Jet lag allowed me to sleep for about 16 hours without feeling guilty in any way, so Day 2 got underway in mid afternoon. Brooke and I decided to go exploring around our area while Alison was out with her parents, and we ended up walking down Euston Road to St. Pancras Station and the British Library, 15-20 mins away.
The library had a really interesting exhibition on in their gallery space called Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art that explored the various uses of maps from about 1200 AD to the present, so of course, being history students we went in. The individual maps were divided into galleries based on the places they would have been displayed: school rooms, merchant's houses, rooms of state, etc. Some were absolutely beautifully detailed woodcuts, and others were painted on parchment or etched. There were quite a few of the New World, so we had a good time looking at the progression of what Europeans thought Canada looked like over the centuries. One of the most amusing maps was a piece of British propaganda that showed the importance of the tea trade. Over Canada there were captions like "Lumbermen need their tea" and "Eskimos find that tea helps them cope with the bitter cold of the North."
After moving through the galleries (and painfully for me, passing the stairs leading to the Treasures of the British Library gallery) we went into the shop to browse and each ended up picking mugs to have tea in our room. Mine has a detail from one of the carpet pages in the Lindisfarne Gospels (8th Century) (!), and Brooke's has a quote from Mansfield Park with a silhouette of Jane Austen on it. I also got a journal with the Chi-Rho from Lindisfarne on the cover. Nerding out I know..
We left the library and decided to see if we could find the British Museum, and took a little detour on some side streets, inadvertently finding the pub we're going to for orientation on Monday. It's really close to where our main classroom will be, and the area is lovely. We made it to the museum after consulting a trusty map, and just kind of gawked at it from the outside.
There's an exhibition opening soon featuring an Egyptian Book of the Dead, so that's pretty exciting!
We made our way back in the direction of our residence on Tottenham Court Road, which is packed with electronics shops, pubs and little cafés. Since it was Friday night, there were a million people in each pub, and we could tell where they were by the crowds drinking on the sidewalk... ha ha!
By this time we were pretty hungry, so we ate in a café called Cilantro. I had spaghetti because I was starving, and a fountain Cherry Coke (Yes.). We also found this absolutely adorable store called Paperchase, which is basically a giant stationary/card/notebook shop. I know where I'll be shopping for postcards now! I bought myself a sketchbook there for art history, and then we pretty much called it a day and came back to the room.
Alison was back by the time we got home, so we had girly chats and discussed plans before bed!
Deeeeeelightful!
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