Today we head to the British Museum to visit their special exhibition ‘Sunken Cities’. The British Museum is always worth visiting an we haven’t been here for more than ten years.

We get a time slot to enter the special exhibition. Until then, we stroll around the rest of the museum with finds from Central America and Egypt.

Central America from the Maya and Aztec era:

There’s also a rather impressive, although not that big of a statue from the Easter Island.

Egypt from the Pharao era:

There’s also the Rosetta stone containing a priest’s decree in three different languages. This was a huge help in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Unfortunately, taking photos was not allowed in the special exhibition. It was about two Egyptian cities on the mouth of the Nile, Heracleion and Canopus, that submerged into the sea after floodings and catastrophes. Today, they are located about 1,5 miles / 2,5 kilometres from the shore and 10 metres below water level. A team of underwater archaeologists has researched the cities during the last 15 years and has recovered statues, steles, juwelery and other finds. The city of Heracleion was particularly interesting as it was an important place of trade with Greece. Many Greek citizens had moved here, bringing their own gods, temples, statues and architectural style, with styles being mixed between both cultures.

The special exhibition is very interesting with videos from recovering statues and the objects are in a very good shape as they hadn’t been exposed to wind and sand in all these years. But I had expected that at least some of them would be placed in tanks as the air will surely damage them after all these years in the sea.

From the British Museum, we continue to Soho.

For lunch, we get a nice currywurst at Herman ze German. It’s definitely the best currywurst of the town… maybe the only one.

Then, we spend quite some time at Forbidden Planet, a store we visit whenever we’re in London. There are so many things from films, TV and comics we’d love to buy.

The huge Enterprise-D hangs has been hanging here… forever! At least for the last 20 years that we visit the store.

Mr. Fusion with base plate (approx. 400 GBP) and a 1:6 scale model of the DeLorean time machine from  ‘Back to the Future’ (approx. 700 GBP): We didn’t buy these.

From Forbidden Planet, we continue to Foyles, the largest book store of the town. In the music section, we discover a lot of drawers with sheet music divided by instruments. Wow!

There’s also a big section with biographies, or for instance a film section with racks with books about writing a screenplay, filming, directing, editing and publishing films. And there are many books about crocheting and sewing.

It’s late in the evening when we exit the store. We have a quick meal at Leon before returning to the hotel.