The Jetpacker

Here’s the great thing about museums in London: most of them are free. That’s a big relief in a city where everything is expensive. So I can’t legitimately say “you get your money’s worth” in The British Museum, but you know what I mean.

This place is absolutely epic in scale. 7 million objects. 588,000 square feet. 94 galleries. Artifacts from almost every culture in the world – ancient and modern.

Even the building’s architecture is monumental. Although, standing in the Great Court, which is Europe’s largest covered square, did make us feel like we were fish about to get caught in a giant net.

We first checked out an actual stone statue from Easter Island, named Hoa Hakananai’a. This one looks just like the others that are still on the Easter Island, so that saves us a trip, right?

Is it cold in here or is it just him?

Then it was on to the Rosetta Stone in room 4. We were surprised to see that it wasn’t the language learning software we frequently see on late-night TV. It was an ACTUAL stone. But when it comes down to it, the actual Rosetta Stone is a lot like the software, just on a 2,000-year-old rock. This is the rock that helped linguists figure out what all those Egyptian hieroglyphics meant. Before the stone’s discovery, hieroglyphics were just as confusing as the wingdings font.

Next, we looked at the Sculptures of the Parthenon (also called the Elgin Marbles) and the sculptures from the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos, one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world.  Room after room is filled with slabs and sculptures of Greek people missing heads and other vital limbs.  The ones that do have heads look a lot like the guys from the movie “300″.

Our favorite attraction was the Egyptian mummies, and it seemed to be everyone else’s favorite spot too because this section was packed. The 140 coffins and mummies is the largest display outside of Egypt. The elaborately decorated coffins were more interesting than some of the paintings we’ve seen in museums (particularly modern art museums).

Some other major sights in The British Museum include the Reading Room in the middle of the Great Court; the Mesopotamian antiques (part of the largest collection outside of Iraq); drawings from da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt; a collection of 9,000 coins, medals and banknotes; the Mildenhall Treasure (a hoard of 34 Roman silver objects); and the Lindow Man (a freeze dried body of a mid-20s man who had his throat slit sometime in the first century). We didn’t find out until after our visit that the museum also houses a crystal skull — of questionable origin.  Somebody alert Indiana Jones.

Check out The British Museum website here.