Chapter Ten: In Which We Finish Our Tourism and Prepare to Go Home

Last day in London. What to do? We felt compelled to revisit the British Museum for a third time, because we hadn't really seen enough the first two times. This time, we had our sights set on Europe. This flagon is from Iron Age France.

This is a peacock, sans tail, from Roman Britain.

The 12th-century Lewis chess set. The gigantic chess pieces in the first Harry Potter movie were modelled on this set.

Alas. Here, as at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Mediaeval rooms were being refurbished.

We headed down for a look at Alexandrian Greece instead. Here is a boy with a bunch of grapes and a predatory cockerel, from the first century BC. Who knew chickens could get so big?

This Hermes is from 150 BC. He appears to be wearing a plate on his head but the sign assures us that it is a petasos, or wide-brimmed hat.

This is a life-sized Molossian hound (related to the modern mastiff).

The tourists were pretty thick on the ground by the time we left Alexandrian Greece, so we decided to say goodbye to the British Museum. We went to nearby Neal's Yard Dairy to buy some good English cheese to take home, and were rewarded with lots of samples. Next, we got fish and chips take-out from Fryer's Delight, a good old-fashioned fish and chips shop where the food is fried in beef dripping. Yum. We took it to Red Lion Square and ate on a park bench. Very good stuff!

And now it was our last afternoon in London. We decided to take advantage of a pass we had been given which gave us free admission to Kensington Palace (as well as the Tower of London - that pass saved us about $120). We took the bus so we could see a bit more of the city. Here's the umbrella store on the corner of New Oxford and Bloomsbury, very close to where we were staying. This kind of store must be very useful in London.

We rode in the front seats on top of the double-decker.

All of a sudden we saw the Royal Albert Hall on one side of the road and the Albert Memorial on the other, so we hopped off the bus.

We had seen a model of the Albert Memorial at the V&A...

but we weren't prepared for the grandeur and size of the real thing.

Victoria really, really loved that guy.

At each corner were statues representing Europe, North America, Asia...


and Africa, where the dominant figures were Egyptian or other northern Africans. There was one stereotypical sub-Saharan African, but he was behind the others with his face turned away. And he was naked.

From here, we walked down "Flower Walk" to Kensington Palace.

The squirrels were very aggressive. One actually jumped up at Kelly. People must feed them despite the signs at each end of the walk that tell them not to. Sara would NEVER do that.

Kensington became a palace when William and Mary bought it because the London air was too polluted for William, who was asthmatic. Most of the rooms we saw were preserved from their time, but we also saw the bedroom of Princess Victoria, and a selection of her childhood toys. She and her mother lived here until Victoria came to the throne and moved to Buckingham Palace. More recently, it was the home of Princess Diana. Inside, we saw a display of some of her gowns, as well as displays of court dress and how it's made.

Here's Sara at a sentry box in the garden just outside the palace.

One last gift shop, and our tour of London was complete. We walked to Queensway tube station, got off at Tottenham Court Road, picked up a salad and some wine at Marks and Spencer, and had one last pint at the Rising Sun (alas, Sara's favourite, Timothy Taylor, was being conditioned) before heading back to the hotel to pack.

A fantastic trip - we can hardly wait to go back.