Celebrating Colonialism and Harassing Wildlife (ugh)

Jon and I started today with another Google lunch. I was going to spend the morning by myself at the Victoria and Albert Museum before meeting Jon, but when my alarm went off at 8:20 I was like HA NOPE. Hopefully I can get to it on Friday.

After lunch we spent a couple hours at the British Museum. It's called the British Museum, but most of the content is ganked from non-British places. Basically the British went all over the world, took a bunch of cool old things from other countries, and put them on display back home. Jon characterized the museum's attitude with, "Remember that time we owned half the countries? Well, here's all their stuff."

The museum is massive, and incredibly crowded. We saw a few cool things:

The Rosetta Stone. It's a pretty big deal there.

"Chess was conceived as a game of strategy and skill. In the medieval period it was used to sharpen the tactical abilities of knights and was seen as one of the seven knightly accomplishments...Men and women also played chess together, and it became associated with flirtation and the battle of the sexes in medieval love poetry."

Queens typically had this pose; I think she's supposed to look relaxed, but she seems more bored and irritated to me.

Map of the world by Battista Agnese, 1536

Trillion dollar poster, South Africa, 2009
Part of the "Money" exhibit.
"Made from worthless banknotes at the height of Zimbabwe's hyperinflation, posters like this were displayed throughout Johannesburg, South Africa, They protested against the Zimbabwean government's 55 per cent 'luxury' tax on imported goods including the independent newspaper, The Zimbabwean."

Basalt statue knows as Hoa Hakananai'a
Easter Island/Rapa Nui, Chile (South Pacific), about 1400

There was also an exhibit on prints and propaganda during the Napoleonic era which was quite lovely:

John Bull Viewing the Preparations on the French Coast! Published by William Holland, 13 October 1803
"William Holland has produced a simple and very clear image of what the ordinary Englishman was afraid of in October 1803, and was determined to defy."
I mostly found this interesting because of the speech bubble--"You may all be D--d!" Why is "dead" censored?

The Plumb-pudding in Danger, published by Hannah Humphrey, 26 February 1805. Image from Wikipedia.
"In this most famous image of Britain's war with France, two greedy politicians, William Pitt and Napoleon, carve up the world."

Russians Teaching Boney to Dance, Published by Hannah Humphrey, 18 March 1813. Image from Britishmuseum.org.
"If you trespass on our grounds, you must dance to to our tunes."

The museum is generally divided up by continents. Most continents are broken into subcategories, usually individual countries, while the African section is just "Africa" with no further subdivisions--because obviously the second largest continent has had a pretty uniform history over the last couple thousand years. The exhibit's description says there's artifacts from throughout the entire continent, but I saw an awful lot of descriptions that didn't get any more specific than "African." This was also the only exhibit that we noticed included modern information and not just info on the ancient civilizations (everything about modern Africa was discussed the same way that the ancient civilizations were discussed), because AFRICANS ARE SO PRIMITIVE AMIRITE?!
AND THEN THERE'S THIS SHIT:

WHAT A LOVELY TALE OF CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGE

So to sum up, the British Museum is a colonialism-glorifying, white-supremacy-apologizing hunk of crap, and you should not go there.

After the Museum of Blatant Imperialism, we went to the aquarium, which cheered me up because fish are cool.


You can stand on sharks there!

We also saw some cool jellyfish:

Aquarium lighting designer must be a pretty cool gig.

Here is the most fabulous sea creature of them all:

It is a snakelock anemone! For some reason it is holding a shiny bauble and waving it around in the air.
The aquarium ends with some friendly penguins:

He came right up to say hi.

We learned that Port Jackson sharks lay screw-shaped eggs!

WHAT?! (photo from Australianmuseum.net)

The aquarium, perhaps purposefully, put the clown fish in the same tank as the regal tang, and every child who approached the tank exclaimed "OH LOOK NEMO! AND THERE'S DORY!" It was adorable.

There was a sign at the beginning of the aquarium telling you DO NOT TOUCH ANY OF THE DAMN ANIMALS, but they did not necessarily repeat this warning at every tank with an open top. We saw first-hand that they probably should. We watched a GROWN WOMAN encourage her eight-ish year-old daughter to touch a turtle that was swimming by--not just on the shell either, she was REACHING FOR ITS HEAD AS IF IT WERE A PUPPY THAT MIGHT LICK HER HAND. Jon and I saw this happening, both said "Uuuhhhh don't do that..." and no sooner were the words out of our mouths than the turtle snapped onto the little girl's finger. She shrieked and pulled her hand up, bringing the turtle out of the water for a second before he let go and returned to minding his own business. The girl was fine, just shaken up, but I felt like smacking her mind-bogglingly irresponsible mother. Instead I made eye contact with another woman who had also witnessed this spectacular display of dumb-assery and giggled with her.

This turtle DOES NOT WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND.

Jon and I are getting up bright and early tomorrow to head to Paris! We'll return to London Thursday night. Expect a mega-Paris post later this week!

xo

Hannah