London

I flew in from Oulu and spent a night at the cheapest hotel near the airport, a Comfort Inn, for the low discount price of $250. Then I went back to Heathrow in time to meet Susan, Michael, and Marley as they came out from the arrivals gate in Terminal 4. In the meantime, I’d also stopped briefly at Terminal 5, where they have a fountain I liked. It is a 5x10 grid of water spouts that shoot out from nozzles that are flush with the tiles. Each spout is about my height. The system stops them abruptly, so the water all falls to the ground at once with a loud snap. I only wished I could run around in there in my swimming trunks.

The British Museum
I made my maiden voyage to Europe in the year 2000. Since then, I have been to London more times than I can count, but there are still plenty of things I haven’t seen. Most of the British Museum goes on that list, although I try to get there for a few hours on every trip. As you know, it contains a good representative sample of the loot of an empire, so it is really more like conveniently visiting the cultural repositories of a dozen countries than seeing the culture of England itself. We scampered past the Elgin marbles, various winged Assyrian centaurs, a few Egyptian mummies and their cat statues, swords and bits of armour of every conceivable material and state of preservation (I liked the bronze ones best), and even a few dakinis and bodhisattvas. You often have to wonder, however, about the labels. A lot of supernatural Buddhist creatures, for instance, are depicted overcoming their own mental afflictions by trampling on them. The label in the BM says “Dakinis are usually shown standing on corpses.”

The Natural History Museum
This is another of my favourite museums, in part I think because it embodies the Victorian cultural obsession with nature. The arches on the entrances soar up fifty feet or more, and each arch has carvings of some living creature — birds on one, snakes on another — climbing up and over the top and down the other side. There is even one with monkeys. They also have huge ballrooms filled with, for instance, their rock collection, which is admittedly very fine. There's a vault room with some of their favourites, including a meteorite that they know came from Mars, because it had some small pockets of Martian air in it. There’s a huge diamond necklace from South Africa. They also have a fossil coelacanth, which is the only one I’ve ever seen. And in the dinosaur room they have a robot T-Rex. I watched a toddler lurch in, see the thing, and begin to wail. It seemed clear that this was just the sort of betrayal he had been expecting from his parents, who quickly picked him up and reassured him to the contrary.

The Phantom of the Opera
I’ve never been to a theatre in London, but on this trip we decided to find one, and I must say it was a lot of fun. The place was packed, although the Phantom has been haunting it nightly for 21 years now. They sell ice cream at the intermission, and the many stage tricks were just the kind of thing I like. The descent beneath the theatre was managed by having a catwalk lowered one end at a time while the actors walked on it. The Phantom had a stick that threw small balls of fire. The boat was exceedingly boatlike as it sailed back and forth on the stage. There was also singing and a plot of some kind.