England Vacation 2009 -- August 14

Helen Anne

I was in bed asleep about 9:30 last night – much later than I expected. This morning about 7:30, I woke up feeling pretty good. I heard Karen so went to say Good Morning. She’d crawled back into bed so I lay down to visit. Next thing I knew, it was 9:15.

Karen

Helen got up about 7:30ish and crawled into my bed, so we could visit but fall asleep. I was ready to be up and didn't want to toss and turn and wake her up, so got up. I managed to have breakfast, a shower, slip in and grab the clothes I had worn the day before and leave without waking her up, it was about 8:30 or so when I left. I went to do some errands and got home about 9:30. She had been up for about 15 minutes.

Both

We packed everything for next week into Karen’s two smaller bags, as that is easier for moving around train stations. We finally wandered into London about 11. We got the train to Herne Hill and then changed trains to get to St. Pancras International. There we got some lunch at Prets, a sandwich shop and then went over to the British Library to see the Codex Sinaiticus Exhibit.

The Codex Sinaiticus is a Greek bible from the 4th century and is the one of the oldest known text of the full Christian bible. Older copies do exist but they are incomplete. Its hand written by three or four scribes and there are a lot of handwritten corrections. They have digitally reunited the full text. Most of the pages are held at the British Library but some are held at Leipzig, some in Russia and the remainder at St. Catherines Monastery. Digital images have been taken of all the pages and the full text is now available on line. http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/

The display wasn't large but had some rather interesting displays to it. The obvious - history of the text and what is 'known' about its creation. Along with how the British Library acquired so much of it (it was bought from Russia). They also had a few electronic displays. One of the website, one showing the 'development' of one page - the original writing, the various corrections added at different times and then what it looks like today. The last one we looked at the first 40 pages or so of but it was a few hundred pages long and neither of us where prepared to stand there all day. Each page had some notes with it, it described what portion of the Bible it was and then pointed out some features of the pages - corrections and why, how they can tell different people wrote the pages, how things were written.

From the British Library we went and found a drink and the tube to Green Park. We were going to take it to Victoria but the Victoria line had problems, so used the Piccadily line and walked a little further. We went through one end of Green Park and into St. James Park. During the walk through Green Park, we admired the trees. They look like ladies holding up skirts to wander through the park. From there, we went to Ruebens - where we enjoyed afternoon tea.

Helen got Darjeeling and Karen had English Breakfast (they didn't have Lady Gray). It came with finger sandwiches (egg mayo, smoked salmon, cheese with cucumber, chicken salad and ham with mustard. Four scones (not big scones, some what bigger then a two bite brownie) of course it had clotted cream and strawberry jam and various sweets. There was a cinnamon donut with custard filling, a strawberry tart, a raspberry dessert, a steamed pudding and a chocolate mousse. We split all the sweets in half and each tried them all.

After tea we came home and did a little surfing. Ed picked us up about 6:30 and we went over to Chung's for a night of Mexican Train. It was great fun. We always start with snacks in and then start playing, part way through we have tea and last night we had more snacks. Ed was winning but then got caught with some large scoring tiles, so Helen took the lead but got caught as well and finally Karen snuck in and won! Despite getting caught on the last round! We got home about 11:30 and both fall into bed.

Pictures IMG_4129, DSC02944/6/50/1/3/4