A weekend in LONDON

Last weekend, I went to LONDON by train. As most of you probably know, London is one of the biggest cities on earth. However, when I first arrived in this great European megalopolis, I was somewhat underwhelmed. I thought of it as a more refined, more comprehensive version of Sydney. The air was clean and it wasn't crowded, albeit it being a Sunday morning. It didn't give any hint of the absolute rumble-and-mumble and wall-to-wall saturation that typefies cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong.

I first passed by London when I got to the UK by air. It was actually sunny and warm (quite un-Londonlike) and I had a morning to kill after my rendevous with my work supervisor fell through. After becoming LOST (a rare thing for me with a map, as I am usually very good with directions), I eventually stumbled into the British Museum. This behemoth of a building was too big to explore by myself so I paid 8 quid (British slang for "pound") for a highlights tour.

Things that I saw here included the Rosetta Stone which enabled Egyptian hieroglyphics to be translated for the first time - an object that was discovered to have identical paragraphs in three languages, including the then unintelligble Hieroglyphic and the intelligible Greek. There were the huge statues of these giant animals that guarded the palace of Sargon of Assyria (now Iraq). About half a dozen Egyptian mummies were also on display, together with Britain's own mummy, the Lindow Man, naturally preserved in a peat bog after dying a victim of ritual human sacrifice. I had first heard of the Lindow Man during a Year 8 History Class at University High's Task Force, where Mr Andreou taught history from a different perspective - not learning dates, but researching evidence and making hypotheses. The Lindow Man and the Tollund Man in Scandinavia was among these. Nearby was another memory from my history lessons - exhibits from the Sutton Hoo burial site which included fragments of a huge Saxon ship.

The museum features many myriad of items that the British obtained, no, STOLE from just about every nook and cranny of the wretched globe. This includes huge numbers of porcelain artefacts obtained in my own mother country after we shamefully lost the Opium War, ordered by a young Queen Victoria under the auspices of Lord Melbourne in the 1840s. The Greek Government have been sniping at the British Museum for years to get their treasures returned. The big wigs of Beijing have a moral obligation to do the same.

Last Saturday I visited the Tower of London, an absolute ripoff at 16.50 quid. I expected it to be a huge site but it wasn't. It did bring back more memories of history lessons when I saw where Richard III allegedly murdered his nephews - we bickered for weeks on whether there was enough evidence to implicate either him or certain other royals. There was also the collection of the Crown Jewels - an appalling waste of taxpayers' money that could be better off being sold to better the public services of the Commonwealth's poorer members or installing air conditioning in the Tube. Westminster Abbey was an interesting place - it was basically one big graveyard for monarchs and mortals who made a great contribution to British society. Afterwards, I walked by Buckingham Palace, which is also a huge waste of money to maintain (the monarchs of mainland Europe have to make do with much more modest environments).

On Sunday, I went to the Royal Greenwich Observatory, me having always been interested in astronomy. This was where the prime meridian of zero longitude separated the world into east and west. Of course, unlike North and South Poles which are actual pre-ordained locations, this line of longitude is an arbitrary line. What divine right had England to claim this line that the wold must use as a standard? Personally, the standard meridian should be measured from the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing.

Later on, I went to the Science Museum, where James Watt's steam engine was on display. I also enjoyed the Mathematics exhibit which had cuisenaire rods, the ones that were used to teach numbers when I was at primary school (this was before most of my friends were born). There was a display of a book called "Matriculation Mathematics for Girls", an atrocially sexist text which was almost entirely based on the arithmetic of cooking and shopping that dated from as recently as the late sixties. With the obligatory collection of abaci, no doubt stolen from my own beloved motherland.

My favourite bit though had to be the med section. This occupied one and a half floors. It showed the sheer primitiveness of medicine that prevailed in the Western World for millenia and the quackery that plagued the medical and surgical industry before the huge advances taken in the last century. Did you know that in WWII, penicillin was an Allied secret used as an advantage against the Germans, so that it was not available to British civilians and hence many thousands of lives were thus lost? To its credit, the museum also showed many traditional Chinese herbs that are still used today. There was also an Australian artefact here, which I already knew about. It was the Dying with Dignity machine that Dr Philip Nitschke had invented which allows the user to be injected with a drug (Nembutal) so they can terminate their suffering at their own volition. Four cancer victims made use of this machine in Darwin before the Howard Government brought the legislation undone. Since then, even more draconian restrictions have been placed on euthanasia in Oz, and none of the museums there were willing to house this machine for fear of prosecution and persecution. It is ironic that it had to end up in the relative progressivism of Mother England.

Before leaving London I paid a brief visit to Harrods where I found some snooty people who looked like nobility although they deigned to apologise to me when they hit the wrong button in the elevator. I decided it was not worth buying anything here.

All in all, London is a nice place to visit, though I don't know if I want to live there. It's impossible to visit in a weekend.