Well, I leave for Salisbury tomorrow, and not a moment too soon! While I was out at the British Library, TWO new roommates joined the room. One of them is named Kat, and I didn’t catch the name of the other. They’re friends, they’re really into working out (they were asking me where the nearest gym was) and drinking (they also asked if I’d been to the pub across the street, which I hadn’t—I don’t drink), and they have a ton of luggage between them. I counted six new bags. Wow.
Kinda sucks, though, since I was using the foot of one of the spare beds as a rest for my glasses at night. I’ll have to find someplace else before I go to bed.
So, like I said, I went to the British Library again today, and this time, I got a tour. It was pretty awesome. The library is indeed 10 years old—from when it was opened—but planning and building started way back in the 70s. The architect was inspired by ocean liners, as you can see in one of the pictures of this scale model of the building.
Also notice the size of the cars in relation to the library. This building is HUGE. It’s also nearly full and funding had been cut short, so it’s not as big as they would have liked. The library has five floors of basements. Four of them are used for storage, while the fifth is used to take into account London’s changing water table. It’s for pumping out extra water. The basement is the largest hole ever dug in London, and it’s so deep that two Tube lines, the Piccadilly and the Victoria, run through level 3. When the trains go past, the guide said, you can hear it.
While digging the basement, the workers uncovered strange smells—prehistoric air bubbles trapped in the clay. They also unearthed a Victorian graveyard and had to rebury the coffins elsewhere.
Probably the coolest book I saw today was this one:
It’s an atlas from 1660, a gift to King George III from the Dutch. The age alone makes it pretty awesome, but what makes it even cooler is the size. It’s probably about six and a half feet tall, maybe more. It’s HUGE. The little plaque beside it to explain what you’re looking at is the size of a normal sheet of computer paper. HUGE.
It’s also part of the working collection of the library, which means you can request to look at it. Of course, you’ll be given a very dirty look and you’d better have a dang good reason why you need to look at the original of THAT book, but if you do have that reason, they’ll haul it out for you. It’s so big that it needs two people to open it, and a third to turn the pages. You may notice that it’s on wheels, just in case it needs to be hauled out. Not too long ago, the library had a professional photographer get on some scaffolding (so he could get the elevation he needed to get the whole page in a shot) and take pictures of all the pages, so they can give you facsimiles to look at instead of wheeling out the whole thing.
The lighter colour around the edges are from recent restoration work, but the dark middle is the original leather. The inside, we were told, is in remarkable shape—probably because no one ever opens it! In this close-up, though, you may notice something that really should be a cardinal sin for book lovers like King George III: right near the flash, there’s a ring from where someone (probably the king himself) put their tankard on the book. Apparently, he didn’t hold this gift in high esteem!
Okay, I lied, the coolest book I saw today was a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. That was awesome. However, I couldn’t take pictures of it. The coolest book I could take pictures of was the 1660 atlas.
The tower of books in the middle of the library, I also learned, is King George’s collection. He gave his books to the country with the stipulations that they must be always kept in one place and the public must be able to access them. You can request any book from the collection (with a reason why you need it), and someone will fetch it for you. Pretty awesome. The tower itself is six stories tall, but it has shiny black marble at the bottom, so shiny, in fact, that when you look over the railing, it looks like the tower continues on to the bowels of the earth as it reflects itself. Quite awesome as well.
Here, you can see the front lobby of the library, as taken from far up. Not nearly as pretty, I think, as the tower of books that’s behind me.
One more really cool thing at the library was this piece of art. It was so cool that I had to take a video of it—a mere picture would not, could not, have done it justice. Here’s a link to the video—it may take some time to download, but it’s only 21 seconds of video and very mind-boggling. I kinda did the filming backwards, though, so you see how it works before you can really see it working. Nevertheless, you’ll have a hard time to see how it works as it’s working.
http://www.mediafire.com/?j0xv2mdw1yn
Wait a minute for the download to finish processing, and then it'll turn into "Start Download." From there, you can save it to your computer so you can open it. You can delete it when you're done watching it, if you'd like. I don't mind.
After I visited the British Library, I had dinner at Burger King—my last American food stop, I promise! Besides, there aren’t really many other American places to choose from, unless you count Pizza Hut or Papa John’s, and neither of those are the sort of place you can easily just eat for one person or one night. I was not impressed by the staff. They sucked. Badly. It took forever of me standing in front of the cash register before the girl there bothered to stop trying to hide plastic bags under the keyboard (what was she doing!?) and take my order, and then she just called it out to the back several times before she took my money, and only then did she actually enter it in the register. The Burger King did have trash cans, and signs asking people to use them… and you know what? People DID. Except… they weren’t empty. It’s very hard to use a trash can that is overflowing with trash. There must have been twenty empty trays stacked on top of it, and British people showed their courtesy by putting their finished meals on the tables around the can, instead of trying to shove more in. One more piece and it would have overflowed onto the floor, I’m sure. One Burger King worker did glance at it, but she didn’t make any move to actually do anything about it in the whole time I was there.
So… McDonalds was best, Subway was pretty good, and KFC, but Burger King was pretty sucky.
When I got back to my room, I noticed the new roommates and began to rearrange my luggage. I showed them my British Museum book, and they were excited about it for me, which was pretty awesome. My luggage is now all repacked and hopefully things are where I need them to be. None of the roomies are around right now, except maybe the ghost. He didn’t wake me up last night. I was grateful.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment