BY SAVANNAH SHAPIRO
LONDON
It’s already week 2 for us here in London and we only have 11 more days left in England. On Monday, we had our first classroom session which was on the campus on the University of Westminster. It felt like a normal day of class at UCLA, but felt different as Professor Makdisi talked about the streets on London while in London. I started making the connections to our readings we did and the streets we already roamed in London.
Tuesday was a day for museums. We started our morning off bright and early and took some time before class to visit The British Museum. It was also the first day where we encountered rain. We were lucky enough to have clear and sunny skies for our first week here, but the rain came at last. Luckily, we were indoors which made it the perfect day to tour some museums.
The British Museum is so large that you can spend hours and hours wandering through all the rooms in the building. There are over 90 rooms that are dedicated to Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome and Greece, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Not to mention, the museum is free! We spent most of our time in the Ancient Greece and Rome rooms, as well as the Egyptian room. My favorite room was the gallery that contained the Elgin Marbles. The marbles that were from the Parthenon in Athens Greece seemed so remarkable that my mind couldn’t fully comprehend what I was seeing.
In addition to the Elgin Marbles, we saw the Rosetta Stone which was swarmed with hoards of people. The Rosetta Stone was the key for scholars to understand and decode the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. The cluster of ancient hieroglyphics clutter the surface of the stone from top to bottom. Although it was crowded around the Rosetta Stone, it was something definitely worth seeing.
After The British Museum, it was time for class and we had to meet Professor Makdisi at the Tate Britain. The Tate Britain is the National Collection of British Art and is much less busy than The British Museum. At the Tate, we looked at artwork by Turner and Blake connecting the concepts of our walking tours to the pieces of artwork. We looked at how 18th century was captured both the good and the bad and compared this to the writing of Blake, Hannah Moore and Hazlitt.
After we finished walking the Tate and finished class for the day, we went back to the dorms and relaxed. We called it an early night and made plans for the next day in Hamstead Heath.
Savannah Shapiro studied abroad in England on the 2017 Summer Travel Study program “London and the Age of Revolution:” https://ieo.ucla.edu/travelstudy/English-London/
