I arrived in the UK last night at about midnight and my driver was kind enough to get my room set up for me ahead of time as the pub I stay in shuts down at midnight. So when we crawled in at 1 am, I didn't have to sleep in the parking lot.  I was hoping for a sunny day to go to the Medicial Garden in London, but it was cold, dark, and wet. I went to the British Museum instead to drool at over the Sutton Hoo sword replica. 

After a nice English breakfast, I took the train into London and the tube to Holborn. It's a short walk past Bloomsbury Square

to the Museum, which is an imposing complex dominating the street. From the inside, it looks almost like a dome was put up to cover an courtyard.





I wasn't really looking at everything, mostly wandering and looking at tools but some of the stuff was amazing and there were whole galleries dedicated to themes, like the Asian Art Gallery below.



Jumping ahead, the Sutton Hoo exhibit is amazing and the Lankton replica breathtaking. If it doesn't make you want to pick it up and go raiding, I think you might be soulless.



Close up of the tip shows the shimmer in the photo is not an effect of the photo:



There was a fairly large exhibit on British burial mounds with some lovely work:



Another cool exhibit was the one on making iron in Ancient Greece - using either local ores or meteorites. I'll have to send this to Ric Fuller and Lee Sauders when I get home but below is the bloom from a Greece bloomery made using a meteorite, the consolidated metal, and a knife forged from it.



There were a bunch of cast broze tools, for war,



for masons,



and some cast in gold - I'm not going to encourage Ben to make this dagger, at least not in the same metal. Orginial is from the Lower Kingdom I think...lots of mummies.



A nice exhibit on Ethiopia...



and a shadow box by Xu Bing mimicing a brush painting, all done with shadows on frosted glass.




After 4-5 hours, I took the tube over to Paddington Station to visit the bear,



then walked over to Babylon Cafe, for a Lebanese mixed grill lunch (I was good and skipped the bread). Then back to Gerrards Cross to prepare for work tomorrow.