(Edited on 21/02 . )Wow. Snow is still hanging on but looks nothing like the blizzards in december.
So i made tre trip to London and brought home the usual headache. Too big, too loud and too cramped cities - i'm glad i'm living in this small town of 160 thousand heads :D
The main reason i went was the British Museum, and i spent most of my time there. I listened there to a lecture about the mayan maize god, and i've understood every single word and every expression - something that made me very happy, especially when i think back that guided tour at Salisbury a few years ago when all i understood was "king blah blah blah king blah blah king"... There was an interesting question at the end, about the hands of the statue. Wath does that gesture mean? The curator who held the session said in shortly, we dont know. In lenght, free your imagination.
So that gesture just keeps bugging me even more so after seeing a two stories high Buddha statue a few rooms away and remembered all those south-east asian statues who have a very similar posture. Problem is, i have no idea what that means and if that means on that mayan anything and the curator was specialzied on the Americas and i'm sure he didn't knew either otherwise he would've mentioned it.
He had a funny anecdote too; talking about types of staple foods, he mentioned porridge - as a scotsman, that is The staple for him. But he also said, that his Puerto Rican wife made him eat it with banana instead of salt - so he's a "converted scotsman" :D Myself, well, i could never eat porridge, not oatflakes nor semolina - the latter is the common type in Hungary - not with sugar, or cocoa, or jam, i just didn't liked it. Until someone at the university dorm made it with honey and banana. I'm a convert too, since then i can it eat at least the sweetened (with honey) version, with banana, its almost a treat :)
The lecture was held in Room 1, which is a reconstruction of how the museum looked like when it was first opened in the middle of the 18th century, so it has things from lots of diffenerent times and places around the world. I found the touchy-feely version of the Rosetta Stone, exhibited like it was first in the 19th c., laid back and written "Please touch" under it. Luckily i wasn't the only one spending minutes there with that "wow this is for real" expression while stroking the stone :D There was the biggest goblet i ever saw, made from stone, the same height as me or a bit taller; a Sekhmet statue in front of which i almost said out loud - "Sekhmet you f***er" as one blogger used to say at her cat...
The food is still too expensive and not really good, but in exchange one can sit on uncomfortable chairs in an always cold and crowded and loud indoors court - under 10 meters high totem poles.
After lunch I looked up the native american stuff too, i went to the temporary room first, the one with the warrior stuff. They were as beautyful as warring things can go, the premium quality from everything - shirts, pipes, lots of beaded things and headdresses.
On my way there, i stumbled into a room full with primary school kids and stacked with mummies to the ceiling. I'm ok with mummies if they are in a large airy room with plenty of space, but this room was small, had a low ceiling (well, normal height, but lower then most rooms in the BM), and was stuffed with mummies and crates and sarchopaghs, and kids too. So on my way back, i did a loop around it to get to the north american room. There was only one room, though quite big, but was under reorganisation so at some places the plaque said "navajo rug" and there was a beaded saddle. Or that was the most shaped, padded, non-geometrical patterned and most colorfully beaded navajo rug
ever.
It was good to see the everyday versions of the fancy things from the warrior room. I even found those strange-looking hatchet Chingacgook had in the Last of the Mohicans movie. I read somewhere that it was based on ceremonial tools much smaller in size and used to crack nuts. Well, these ones were quite big, though not as big as in the movie, made from wood and not metal, and definetly not blue; but the text said they were used as weapons. Ha.
I found also a big put-there-everything room, with african kenus, eskimo clothing and a modern installation with pills. It was a looong table, with two twenty meter or so long (knitted :) nylon net on it with little pockets which contained pills, hundreds of pills, and pictures and texts on the edge of the table following the life of a typical man and a woman. Really interesting and thought inducing.
I found some of the objects from the bbc series, like the handaxe - it is big! - but started to get a headache and almost walked out, when checked my to-do list and almost slapped myself on the forehead. Nearly forgot the
Staffordshie hoard! It was only four little tables with samples and three posters, but wow. Most of the pieces had dirt and soil on them and they were very small, just a few cm in size like this sword fitting. Which made it even more interesting - those inlays with garnet are marvelous. Both they sheer beauty and the craftmanship behind them. Sometimes those old jewels and artefacts struck me as slightly on the cruder side even when they are made from gold with gemstones and were owned by kings, as nowadays those laser and whatnot technologies can make so fine things, but these little things topped everything in a modern jewelry shop. So finely made and the contrast between the gold and the garnet, and those celtic designs, i'm so glad for being able to see them. I hope they don't end up sold off, i want to see them clean and tidy and some of they secrets uncovered :)
On my way from the museum to the station, i thought, hey, it's only 3 o'clock, do i really want to get home? Next stop was St. Paul's, and i got off the train on a whim. Last time i was in London i saw it or thought i saw it from a distance, so i thought i check it out, and maybe have a coffee if i can found a starbucks nearby. I went around and there it was, the St Paul Cathedral, scaffolded up half its side. It's impressive. Walked off a square near it, and that was some strange little place: called Paternoster square, it was surrounded by all modern buildings - i mean all buildings were modern, '90- 00's style. Never saw such a place before. Usually there are older and newer buildings too, sometimes with hundred years of age gap, sometimes just 20, so always a bit eclectic. Well, this was not. looked like the inside of a shopping plaza. It was full with suits, i was the only one dressed casually, with a big fair isle scarf in my neck. Ok its The City, the financial district, but i didn't expected to find it literally at the foot of St Paul's. I expected old buildings around a cathedral and tourist, not white collars and fancy soup diners. I saw three or four caffeterias, but all where stuffed with businessmen and were so loud that a kindergarten room in lunchtime seemed a quite place compared to them. No coffee.
Saw these strange statues off the Paternoster square and i went to check what they are but found no inscription. Instead i saw these really funny street names on a corner: Ave Maria Lane and Amen Street. I guess the bigger the city the funnier the street names. In
Szombathely where i went to high school, we had Spinner street and Weaver street; in Southend we have Valkyre Road, in Budapest we had ones like Bloodfield and Turkish Danger, and London... well. English humour. Also found this strange thing near the front steps of the cathedral, have no clue what it is - all spikes and iron, in a corner. Maybe it's better i don't know what it is...
I bought a coffe at the station and drink it on train before it even departed. I fell asleep around West Ham - that's what, 3 minutes? roughly - and woke up at Benfleet 20 minutes later and that was when i realized that it wasn't a display error when the timetable said at Fenchurch street that next stop is Benfleet. The train did not stopped 'till then. I was down on Southend High street in 45 minutes instead of one hour 5 minutes and got home before dark.
Aside of the cashier messing up my train ticket - i bought London zones 2-5 train stations by mistake, and not London Terminals plus Underground zones 1-5 and he said it was the latter, so had to buy a daily ticket to the tube... overall it cost about the same, but i couldn't get through the gates at Fenchurch street as that's zone 1. So beside this and the headache which lasted till sunday, it was a nice day out.
but also, i dont have a tv set now and no one to watch as my cousins aren't interested in winter sports and the rest of my family is too far away. I watched the games on bbc online, not everything, and not compulsively, and often in the background while doing knitting. I cheered mostly for strangers, for good games, for people whose few-line backround stories cathced my attention or just had a catchy name; i cheered for brits and hungarians in particular - when i could get snippets of them, when not, i had to do with poles and any neighbourghs like slovaks and slovenians and austrians. Or anyone. They where good games, great moments, lots of fog and snow, and well, canada can cheer :)
