Day at the Museums

Another Saturday in London - and this time of year demands some indoor site-seeing.  So, we set off for the museums...

First, we toured some of the more interesting exhibits at the British Museum.

The British Museum opened to the public in 1759.  Entry was free and given to ‘all studious and curious Persons’.
With the exception of two World Wars, the Museum has remained open ever since, gradually increasing its opening hours and moving from an attendance of 5,000 per year to today's 6 million.  And still free entry!

The British Museum houses over 9 million objects.  A few of our favourites included:

the Rosetta Stone

Easter Island statue:

Egyptian stuff:

Amy has a stencil she got in Egypt that shows heiroglyphics and their corresponding English letters.  She likes to write us notes in heiroglyphics and have us translate... It has been a fun game, but was even more fun to see that we could actually decipher some of the objects at the museum (very cool!)Mmmm.... mummies!

 We had fun guessing what some of these objects might have been used for...

We also looked at the Sutton Hoo (Viking) exhibit as well as some old clocks and a bunch of Asian statues.

Just enough time left in the day for a couple of hours at the Museum of Natural History (also free entry - though the plush dinosaurs Matt bought for the girls kind of compensated for that):

A special exhibition on Planet Earth, including gems and other amazing rocks:

We enjoyed the volcano room and the earthquake exhibit - where you stand in a Japanese grocery store and the room starts shaking as if you're in an earthquake. Strange, but fun.

Of course we had to say hi to Ol' T-Rex before catching the train home.