old things and a new coat

well... I have been slack in updating the blog for the past few days... I have been out and about seeing London and getting back rather tired, so here I am on a cold Monday morning (it is 5 degrees right now), with the last few days in review:

A day at the Museum...

...and a day is not nearly enough. The British Museum is a bit of a tourist trap on the weekends and full of loud school groups on weekdays, but whenever you go, you are fascinated, awed and basically run out of time to see everything...

The Egyptian Government calls the Museum the best advertisement for Egypt in the world, and as it has the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside Egypt they are quite right!

There are halls and galleries full of granite statues and burial find (including dozens of mummies on display). To stop and read the information on every piece would take years. I chose to wander through and glance at everything, working on my current "travel principal" that I will return to the parts I liked in more detail at a later date (HA!)

...and of course the Museum has more than just Egyptian artifacts, there are displays from most for corners of the former British Empire, as well as huge collections from ancient Greece and Rome. Although the majority of the Greek galleries were closed for some unexplained reason (welcome to London) so that will give me a definite reason to return.

The architectural highlight was the relatively newly finished Great Court by Norman Foster. A huge faceted glass roof has been spun between the walls of the old museum and the circular reading room in the middle of the courtyard. The effect is amazing... a giant white space that provides perfect circulation to the various galleries, a meeting place, a place to rest for a few minutes and let your sore feet recover from pounding the stone floors and a place to sit and try to absorb what you have just spent the last 4 or 5 hours looking at...

The great walk...

When a day dawns with crystal clear blue skies and a slightly warm sun (although tempered by a cool breeze) the thing to do is to get outdoors... I had intended to visit the Tower but decided to do a more on-the-move bit of site seeing (plus I still hadn't bought a decent coat so I figured here was a good excuse to see some sights and find a coat at the same time. In short I walked from the East End to Southwark and then to the West End... quite a few miles! The sights seen?

- The remnants of the Old London Wall

- The Barbican Development (including 15 minutes of the London Symphony Orchestra playing in the Concert Hall thanks to a kind usherette on the door...)

- St Paul's, again... (and this time I established that it costs 9.50GBP to get in... when I eventually do the tour and the walk to the top of the dome)

- The Millennium (or Wobbly) Bridge (the pic of St Paul's is from this bridge - note the cranes - good for construction jobs!)

- The turbine hall of the Tate Modern with its infamous "crack" (the current installation... which is actually quite intriguing as it is at least 3 feet deep at some points and runs the complete length of the hall...)

- The Globe Theatre

- Borough Market (which will be about 10 minutes walk from my flat and has some superb cheeses, vegetables, antipasto and one of only 2 places in London you can get a Flat White Coffee...)

...and yes, the walk did result in a new coat, which has been very useful as the temperature has dropped and taken the pressure off my old leather one... which has performed admirably I might add.

Trainspotting... well the trains turn up later in the week...

St Pancras Station seems to have gotten some good publicity all around the world... and rightly so!

For us, here at the beginning of the 21st century, buildings of large size or structures of extraordinary span are seen every day in every city... they are every day things... unfortunately many of them lack grandeur, scale and the ability to awe.

This one has been doing it with ease since 1868.

Photos do not do it justice, the span of the pale blue vaulted iron and glass arch is beyond description... the structure is unbelievably delicate... and even in London's dull light the train shed bright. The contrast between the 19th Industrial Revolution architecture and the new steel and glass platforms is wonderful. That contrast will be complete once the sleek Eurostar trains start running from the station this week.