Nerding out at the British Museum

 One of the things Margarite was really looking forward to on this trip was visiting the British Museum. 

On our way there we came across some kind of television shoot right next to the museum. We couldn’t see any actors, but we think they might have been shooting “Ted Lasso.”

Not so fun fact: The British Museum houses more stolen artifacts than any other place in the world. 

Despite it’s lousy reputation for refusing to repatriate anything back to its rightful owner, The British Museum is one of the largest in the world and far be it for us to judge. We went to see history, and its vast collection did not disappoint.

The museum is known for such artifacts as The Elgin Marbles, the Sutton Hoo Mask, and The Rosetta Stone

 but nothing could prepare us for its outstanding collection of mummies and sarcophagi in the Egyptian section. These were absolutely jaw dropping!

Margarite fancies herself a history buff so when we came upon the Standard of Ur and some of the El-Amarna letters, she just about fainted. 

 To be able to gaze at the actual correspondence between Kings and ancient Pharoahs was just awesome. In this case it was a letter complaining that the Pharoah had sent along an unsatisfactory dower for the King’s daughter.

We spent hours there, and came to the conclusion the there’s no way we were going to be able to see the whole thing in one day. We would just have to come back. We’ve got no problem with that!

Getting around and Fitzrovia…a great area to stay in London

When we first booked our trip, we wanted to stay in an area that was walking distance to the British Museum and the West End theatre district as those were two of the things we knew for sure we were planning to do. 

We settled on a cute little AirBnb in Fitzrovia, just north of Soho. 

This has turned out to be a fantastic choice. The area is safe, near the Goodge St Tube station, and there is a grocery store just around the corner.

Fitzrovia at 6 in the morning (we were still jetlagged)

 We picked a place that had a washer and a kitchen to save money on eating out. A £25 trip to the grocery store is easily saving us £125 on breakfasts, and probably more if you consider that we feed ourselves so well in the morning that we often don’t  need to eat lunch. 

We are probably 2 tube stops away from Leicester Square, and two tube stops away from Euston station- the main rail station where you can catch a train to other parts of the UK. 

The Tube took a little getting used to at first, but we quickly got the hang of it. As long as you know how to pay, you’re all good.

When we first arrived, we bought an Oyster card at the airport and put £20 on it. 

We ended up putting another £25 on it later which was just about perfect for our 7 day stay. The Oyster card has a daily cap on how much you can spend depending on which zones you go through. We mostly travel in Zones 1 & 2 so the cap is about £7.70 per day.

 The only day we didn’t use our Oyster Card was the day we went to the Tower of London. That day, we used a single day Travel Card because the National Rail has a deal called 2for1 Days Out. If you buy certain passes at a national rail station and show a voucher, you can get 2 for 1 tickets for some attractions for that day. Seeing as how the Tower of London was about £30 each, it made sense to do a little bit of planning to make this work for us. 

We were able to save about £20 total (the travel pass was slightly more than what the Oyster Card daily cap was). 

Information on these discounts can be found at daysoutguide.co.uk . 

Make sure you read ALL the directions and know what the rules are if you want to do this. Not all passes will work, and in some cases, you have to print out a voucher, which may be difficult to do while on the road.

For our entire stay in London so far, the weather has been perfect. May is evidently a really good time to travel here. There were times we could have walked to the places we were going, but it was nice to be able to just pop onto the tube to rest our feet. We’ve been walking an average of 5 miles a day! Good thing…we have to walk off all that heavy British food somehow!

Tower of London Surprises!

 There is a show we’ve been binge watching called “Inside the Tower of London” that got us fired up to go see the iconic landmark. I think it’s on it’s 4th or 5th season, and it’s really well done. Anyhow, we set aside today for our visit, and the weather couldn’t have been more beautiful. 

Along with being a palace, a prison, a records office, an armory and barracks for troops, the Tower of London was also once a zoo. There were these cool wire statues placed around the grounds to represent the types of animals that used to live there. I only took pictures of the monkeys for some reason. Probably because I just love taking pictures of monkeys!

I’ve been to the Tower of London years ago, but the circumstances were such that I don’t remember much.  Our visit started rather slow and typical. We beelined to the see the Crown Jewels before it got too crowded and were in awe with the obscene amount of wealth concentrated in one place. Sadly, there are no photos allowed in the area where the jewels are, so you’ll just have to use your imagination on this one.

 

The Beefeaters give tours that start every half hour and we learned about all of the Tower’s gory history. We both found it kind of strange at how nonchalant the Yeomans were as they described the murders, beheadings, and backstabbing political intrigue that occurred within the walls. Like it’s totally normal to marry someone and then execute her 3 years later, then marry someone else 10 days after the execution, marry a teenager, behead the teenager…etc etc. 

 

One of the highlights was the White Tower which had a pretty extensive museum inside that mostly involved armor and weapons. 

 

Inside one of the rooms there was some filming going on and we stopped to listen what was happening. A guy was talking about this crown that was going to be used at the Queens 50th Jubilee in 2 weeks and giving an elaborate description about it. 

The guy doing the explaining was clearly miked up and doing the presentation for the cameras but the other visitors were just kind of uninterested and avoiding him. So Helmut and I stepped up and gave the guy some interaction for the camera…giving the photog adequate opportunity for cutaways and asking the right questions so he could explain it without sounding awkward. 

Afterwards we were approached by a girl who asked for our information and permission to use our images on tv . Turns out, they were filming for “Inside the Tower of London!”  We were stoked! Here we were binging on this show, and now we might be in an episode? SWEET! I just wish I had done my hair or something that morning…I looked pretty wretched. The girl said to look out for it sometime in September. I didn’t get an upclose picture of the crown, but went back and quickly snapped a pic of the film crew.

We were just about to wrap up our visit when we decided to stop and talk with one of the Yeoman Guards. We chatted with him for about 20 minutes and got all kinds of interesting info. 

His name was Shaun (spelled the proper way he says), and we talked about his travels, his family, his life at the Tower, and we gave him our email so he could hit us up for info when he decides to travel to Hawaii. He was super interesting, and our conversation with him was one of the highlights of our time there. 

At Shaun’s suggestion, we went over to the Chapel where a bunch of people are buried (even those that were executed).

 What we found there was shocking!

 Helmut noticed that one of the monuments to the dead was for a guy named John Holland.

 To understand why this is shocking, let me back up for a minute and give you a little background.

A few weeks before we left for our trip, I was doing some genealogy research and discovered that through my mother’s grandmother, I had ancestors who were English. I traced her line all the way back to a place near Manchester called Upholland. Those ancestors were the Hollands of Upholland and I was able to trace back to Ulfe de Holland who was my great great great….too many greats to even say, like over 40 or something. Either way, it was a direct line through my great grandmother. At the time, I was also excited to find that that these were noblemen and there was a fair amount of history surrounding these people…including some of the Hollands who were founding members of The Order of the Garter, which was apparently a pretty big deal. During this search, Helmut and I also discovered that we had a common ancestor by the name of Thurston Holland (37 generations ago). I spent a lot of hours trying to find a museum or something that we could visit near Manchester that might mention these people who we were both apparently related to, but to no avail. 

So back to John Holland…

We asked the Yeoman Guard at the chapel what he knew about this John Holland and he went into this whole explanation about him being in the Order of the Garter (It was a Knights Templar thing and there were apparently only like 23 of these guys) and further explained some history about him that I recognized from my genealogy research!  This was one of our ancestors! I can better figure out the relation when I get back home, but this was very exciting! And we found him buried in the Tower of London of all places….who would’ve thunk?