On Monday, we started out from the hotel and caught the DLR and then the Tube to go to the British Museum. We met Deborah there, where she took us on a two-hour tour, from about 10:15 to about 12:15. It is ridiculous to try to see the British Museum in two hours, so Deborah took us to several specific exhibits, and we tried to remind the students that this was a survey of sorts; they could (and should) come back another time and try to see more.

Deborah took us around the museum in an efficient walking path which saved time, but took us out of chronological order. So, we started the tour with a couple of Medieval treasure hordes; one was a chest of gold coins worth about $500,000 in today’s money. It had probably been buried during the Wars of the Roses to keep it safe, and was never retrieved. The other horde we looked at was a bunch of chess pieces found in a cave, probably left by a Norwegian trader who was never able to come back for them.

We then moved back in time to the early Anglo-Saxons of Britain. We looked at a horde found as part of an inland ship burial of a king. There were lots of armor pieces and some decorative pieces, as well as some money found at the site.

After the Anglo-Saxons, we moved on to Roman Britain, with some very rare samples of letters written on birch bark, as well as some gold, silver, and bronze necklaces and other decorative items. This was followed by looking at ancient Egypt, focusing mostly on mummies and sarcophagi. We then got to see the Rosetta Stone, which is famous because it had inscriptions in three languages: hieroglyphics, Coptic, and Greek. The Stone let scholars finally decipher hieroglyphics, which no one could read until the Stone was found in the mid-1800s. We then moved on to the Elgin Marbles, which are the very detailed carved marble friezes that used to be at the top of the Parthenon in Greece, but were bought by a British collector in the late 1800s and moved to the museum. Some of the carvings are amazingly detailed and could pass for sculpture from the 1600s or even later.

We finished our tour by going into a very pretty large room that houses many books and other oddities from the collection of a doctor whose personal collection started the British Museum. As an aside, he was also the person who thought to make bitter cocoa into a tasty beverage by adding sugar and warm milk, so many of us felt very kindly toward the doctor for inventing hot chocolate.

We said goodbye to Deborah for the time being, and caught the Tube to the British Library. We did not have much time once we got there, so we encouraged the kids to grab something quick to eat at the cafe; they only had about fifteen minutes to eat. We met up with the first of two tour guides we would have at the Library, an infectiously enthusiastic woman named Aviva. She laughed a lot, and she took us into the Treasures Room of the Library, where they display some of the unique or rare items. We got to see two copies (of four remaining) of the Magna Carta, and we got to see two of the three oldest complete New Testaments (from about 300 AD). There were some old illustrated manuscripts and some fragments of very old copies of books of the New Testament (from before 100 AD).

We got to see the handwritten notes for songs from the Beatles. There was an entire display case dedicated to Alice in Wonderland, including some handwritten journals and a version of Alice with illustrations by Salvador Dali. There were cases with notes or early editions of Chaucer, Austen, Bronte and others. It was a book-nerd paradise. The Treasures Tour took about an hour, and then we met a guide who took us on a general tour of the Library. He pointed out the King’s Collection from George III, which is required to be publicly displayed, and he told us the Library is the third largest library in the world, after a library in Russia and the Library of Congress. We were shown a model of the library and how it resembles a large ship from one angle (it really does). Finally, we were shown a film on how books get from storage to a patron, a process of moving books along a conveyor that takes about an hour. The kids were clearly getting tired after being on their feet for so much of the day, but they hung in there.

After the Library, we took the Tube back to the theatre district, and with much consulting of maps and some considerable student aid, we found the St. Martin’s Theatre, where we were to see a production of The Mousetrap, by Agatha Christie. We still had over ninety minutes until we needed to meet for the show, so we let everyone go to supper. Five students stuck with me and Meredith, and we ended up at a very good Italian restaurant in a large basement several blocks from the theater. It was fun to eat with the students. They all left right after supper, but Mer and I lingered to get dessert.

We all met up at the theater at 6:45, and got into the theater shortly thereafter. St Martin’s is a small theater, and since it was a Monday in January, the theater was only about one-third full. That was not all bad as it let several of us spread out from our original seats and gave us more room. The Mousetrap has been playing for well over fifty years, and we were seeing the 24,219th showing of the play. One funny (to us) story – one student saw a picture of the fiftieth anniversary celebration and jokingly identified the older woman at the center as Miss Marple. I corrected him quietly and told him to never make fun of Her Majesty the Queen when in England. He was chagrined – he really had not realized it was Queen Elizabeth.

Anyway, The Mousetrap was much fun. It was funny and fluffy and still engaging while we all tried to figure out who done it. The characters were colorful, especially the young man named Christopher Wren (named for the architect). Most of us failed to figure things out, and the kids loved it. We were asked not to reveal the ending, so you will have to go see it yourself.

We headed back to the Tube in a light rain, and got back to the hotel at about 10:30. It was the last of the very late days for the trip, but we still had another full day of touring to go.