4-25-09 London Day 4

Today we visited the British Library, home to some of the world's greatest literary treasures. We were able to see the Gutenberg Bible, some of the original Magna Carta documents, originals of the Brontës, Woolf, some of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches, old Zoroastrian religious texts, very old copies of the Qur'an, and the King's Library, an enormous collection of 60,000 books owned by English kings.

Unfortunately, three of the things we came to see, namely Beowulf, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and most importantly, the originals of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, were on loan. This had happened to us a few times already (see Florence Day 2 when Machiavelli's tomb was covered in scaffolding) so it was a little easier to bear, but still disappointing.

Attached to the Library was the British Library Centre for Conservation, where old and damaged books are taken to be restored and stabilized for storage, exhibit, and loaning. Tours were by appointment only, so we had to be content with their 1 room "museum" which had plenty of interactive exhibits, videos of restoration techniques on loop, examples of restored works, information about sources of damage and repairs made, and more. For a book geek, this is a playground.

Parting ways with the British Library, we headed down to Bloomsbury to check out a small bookshop called Collinge & Clark, that served as the backdrop for a British TV show we like called Black Books. We arrived at the store (which was closed, thankfully), and found it to be unassuming, small, and specializing in antiquarian books. We got some shots of Natasha out front just for kicks :)

Earlier I promised a bit of info about the street names in London. The thing about London is that street names can change without warning, often from block to block. As we were trying to navigate our way to the British Museum, we walked down one street that changed names 4 times in 4 blocks. My hypothesis is that they have more famous dead people than they have streets, so they rename streets midway to fit more of them in. But I digress :)

In the British Museum we found the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon friezes, and much more. Normally the museum carries a preserved corpse from Northern England, called the Lindow Man, who is suspected to have been killed as a human sacrifice in a Druid religious ceremony. However, like Chaucer and Beowulf, he too was on loan that day.

That night, we decided to try the pizza place near our hotel. The pizza was average. What was exceptional was the dessert - the menu had a warning that the "Chocolate Challenge" was for two or more people to share, and the price wasn't terrible, so we decided to go for it. This is what we ended up with:

If I recall correctly, this has chocolate cake, chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream, layered with more syrup, whipped cream, chocolate discs and more syrup. We finished about 2/3 of it. I could have continued but I was sure that I would have poisoned myself in the process. Be warned, America is not the only place where hedonism takes on fantastic proportions :)