Had breakfast at Grounded again, even though a breakfast buffet was included in our hotel stay. The buffet was just like the hotel itself: clean, tidy, nothing wrong with it, but very much on the budget end of the scale. For a hotel room, I don’t mind that at all. All I want is a clean room in a safe building, with decent beds. The beds and pillows here were actually really good – many more expensive hotels opt for too-soft everything, and this place had nice, firm ones. But a low-budget breakfast, with the cheapest possible sliced bread and sandwich stuff, and only water and coffee to drink, no juice, is not for me. Even the boiled eggs somehow managed to taste really cheap. If the food isn’t appetizing, I struggle to make myself eat.

The rest of the morning we spent at the British Museum.

This time we hadn’t booked any tickets in advance, but had no trouble getting in.

There were quite a lot of people, but they were unevenly distributed. There might be a dense crowd in front of a popular exhibit one moment, only for them all to somehow disappear minutes later and leave us mostly on our own.

Just like at the NHM, we wandered wherever our fancy took us, and looked at whatever we felt like at that moment, without any particular focus. This meant a lot of old Egypt, but also the Parthenon marbles, Mesoamerica, Iron Age Britain, and China.

I have mixed feelings about the collections at the British Museum. On the one hand – amazement and gratefulness that we have all these unique, priceless artefacts from thousands of years ago. That they have been excavated and preserved and exhibited, and that we have learned so much from them. It’s mind-boggling, when I stop to think about it, that we have detailed records about an individual dead person from thousands of years ago, and we know who they where, what they did, how they died, what they were buried with, and why.

That we have examples of writing from five thousand years ago, and that we have been able to decipher it, and we know how much this merchant owed to that one, or what a mother was writing to their son. That the Rosetta stone was created, and survived, and could be used to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs.

On the other hand… the imperialism and ruthless plundering and the complete disregard for the wishes of the people whose history this is, that enabled this collection.

One could stay here for days and keep discovering more amazing things about the history of human civilization. We could only stay a few hours, though, since we had a flight to catch in the afternoon.