Honeymoon in London: Museums & Harry Potter

Time for another Honeymoon Week post! This post is Part 5 in a 6 part series chronicling my honeymoon from last summer.
Catching up on previous posts?

• We took toured ‘The City’ and the Tower of London

• We took a train to Paris and spent the day exploring

• We saw Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Tate Modern art museum

• We saw the Queen and watched the U.S. play England in the World Cup

We began our last day in London with our nerdiest quest of all. Finding Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross and try to catch the Hogwarts Express. I’m just going to assume you get that that’s a Harry Potter reference.

Finding the platform was easier said than done, and we wandered around the station for awhile before we saw a few people duck into an alcove that held the fake platform.

Naturally we posed for dorky pictures.

Nerds.

All that searching had left us hungry and we left King’s Cross to look for lunch. King’s Cross Station is across from the beautiful St. Pancras Station.

We grabbed lunch nearby and made the short walk to the British Library.

Those are the only two pictures I have of the British Library because photos are prohibited, but it was amazing. The Magna Carta, ancient maps, early Gospels on papyrus, the original Beowulf, the Gutenberg Bible, pages from Leonardo’s notebooks, and original writing by the titans of English literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Dickens and Wordsworth is all in one room! There’s also a wall dedicated to music, with manuscripts from Beethoven to the Beatles. Very, very cool.

Continuing with the museum theme, we decided to visit the British Museum next.

All of the gardens out front were planted with exotic plants from Africa.

When we entered the enormous museum and ducked into one of the wings, the first thing we were greeted with was The Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone is a stone with writing on it in two languages (Egyptian and Greek), using three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek). Because it has  essentially the same text in all three scripts (with some minor differences between them), it provided the key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

We spent awhile exploring the Egyptian wing of the museum.

Indiana Jones was studying up for his next adventure.

When we left the museum did some shopping for souvenirs and took the Tube to our last attraction of the day, Harrods.

Harrods  is one of the largest department stores in the world, with over one million square feet of retail space and over 330 departments.

Harrods is owned by Mohamed Al Fayed whose son Dodi was killed in the same car crash as Princess Diana. Two memorials have been erected within the store in memory of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed. We saw one of the memorials, photographs of the two behind a pyramid-shaped display that holds a wine glass smudged with lipstick from Diana’s last dinner as well as what is described as an engagement ring Dodi purchased the day before they died.

I snapped a few pictures of the dessert counters in the famous food hall before I was told photography was prohibited. Oops.

After leaving Harrods empty handed it was time for our last dinner in London. We decided to return to the Troubadour because we had loved it so much the day before. Best decision ever.

I finally got a glass of Pimms. Pimms is a gin-based liquor made in England from dry gin, liqueur, fruit juices and spices and was the only thing the coordinator at our wedding reception insisted I try while in London. Good call Julie.

  For dinner Jacob ordered the special which was pasta made from scratch that melted in your mouth. I got Bangers and Mash & Onion Gravy which on paper is sausages with mashed potatoes, but in reality was one of the best meals I’ve ever had. 

It was a lovely meal and the perfect way to end our wonderful honeymoon.

We’re almost done! Tomorrow will be the last Honeymoon Week post on our hotel and little neighborhood that we loved