This week we met up with the Seattle Wilcoxes and the Newton Wilcoxes for a grand reunion in London. A few highlights: The Athenaeum – a superb, stylish hotel just across the park from Buckginham Palace and walking distance to the West End that loves kids – wow! The focus on children includes a special kid’s concierge, assortment of games and movies in the rooms, no charge for meals for children under 12, an open non-alcoholic minibar, and milk and cookies every afternoon. Churchill War Rooms and Museum – we descended into the actual underground bunker complex in the heart of London where the British ran the war. There is a first rate museum here all about Churchill’s life as well. Fascinating and if you like history, thrilling. Henry VIII – the Shakespeare play, shown at the wood-and-thatch London Globe Theatre which recreates the theatre as it existed when Shakespeare was first showing his works. The actors were first rate and we learned a lot about Cardinal Woolsey, Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon and Ann Boleyn. We are always left in awe of Shakespeare’s works when we see them live. National Gallery – London’s free national art museum is superb. Favorites on our trip included a 15th century portrait of a Venetian Doge, the Ambassadors by Holbein, famous vase of yellow flowers by Van Gogh, and Seurat picture of bathers with smokestacks in distance. Indian, Lebanese, and Chinese spices – London has great ethnic eats; a welcome respite from cheese. Classic British cuisine – nothing here to motivate a special Gina post; still we enjoyed fish & chips with mushy peas and meat pasties; a high tea at the Athenaeum complete with excellent teas, fresh scones with lemon curd and jam, a giant dessert trolley and crumpets with sweetbreads; and full English breakfasts… kipper, mushrooms on a doorstop, bangers, tomatoes, oatmeal porridge, parfaits, local honey, Wesleydale cheese. London Scavenger Hunt – we spent Wednesday morning searching historical sites for trivia, finding inventive objects and asking strangers to take our pictures. Girls beat boys, narrowly. Les Miserables – a well-oiled performance with strong voices in an intimate theater made the play a magical event, even for those who had seen it before. As you age, you take away new meaning from the same show. Hampton Court – this was built by Cardinal Woolsey in the Tudor style back in the 1500s and became a favorite palace for Henry VIII and many successive kings. We had a fun tour, meeting costumed guides and characters and visiting the rooms and grounds, and we learned about the royal families, the running of a palace, and building itself. Warhorse – this new play adapted from a children’s novel features lifesize puppet horses that gallop, twitch, shake their heads, stamp their feet and wave their tails. They say it is for kids 10 and up but the story is grim – wallowing in the death, carnage and despair of trench warfare… the WWI version of Saving Private Ryan. Ultimate Bus Tour – yes somehow on the spur of the moment and given our party of twelve, we rented a double-decker bus, complete with driver, conductor, and accredited guide for the day. This was the day we had set aside for classic touring. Our guide Tim regaled us with stories as the bus wound past icons like Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Trafalgar Square, Fleet Street, the City financial district, London Bridge, 10 Downing Street, and later Buckingham Palace. We peeked at the locations for Harry Potter scenes and Sherlock Holmes books, drove the streets where Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd committed murders and where there are pits for buried victims of the Black Plague, and gazed at the buildings for the national supreme court, mint, Prime Minister’s residence, House of Commons and House of Lords. We hopped out for a detailed tour of the Tower of London, a fortress on the banks of the river Thames that dates back to the eleventh century. Here we listened to ghost stories, studied the Crown Jewels, toured armor from across the centuries, examined a Norman castle bathroom, and stood on the site where Ann Boleyn was beheaded. And all of that before lunch! We then bustled off to the British Museum for a look at the Rosetta Stone, mummies, and Greek sculpture especially the famous Lord Elgin marbles that were taken from the Acropolis. Why not give those back? Our guide said that Lord Elgin purchased them fair and square from the Turks while they were legally in control of Greece. We then split up and one group took the bus home and went off to shop at Harrod’s. My Dad and I stayed at the museum and loaded up on caffeine. Knowing that Iran/Iraq are off limits for vacation tourism for the foreseeable future, we took advantage of past British treasure-collecting from this region and devoted several hours solely to studying the objects from Ancient Mesopotamia – especially Assyria, Babylon, Urartu and Ur and stretching up into Persia. These are the periods and locations famous for the Western origins of agriculture, cities and pottery, the evolution of pictograms into cuneiform, the oldest known library (cuneiform tablets), Kings Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar and Corus, the Gilgamesh epic, the goddess Ishtar and her alter ego the Queen of the Night, the gods Marduk, Sin, and Shamash, cities Nimrod, Nineveh and Persepolis, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, enormous burial ziggurats that predate the Egyptian pyramids, and three-dimensional walls that are carved with fantastical and detailed reliefs of exotic merchants, soldiers, kings and winged creatures. We were astonished at the quality of the exhibits and how they unveil such intricate civilizations and detailed organization and belief systems, even going back three or four thousand years. Later that week we were inspired to download Gilgamesh on our Kindles and read the original story – which is both racier and more profound than we would have guessed. How can history be any more fun than this?! We want to return to the British Museum soon.