LFMSS UK 2012: Sunday services

With a great sleep and an excellent English breakfast at the classy Georgian House, we were set for a busy day of rest, aka Sunday. Our first stop saw the students exploring the foundations of Western Civilization in perhaps the greatest museum in the world - the British Museum. Most of the contents of the museum are not British at all, but are instead the results of the large scale "borrowing" of ancient objects by the once massive British Empire. The kids did a photo scavenger hunt in the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek wings of the museum, finding such items as the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles ("stolen" from the Parthenon in Athens by the British nobleman Lord Elgin). We had planned a guided walk after, but a midday rainstorm changed our minds and we went to the Imperial War Museum instead - to experience WW I trench warfare and the WW II Blitz (bombing of London), and to try to fathom the madness of humanity, which in the 20th century killed more than 110 million fellow human beings in warfare. Then we went to church to cleanse our mental palette, as it were. We organized front row seats for evensong service in St. Paul's Cathedral. In the opening prayers, the deacon of the church even mentioned our school! The service was very nice, with lots of standing and sitting, all accompanied by a wonderful choir and organist. St. Paul's is a glorious neo-classical Anglican church, with one of the largest domes in the world. After London (and the original St. Paul's Cathedral) burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1666, Christopher Wren, a young architect who had no large buildings in his portfolio at that time, was commissioned to rebuild the church. Based on the experiences of English Grand Tourists who had come back from Rome with drawings and casts of ancient (aka classical) buildings and their newer Renaissance copies (eg. St. Peter's Basilica), Wren chose to rebuild St. Paul's in the neo(new) classical (ancient) style. We ended the day with a stop by Buckingham Palace. The queen did not invite us in.

Click below for exclusive video highlights of our day:
The Bells of St. Paul's call us to Evensong Services
Our "coach driver" Brendan calls Mr. Sawatsky a "bloke"

Happy to be in the British Museum

Ramses II considered himself very memorable - he had thousands of statues made of his likeness.

Ray shoots some lion-goddesses.

The Assyrians really knew how to wear facial hair

The Greeks fight some mythical Amazons. Note that the boy, not the girl, is resorting to hair-pulling in this instance.

The British moved enormous monuments, piece by piece, from the Mediterranean and Middle East to London.

Some serious discussion

In the China wing, a Jade glazed stone statue of a judge in hell holding scrolls that summarize all the misdeeds of one poor guy, who, buy the look in the judge's eyes, doesn't have a chance in, uh... hell.

In the "trench experience" in the Imperial War Museum.

The foyer of the IWM is filled with tanks, planes, submarines, etc.

What did Tim just say?

Doesn't do the building justice.

Better. The IWM is housed in a former mental institution, which was called Bedlam Hospital. Bedlam became a word in the English language meaning chaos based on the goings on at this hospital, which people used to pay to come into just to watch the patients.