acting like a tourist
well, i forgot my camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it, but i did manage to spend the whole day out of the house yesterday and quite a day it was!
i had an appointment with the sushi restaurant job, and i am taking it! starting next monday i’m working every day for the following two weeks, and hopefully i won’t have to spend it all on a place to stay for the second week, because i’m set to leave the room i’m in now on the 20th. all the other people in the flat are leaving as well (except the one who’s coming back to the room i’m in), so part of me is hoping that one of the rooms will stay empty for a week while they look for someone new and i can just crash there. but no guarantee of that, so we’ll have to see.
in the meantime, i’ve got to start getting my tourist on before i’m working all the time, and i started after my interview with some museums and a polish cafe. it was fun!
the polish place was one of the cheapest listings in my lonely planet for the neighborhood i was in (south kensington/knightsbridge), and borscht and potato pancakes sounded good to me, so i searched it out for lunch. it didn’t open until 12:30, so i killed time in the natural history museum. the moral of that experience was: natural history museums are kind of boring when you’re not a kid. Or at least when you’re not With a kid.
i mean, it’s not that i have No interest in the eating habits of the saber-toothed tiger, but it’s also rather easy for me to just let that knowledge slide. i decided that a phenomenon is in effect that is something like: i know enough about what makes a mammal a mammal and how cells work that i don’t feel compelled to run and push every blinking button that offers another pearl of wisdom on those matters, but i Don’t know enough about the details of such things to derive geeky entertainment from scrutinizing bone fragments and commenting on the authenticity of the dioramas. so as a result i just float along in this purgatory of both knowledge and ignorance, and can’t really be bothered to look too closely at the things passing by.
that’s a rather accurate description of the plague of everyday adulthood, actually, so maybe natural history museums just bring it into stark relief.
that really isn’t entirely fair, though, because i have quite a capacity for fascination in everyday things, and i also have a very fond memory of spending a day in the new york museum of natural history when i was a freshman at nyu. i had the rather opposite takeaway experience then, actually, because i was enlightened by the exhibit on the differences between egglaying and internal gestation, and i felt saddened that we didn’t spend much time as adults just wandering around and learning things about the world around us.
so it might just be that the london exhibits suck and haven’t really been updated since the 70’s.
a downside of that whole “the museums are free!” bit, perhaps.
either way, the building itself was gorgeous, and i’m not saying that i regret the visit. i just didn’t stay for long.
i went to lunch at the polish place, and the lonely planet did itself proud. the borscht, which they made a point to recommend, was excellent, and the potato pancakes were just fine, served with very good chunky applesauce and enough sour cream. i also had a taster of cherry vodka because it was quite cheap, and the waitress recommended it (along with “bison” flavor, which totally left me stumped. google says it’s bison grass, which makes much more sense. but sounds gross.)
i didn’t think about the potential olfactory associations with cherry + alcohol until it arrived and i took the first sip but, yeah, to modify a friend’s comic witticism regarding cilantro and soap: it Did taste like cough syrup, but it’s the only cough syrup i like.
so that helped me to see how people in eastern europe can take vodka seriously for things other than completely smothering with juice, and that tolerance surely makes me a better person.
after lunch, i ended up deciding to leave the neighborhood and go to the british museum instead. i had thought i would take advantage of being right near the science museum and the victoria & albert, but since i wasn’t going to pay for an imax movie or anything i suspected the science museum would feel much like the natural history had, and the v&a sounded good but the british museum sounded better. seeing that it was also a higher priority on the “must see” list, and i could go to the v&a any day before or after work now, it seemed wise to take advantage of my flexible afternoon and go to the british museum right away.
this was a good plan, and it made me excited.
you see, as i had begun thinking more about the places i really want to visit in london, i realized that the british museum is high on the list not just because it’s really famous and would probably be cool in general, but also because i am actually quite geeked out by one of its most famous attractions – the rosetta stone.
as i get older, i am realizing that one of the quirks about me that could potentially mature into one of my adult armchair hobbies is that i really like alphabets. i mean, i like languages in general, and am not very secretly envious of those people who somehow learn to speak some double-digit number of them, but i also just really like alphabets, which i think is rather less common. i went to russia once for 10 days and, before leaving, i taught myself the cyrillic alphabet just so that i could sound out the signs. then a few years ago, after the revelation that my name only has six letters in greek because of θ, i decided to learn the greek alphabet, too, which i still sometimes use, to david’s amusement, to make crosswords harder when they are otherwise too easy. the fact that these could be signs of something more than just the weird ways i choose to pass the time first occurred to me when i read a whole book about the idea of the alphabet (as in, the idea of using a relatively small number of symbols to phonetically represent speech, rather than using pictures to represent whole ideas), and was completely fascinated. i mean it Was a short book, and very wittily written, but still…
anyway, the rosetta stone strikes me as particularly cool, and indeed, it was kind of amazing to look at it for a while and think about actual people chipping way each of those letters, and then academics poring over them thousands of years later to figure out the language underneath. it had that funny glow of something deservedly famous, even though what it actually says is quite mundane, and i stared at it a few times because those museum planners know their stuff and they put it near a hub where it’s easy to pass by rather than way in the back somewhere where traffic would jam up.
the british museum on the whole was very impressive. that whole sun never setting on the empire bit gave them quite a bit of daylight during which to collect stuff of all varieties, and the museum is immense and dense. i don’t really think they need that many greek vases, actually, but what can you do?
i didn’t see everything, and if i have time i might go back with my camera, but i spent a few hours there and saw a lot of neat things before my artifact appreciation circuits fried themselves and i began walking by exquisite chinese porcelain with a yawn.
then i went home.
before i left i bought a few souvenirs, including… are you ready to know this exists? a blinking rosetta stone pin.
i mean, come on.
because they have to fill as many souvenir niches as they can, right?
and people like things that blink!
i made a rather loud guffawing noise when i saw it, but as i began to put it back part of my brain was like “seriously, kynthia, one day that is going to be the Perfect accessory for something, and you are going to smack yourself if you don’t spend £2 on it now.”
no arguing with that logic.
i got a chocolate one, too, with a reusable mold, so if only i hadn’t already had that alphabet birthday party…
the other thing i got is more respectable as a museum souvenir, in that it’s one of those things that is a bit gimmicky but also rather clever, and so you buy it in acknowledgment of this even though it costs too much.
it’s a fold-up ruler that gets to be 2 meters long, and has a timeline of history imprinted on it along with centimeters and inches.
i am roughly the same height as when nightgowns were introduced, and if i wear heels i can be as tall as f=ma or the collapse of the mayan empire.
good to know, that.