Dickinson College Humanities Program in Norwich

After spending all morning viewing the beautiful architecture of The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster (or Westminster Abbey) I decided to take advantage of two hot spots close to the hotel; the British Museum and Oasis Health Club.  Unfortunately the latter was closed to the general public, but I was still lucky enough to journey over to the British Museum.

Upon walking into the museum I was immediately taken aback by the vast size of the lobby. I couldn’t possibly imagine what was beyond the walls of the entrance, but we grabbed a map and decided to plot out our route.  After simply staring at the map for a few minutes Patsy and I noticed a section at the bottom that said, “Make the most of your visit” followed by a series of objects spread out throughout the museum.  We decided that this would probably be our best bet and we were off.

We journeyed through the rooms and experienced some of the oldest objects from Egypt, Rome, Greece, and China, just to name a few, but despite the numerous countries represented in the British Museum objects from the United Kingdom did not appear to be present in any of the rooms of the museum.  For so many years England was a major powerhouse in the world and was able to collect these valued and ancient items from all over the world.  I was anticipating that when I took trips to these neighboring nations that I would be able to see these detailed objects and to take a step further into the ancient world, but with the British Museum hosting so many of these notable items I could hardly contain myself as I stepped closer to marble statues of Roman gods.  I reached out and slowly rubbed my fingers against the cold stone, but apparently that’s not allowed (there really should have been better signage in the area..) and so as we ventured through the rest of the museum I made sure to keep my hands behind my back so as not to be tempted to touch the objects again (really I felt like a little kid, with so much history surrounding me and just wanting to touch it! And I typically do not get excited about museums.)

Because of the vast size of the museum, and the number of objects on the, “Make the most of your visit” list we were only able to get through about half of the objects.  But I am excited to return to the museum and to finish moving through the rest of the museum.