From 2800 B.C. to the 21st Century—England, May, 2012

Part 3:  The Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew, The Lion King, & the British Museum

Since we were already three quarters of the way to Kew Gardens from London proper, and it was a “must” for me, we decided to go ahead and go there, even though we were now watching the clock closely, since we needed to be at the theater that night before the 7:30 performance to pick up our tickets to experience The Lion King.  We alighted at the Kew Gardens Tube station to a light rain and quickly headed for a little street corner tea room where we enjoyed a hearty, vegetable barley soup with bread and a pot of tea.  It really hit the spot!  And we enjoyed seeing older, local women coming in for their afternoon “spot o’ tea.”
As we ate our late lunch, there was a huge downpour of rain, and we saw something that I’ve never seen in the states, though I suspect they exist here.  Several young mothers were pushing baby strollers with roof/front/side “windshields” on them.  The “windshields” were made of a clear vinyl or plastic; so, that the child in the stroller could see out (minus windshield wipers, of course).  A few minutes later, the same women walked the other direction with their strollers, but now also with school age children, as school had clearly ended for the day.
Now we somehow missed the sign we wanted when leaving the tea room (there were two, both quite visible on our way back), and ended up following the sign to the Main Gate via the Green, rather than the Victoria Gate entrance, which was much closer to our tea room.  But we eventually arrived at the gardens, despite the continuing rain, though much lighter than the downpour we witnessed earlier.
We quickly obtained tickets for the hop-on, hop-off Kew Explorer tram (a 40-minute narrated ride) and a few minutes later, we hopped on.  We learned a lot about the history of the gardens during that ride.  Kew Palace, the smallest royal palace, was built in 1631 and used as a residence by George III and Queen Charlotte (his mother laid the first gardens here).  In addition to being a public garden currently, Kew is also an important research center, and it maintains its reputation as the most exhaustive botanical collection in the world with its 300 acres filled with 33,000 specimens.
We didn’t have time to do it justice, but certainly loved what we saw.   During our tram ride, we saw the oldest tree on the premises, got a nice view of the Thames River at one stop, and the lilacs, rhododendrons, and azaleas were in bloom, plus baby ducklings were marching along behind their mom in two areas.  Anyone pressed for time when visiting there, as we were, should at least take the tram tour and also visit the Palm House, a building of curved sheets of glass and iron dating back to 1848 that features huge numbers of tropical plants.  It is overwhelming!  The nearby Water Lily House, though much smaller is also quite impressive—the size of the water lilies is nearly unbelievable.  We missed entering the Princess of Wales Conservatory, a modern greenhouse with ten different climate zones under one roof, which was also on my “to do at Kew” list, and we missed the Xstrata Treetop Walkway into the tree canopy and the Temperate House.  These gardens are huge, and the grounds have two cafes, two restaurants, and two gift shops.  (We purchased a lovely booklet of the gardens for our friends, Les & Jean Brown, who owned Kampong Gardens Nursery here, which was known especially for its azaleas and its palms.)
While Dave was doing a last-minute loo (toilet) stop, I asked a local how to get to the Tube from the Victoria Gate, which was where we were at that point.  “Just a couple of blocks straight down this street,” she said, as she pointed.  And that was a godsend in terms of time needed to get back to our hotel in London in time for the theatre that night.
As soon as we arrived in our hotel room, we called our friends, quickly changed clothes, and a few minutes later the four of us were on our way via taxi to the theatre.  Unfortunately, we did not have time to dine (Ami and I were hungry) before seeing The Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre, but made it there on time, and we spotted another very English sign when being shown to our seats.  There was a rather low ceiling in one area, and the sign said, “Mind Your Head.”  We really enjoyed our seats with the elephant and other animals walking down the aisle just a few feet from our seats to the front of the theatre to enter the stage.  We especially loved watching the children in the audience that night—they were enthralled!
It was raining lightly, as we left the theater, and since we were all very hungry at this point in time, we stopped at the first place we saw that served food—Garfunkel’s, a chain, but it sure filled the bill that night.
We bussed back to our hotel late that night, and I’m certain we all slept well—it had been a long day, and then the theater (performance ended at 10 p.m.), followed by dinner, and then a bus ride back to our hotel.
Thursday dawned, and that was our morning to see the British Museum, ‘cause that was on all of our “Must See” lists.  Tea and toast breakfast in our rooms, and then we bussed that day to the museum and didn’t arrive until 11:30 a.m., not the best planning on our part since it opened at 10 a.m., but we were there in time to explore a museum that has been in existence since 1749, the world’s oldest museum, spanning 1.8 million years of world history with 6 million items on display!
Dave had downloaded a free audio tour of the museum on his Ipod, before leaving the states, and he used that to tour the multitude of artifacts on display.  The first thing one sees in the Egypt section is the Rosetta Stone.  This inscripted-in-196-B.C. rock was found in 1799 in the Egyptian desert, and because of it, ancient Egyptian writing could finally be decoded, since the stone contains the same decree written in three languages, Greek, medieval Egyptian (both of which were known languages), and hieroglyphics, which was not understood before.  There are many statues in this section, some depicting actual pharaohs and others showing Egyptian gods as animals.  Upstairs in this section are the mummies.  Having seen so many mummies in Egypt two years ago, I skipped them this time.
The Assyrians dominated the Middle East from c. 900-600 B.C., and there are statues of two winged lions with human heads at the entrance to this section.  The Nimrud Gallery here is a smaller version of the throne room of a palace in Nineveh and filled with artifacts, including 30-ton marble bulls and reliefs depicting lion hunting, the kings’ sport in Assyria.
Greece’s Golden Age was from 500-430 B.C. and their collection here is extensive—everything from pottery to the Parthenon Sculptures, sometimes called the Elgin Marbles.  In the early 1800s, Lord Elgin removed these sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, and Greece now wants them back.  They’ve even built a new state-of-the art museum in which they’d hoped to showcase these sculptures, but the British feel like they rescued and preserved them, and, so far, seem intent on keeping them.  They are treasures, to be sure.
I was out of leg energy at that point; so, I sat in the Great Court, under its magnificent glass-roofed ceiling, keeping an eye on the entrance to the Middle Eastern section of the museum, and when Ken, Ami, and Dave appeared, we all had a quick lunch in one of the cafes.  The domed reading room was closed that day, but it was the workplace of some of the world’s greatest writers, including Mahatma Gandhi, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Yeats, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, and even Karl Marx.
After lunch, Dave and Ken were headed to the Imperial War Museum, and Ami and I to Harrod’s, hoping to just look, rather than purchase in the famous, but pricey department store.

By Patti Day-Miller