of books that came in multi-volume sets.  Like the History of France–I think that one was over 20 volumes.  I had to wonder if King George III or the original owners of these books actually read them.  Or maybe they were like people nowadays and just wanted to look smart.  I don’t know.

After leaving the museum we wandered around for awhile and then found a church that was opened and decided to attend services.  We could have attended services at Westminster Abbey (evening service 6:30 p.m.), but Jeremy didn’t want to go to an Anglican Service, so we found a Baptist Church in an old 150 year old building, ironically rather “new” compared to some of the other buildings we’d been seeing.  It was a small congregation, and the service was rather liturgical and there was a woman minister–not something I’m rather used to.  But the people were nice.  We talked to them after the service.   They were glad to see us and had actually heard of Bahrain and were quite friendly.  It was nice getting a chance to chat with some of the locals.