Off with her head!!

As it may be obvious by the title, Becca (my travel buddy) and I are really big nerds, each in our own way, and find an immense amount of pleasure in museums and thusly historical artifacts.  We attempted to do the "abbreviated" version of a tour of The British Museum which claimed to take no longer than an hour... It easily took us two...
  However, we got to see some very genuine, one-of-a-kind artifacts that I have only read about in textbooks and honestly never thought I would get to see.  Some are listed below: (WARNING! All nerds need to brace themselves) . . .
The Rosetta Stone (NOT the linguistic learning program):

 The mysterious Easter Island (Rapa Nui) statues (Mo'ai):

The jade Shiva Nataraja:

Native American Cultural artifacts (this one is for mi padre):

Famous Grecian Cameo Vase:

 Sutton WHO??

Sutton Hoo . . .

Y'all, honestly, I flipped out on this last one.  It's a famous Anglo-Saxon artifact that was discovered along with several other key cultural key pieces in a buried ship, excavated in England.  It is also significant because it helps scholars be able to compare the cultures of the characters in the ridiculously well-known epic, Beowulf.  Yup, pretty cool stuff.


Before any of this took place, we also took a lovely visit to the Tower of London.  Anticipating long waiting lines, we arrived 30 minutes after opening prepared to live the horror stories of waiting up to six hours not only to see the crown jewels, but just to get inside.... The one blessing of luck this trip? We quite literally waltzed in, inhaled the crown jewels (savoring each breathtakingly fearsome inch of it) WITHOUT WAITING ONE MINUTE.  New record? I think so.
   The entire campus is still in beautiful repair despite the amount of visitation a day and I truly enjoyed myself, learning a lot of history that I was not aware of until then.

A fun little fact about the prisoner towers: they have preserved the walls so well that you can see all of the scratches and etchings that different prisoners made in the wall during their time there, including depictions of particular relics like "the foot of Christ," complete with nail piercings.
  And since we were so close, we thought we would just stroll over the London Bridge... and hoped to not fall down. . .

A very leisurely day of history and knowledge :)