The GCW Tour, A Few Bits of the UK and Ireland: London, Part 2

Our second full day in London we started -- in as much as a cancer patient and two teenage boys can ever be said to "start" -- at the Tower of London. You can't really go wrong with stories of imprisonment and executions...

Graffiti left by prisoners

The official head removing tools

...which is sort of their stock and trade. Well, that and lots of armor...

...things made from bits of armor (and other leftovers), like this dragon...

...the Crown Jewels (which you can't photograph), and the ravens...

After the Tower, we headed over to the British Museum...

...a museum whose core message basically boils down to, "Check out all our loot!"* I let the boys direct our path through the displays, which was occasionally successful...

and occasionally not...

A few things that stuck out for me in of the rooms we saw: the world's oldest bit of pornography...

Some thousand year old Smurfs...

A very nice goat...

What I found to be an unusually cheerful ancient face, since most ancient faces tend to be pretty stern...

And, of course, lots and lots of death -- i.e,. tombs, god and goddesses of death, skeletons, mummies (even a cat mummy -- sorry, Kevin), and various kinda, sorta preserved bodies. As one of the boys noted, it's not like any of these people likely expected to wind up in a museum. 

* I didn't bother searching to see if they still had it, but last time I was here I was struck by the presence of a flyer that basically boiled down to the museum's argument for "why we're not giving all the stuff back." It struck me because a year or so earlier I'd been at the Acropolis Museum in Athens which had it's own flyer that was basically an argument for "why the British Museum should give us all our stuff back." Makes you want to attend a museum curator's convention, just to see how the conversations play out.