July 10th

Today two of my friends and I got up early and went and ran in Hyde Park. What a cool park! We didn’t realize how big it was until we ran around it..We are guessing we did about 6ish miles. It was such a nice morning. Once we got back a big group of us went out for the day. Our first stop was Leschter Square where we booked half price Les Miserable tickets for tonight. After that we decided to get a start on all of the required sites that we have to visit for our class. On the way though we stopped at the famous 9 ¾ platform from Harry Potter. We all took really fun pictures and definitely looked like tourists. Then for our first site we went to the British Library where we saw an exhibit that had a lot of history from Samuel Jackson’s Dictionary. His dictionary provided more comprehensive vies of the English language than anything had up until that time. It explained more difficult words and also had principles and also more specific usages of the wording. It was completed in 1755 and was two folio volumes. It was recognized as a landmark in the recording of the English language. It was notable for its definitions and illustrative quotation (a little bit like the 0xford dictionary that we saw yesterday).
Something completely different but super cool at the same museum was some brief history about the Beatles. Something that I found out was that the song “Help” which was written in 1980 by John Lennon originally started off as a literal cry for help. It was sped up during recording to make it more commercial and Lennon was not happy with it. It was supposed to be slow and the lyrics were supposed to set the mood for a song that showed how lost and lonely he was at the time of writing it. Also the song “yesterday” has an interesting story behind it. McCartney woke up with the song in his head one morning and thought that it was a song that already existed. When he realized it didn’t he jotted it down. It is the most converted popular song in history with over 3,000 versions.
We also saw one of the original copies of the Magna Carta. There are only 4 left and this museum had two of the copies.
Next we headed off to the British Museum and saw a few of the elective sites that we were supposed to visit. The two required ones were a few Viking and Roman-British history rooms. However what I found more interesting was the Egyptian exhibit which included Rosetta stone. There was also some really interesting Assyrian art that I studied in my art history class. Finally our last stop was an exhibit that had ancient Greek sculpture including pieces form the Parthenon. All I can say is I really appreciated my Art History class that I took because it made me appreciate the work so much more. I could have spent a whole day in that museum. I will have to go back one day. Now we are back at our Flat and are about to leave to go see our show.