Things British and things not

As fantastic and geek-rewarding as Bath was, I think the British Museum might trump it. Bath was glorious for my Austenmania. The British Museum had Egypt, Greece, ancient Britain, and Japan. And that's only the part I got to.

I have to start with a list of things I saw. Or maybe just a picture of one of the things I saw.



YEAH. I saw it. In the flesh. And I almost missed it - it was in the one Egypt room I didn't get to. We were about to head downstairs, and I looked up and across and my heart nearly stopped. I could have stared at it for hours.


I DID stare at this:



For at least ten minutes. They have an entire exhibit on the tomb this painting comes from. Kate and I went into the room, and I saw this and was just floored. It's beautiful. I also saw the Rosetta Stone (about half my height, beautiful but absolutely THRONGED with tourists taking pictures, so it was tricky just getting close enough to get a decent look), the head of Ramses that inspired "Ozymandias" (does this make me now a traveler to an antique land?), a gorgeous set of samurai armor, two sets of Assyrian winged gate guardians, the Sutton Hoo burial treasures (helmet, shield, sword, grave goods), the friezes from the Parthenon...I could go on forever.

My favorite thing, though, is probably the carvings from the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal's palace of lion hunts. Lion hunting was the appropriate pastime for Assyrian kings - showcasing their manhood, their strength, their fitness to be king by triumphing over the greatest of beasts. These carvings went on for two entire rooms, all over both sides of the walls. They have plenty of incredible scenes with archers and lions that, in terms of dynamic action, quite frankly put Ramses at Kadesh to shame. But the incredible parts were the carvings of the lions alone. Like this one (again, not mine - I was too busy staring to take a picture):



And that's not even the best. The lions themselves were everywhere, and the sympathy they were carved with was just breathtaking.

At four, we (that is, Kate and Jeni and I) met up and had high tea on the top floor of the British Museum. And that was FANTASTIC! I want to have high tea every day for the rest of my life. Preferably with the scones they serve at the British Museum. We each had our own pot of tea (I got lemongrass and ginger - interesting, but never got very strong at all), and we split the scones, the finger sandwiches, and the pastries. (I got the chocolate mousse and the tiny cheesecake.)

Basically, if you ever get a chance to go to the British Museum, DO IT. If there aren't five different things you want to see there, I despair of you.

In other news, I went to see Henry V in the Trinity College garden last night. Interesting at some places, dragged in others. The Blackfriars production remains utterly unrivaled, although this version did the setpiece speeches nicely (particularly "Once more into the breach"). The wooing of Katherine is always a fantastic scene, and they did it well - with plenty of emphasis on how pissed and stripped the king of France actually is at the outcome of all this English patriotic conquest. And while the comic scenes, horrifically, were not that funny (and let me tell you, they ARE funny), this production did feature a priceless little ditty that Henry's army sang as they marched out at the end of the first half:

Harry, he took a tennis ball
And mounted it on top of Harfleur's wall
Gloucester
He hit it faster
But the Dauphin has no balls at all!

(Gloucester and faster rhyme better if you say it with an accent.)