From c9140353ebe1d907fff697c50925d546cd8d0105 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Brian Picciano Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2018 13:33:46 -0400 Subject: add london to mr-worldwide post --- _drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md | 57 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ img/mr-worldwide/1000px/london-steg-2018.jpg | Bin 0 -> 315961 bytes img/mr-worldwide/1500px/london-steg-2018.jpg | Bin 0 -> 637119 bytes img/mr-worldwide/500px/london-steg-2018.jpg | Bin 0 -> 87972 bytes img/mr-worldwide/london-steg-2018.jpg | Bin 0 -> 776509 bytes 5 files changed, 57 insertions(+) create mode 100644 img/mr-worldwide/1000px/london-steg-2018.jpg create mode 100644 img/mr-worldwide/1500px/london-steg-2018.jpg create mode 100644 img/mr-worldwide/500px/london-steg-2018.jpg create mode 100644 img/mr-worldwide/london-steg-2018.jpg diff --git a/_drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md b/_drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md index 47fa761..a75122c 100644 --- a/_drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md +++ b/_drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md @@ -263,3 +263,60 @@ so. After Bruges I took a bus back to Brussels, where I hung out for a while waiting for my next bus which would take me across the pond. + +## London, UK + +Getting to London was honestly one of the most exciting parts of that trip. The +Channel Tunnel, or "Chunnel", runs from France, underneath the English Channel, +and pops back up in England. In the tunnel is a giant train which ferries cars +and buses through the tunnel. Taking the Chunnel was as easy as buying a bus +ticket from Brussels to London, and passing through three passport checks along +the way (the UK check being the most intense passport check of my entire +journey, for whatever reason). + +While the London Underground (The Tube, as the British call it, in their very +endearing habit of giving everything an endearing nickname) was easy enough to +use, though _very_ expensive, so I spent a lot of time walking in the bitter +cold. London is a _huge_ metropolitan city, filled to the brim with shops and +restaurants and plenty of other attractions to grab tourists. But despite their +best efforts, none were more grabbing to me than the museums. + +{% include image.html + dir="mr-worldwide" file="london-steg-2018.jpg" width=1920 + descr="Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum. London, 2018" + %} + +All the major museums in London are free to enter. This includes the National +Gallery, exhibiting paintings and art from the world over, the Natural History +Museum (my favorite), with its seemingly infinite halls of fossils and stones +and pre-historic artifacts, and the British Museum, which exhibits many of the +archeological treasures the British have stolen from other cultures throughout +history. + +There's a significant amount of controversy surrounding the British Museum, and +whether or not it's right for it to keep artifacts like the Rosetta Stone, and +sculptures from the Parthenon of Athens. The argument is that the British were +not really _given_ these artifacts by the peoples/cultures which originated +them, and so the museum is effectively parading stolen property. + +The British Museum argues that, in fact, it's encouraging the spread of culture +and understanding by collecting these artifacts from around the world and +displaying them in context to each other, and that its mission is charitable to +the cultures from which the artifacts are taken. And additionally that: "[the] +restitutionist premise, that whatever was made in a country must return to an +original geographical site, would empty both the British Museum and the other +great museums of the world". + +The argument that they're actually spreading culture is pretty patronizing, as +if the people they've stolen from don't know how to do this best for themselves, +and as if they should obviously _want_ this to be done for them. As for the +argument that restitutionism would empty the museum, I can only imagine a +restitutionist responding: "Yes, that's the point". It's one thing for a museum +to be given or loaned an item for display by another people, but quite another +to assume the right to take an item regardless of its peoples' wishes. + +Besides some very good fish and chips, London didn't have all that much else for +me. The museums were insanely crowded, with everyone pushing over themselves to +fill out their selfie-with-famous-objects-bingo-cards; my hostel was weird (all +of my hostels in the UK were weird, in fact; more on that in Ireland); and +everything was quite expensive. 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