More Sightseeing & BBQ Duck

As predicted, we ended up stuck in the area by our hotel for one more day yesterday because of the Tube strike. Today, with the Tube strike over, we headed back to city center to see the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum and try some ramen noodles at Wagamama in Covent Garden, another restaurant on About.com’s top 10 cheap eats in London. It wasn’t a crazy exciting day of sightseeing, but it was a nice way to start our last weekend in London, which is going to be pretty busy. One of the greatest things about London is that almost all the major museums are free. When you can see an amazing ancient artifacts like the Rosetta Stone (which dates back to 196 BC) for free, I tend to feel less like paying ridiculous sums of money to go to things like the London Eye or Tower of London.

In case you don’t know, what makes the Rosetta Stone so special, apart from its age, is the fact that it is carved with text made up of three translations of a single passage – two in Egyptian language scripts and one in classical Greek. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 contributed greatly to deciphering the principles of hieroglyph writing and understanding previously undecipherable examples of it. Before this trip, I associated the words Rosetta Stone with a language learning software that’s used in North America! Now I know why that company is named what it is…

Because the British Museum was fairly easy to navigate (especially compared to the Louvre), we spent a few more hours than planned checking out their exhibits, which were a lot more interesting than I had expected. I especially liked the Lewis chessmen, a group of 78 chess pieces from the 12th century, most of which are carved in walrus ivory, because of the funny looks on their faces – their faces are all carved to look bored or stressed out

 After a few hours of museum, we headed to Covent Garden, a district known for its trendy shops and restaurants, street performers, and entertainment facilities (a lot of the paparazzi pics I’ve seen in magazines here feature celebrities eating or going out in this area). We ate a disappointing bowl of ramen and chicken katsu curry (About.com needs to come try the ramen places in Vancouver if they think this is good ramen!), and then went around watching some of the street performers. Most of them were pretty ordinary, but there was one magician who caught our attention by swallowing a long balloon (gross!) and we ended up watching his entire show, which finished with a pretty neat trick whereby he made a huge melon appear from under a hat. Paul tried to look up how it’s done, but I think it’s more fun if you just let yourself be a kid again and go “wow, that’s really magic!”

Before heading back to our hotel, we went back to Chinatown to get some BBQ duck take away from the Four Seasons restaurant where we ate on our first night in London. We also picked up some bubble tea slushes from the place the guy who recommended Snog suggested, and it was pretty decent, but still no comparison to Dragon Ball teahouse back home! Now if we only had a place this good for BBQ duck…