London Touristing: The British Museum

The time has flown by. Joe and I have just over 3 months left in our London experience and we plan to make the most of it. Our London list has at least a dozen more activities and sites on it that we are determined to do/see before leaving the city this summer. We have agreed that any time Joe has two days off in a row, we will cross something off the list.

Yesterday Joe had a random Friday off (a rarity), so we decided to do a little London touristing after I got out of my morning class. As tourists, we looked up restaurants on TripAdvisor for lunch and pulled out our trusty London Top 10 guide for our visit to the British Museum. The thing is, Bloomsbury, the area where the museum is located, may be the hardest area for me to pull off the tourist thing. Some of the other sites on the top 10 list for that part of London include University College London (my school) and St. Pancras Station (London's Eurostar hub). Besides Camden and Highgate, I spend most of my time in Bloomsbury.

Still we wanted to try new things, so we chose Roka on Charlotte Street, a Japanese restaurant that specializes in robatayaki-style (grilled) cooking. We have passed this restaurant several times on our way to Wahaca next door, our favorite Mexican restaurant in London. Charlotte street offers a range of dining options and there are many we would recommend, particularly to anyone headed to the British Museum, British Library, or Charles Dickens Museum, all of which are within a 10 minute walk.

We sat at the bar surrounding the open kitchen, which I loved. I always enjoy restaurants with this type of seating option because it allows me to preview all the different dishes without awkwardly rubber-necking the servers and other tables. We ordered white miso soup, grilled broccoli, beef and ginger gyoza, chicken and spring onion skewers, crispy shrimp and avocado maki, and tuna sashimi. I would literally recommend every single dish, plus about a dozen others we saw coming off the grill but didn't get to try.

 Roka was delicious! It was, however, definitely a touristing restaurant for us as it was too expensive for us to return with any kind of regularity. Perfect for the experience-minded visitor, but a treat for the local.

The British Museum, like most nationally-run museums in London, is free to the public. The permanent collections are open to everyone and anyone as often as they like. (Special exhibitions, like the Vikings one that is on now, do cost extra. We considered this one but at £16+ each, it was too steep for us.) They do recommend at £5 donation, but that is up to the visitor's discretion.

The collections of historical artifacts at the museum is one of the most extensive in the world, including over 8 million works. In dozens of rooms over three floors it covers human history from all over the globe. I remember being completely overwhelmed on my first trip here in 2007. This visit was more relaxed. Joe and I wandered through the rooms toward a few sections we specifically wanted to see.

Joe and the back of the Rosetta Stone. 

It's much easier to get a picture at this angle of the modern key to Egyptian hieroglyphs. 

The reconstructed Nereid Monument, a temple inside a room.  

Grecian urns, in a room of at least a hundred, just because I'm an English teacher.  

Sarah with Hoa Hakanani'a, one of the many monoliths of Easter Island that was removed (stolen) in the 1860s. 

Mayan lintel and detail of the same.

After the museum, we headed to Patisserie Valerie on Torrington Place, a tea shop I pass on my way to the bus stop after class and have wanted to try for several months. As we were still touristing, I ordered a traditional cream tea: a pot of tea, two scones, Devonshire cream, and jam. It was a perfect British touch to our London touristing afternoon. We ended at Euston/Cider Tap, our favorite craft bar in the area before heading back on the same busses I take from school. It may not have been an entirely touristy day, but it was a nice breakout afternoon and we still got to make dinner at home and sleep in our own bed. #winning