The British Museum is immense and can be overwhelming.

Even with their map, I get lost. Their 90-minute highlights tour was full, so I got a coffee in the Great Court Cafe and figured out a game plan.

The highlights tour probably wouldn't have been the best idea anyway, since I'm familiar with many of the pieces.

I decided to start on the lowest level. On one of our visits to the museum with the girls 20 years ago, we had a great time down in the basement, exploring rooms with all kinds of what looked to be forgotten busts, torsos, arms, etc. Nine years ago I tried to revisit those rooms, but every time I was at the museum the lower levels were closed to the public. I must have tried six times. Today, I had trouble finding the stairs.

I came across this bronze sculpture, Heech in a Cage, 2005 while I was on my quest. The Vancouver-based Iranian artist is Parviz Tanavoli.

I was directed to an elevator, but that took me down below the Great Court to the Clore Centre for Education. I went upstairs again and was directed back beyond the Court to stairs that brought me down to Level -1, to a room on Greek and Roman architecture and another on Classical Inscriptions. It was great, but not today. A guard directed me to yet another set of stairs, in the room with the Easter Island statue Hoa Hakananai'a.

These stairs led to the Sainsbury Galleries and a great set of rooms on Africa. So I'm guessing that the rooms we saw in 1996 are no more, and that in 2007 the lower level was closed because they were in the process of redoing them. At any rate, they did a nice job of it. The pieces were a combination of old and contemporary.

This piece is Man's Cloth, 1998-2001 by El Anatsui of Ghana (now a professor of sculpture at the University of Nigeria). It is made of foil bottle-neck wrappers and copper wire. Now if I were to save all of my bottle-neck wrappers....

This wooden screen (2007) by the Egyptian-German artist Susan Hefuna incorporates the phrase "knowledge is sweeter than honey" in Arabic script. You can see it in the photo.

Throne of Weapons, made by Cristovao Canhato in Mozambique, 2001, was made from decommissioned weapons after Mozambique's civil war in 1992. In 1995, under a program called "Arms into Tools," people were encouraged to swap their weapons for agricultural, domestic and construction tools, and then artists turned them into sculptures.

Sometimes you couldn't tell the old from the new, like this one from the 14th century.

Try as I might,  I couldn't avoid some of the top ten. Like the controversial Elgin Marbles, which I guess they refer to as the Parthenon sculptures now.

One thing that always strikes me in these massive museums is that there are incredible pieces that get overlooked by the majority of visitors because they are overshadowed by the more famous pieces. Like the Rosetta Stone. But, in all fairness, you can't possibly see even 5% of the collection in one visit. Probably not even .5%.

Everyone crowds around it and 99% of them most likely missed this new little acquisition adjacent to it. (By the way, 20 years ago, the Rosetta Stone was out in the open, able to be touched by curious little hands--I guess that's why it's now in a case.). This is Nebhepetra, a lector and guard, is probably from Western Thebes, and probably dates from about 1874-1855 BC.

I spent the rest of my time trying to pick out pieces that, though quite large, have been overlooked by me in the past. The Grand Court has some. Here is a black siltstone obelisk of King Nectanebo II of Egypt, from about 350 BC.

This stone guardian figure from northeast China dates from the 17th century.

This lion comes from a tomb in the ancient city of Knidos in southwest Turkey. It weighs more than 7 tons and I can't imagine how they got it here. But I guess if they can bring the Parthenon and the Nereid Monument, then this must have been fairly easy.

On my way home, I walked through three squares (or what I would call parks). The first was Russell Square, the largest of the three.

I found this sculpture, The Green Man, 1999, in Woburn Square. The sculptor is Lydia Kapinska.

And last but not least, Gordon Square, had this statue of Rabindranath Tagore by Shenda Amery.

I was planning to cook dinner, but Gord suggested we eat out, and consequently we had a great meal at Dishoom, after an hour-long wait. It was a busy place, but our waiter said that tomorrow would be twice as crowded. I later learned from my niece that it is one of the top 100 London restaurants.

The fountains (all 1,080 of them) in Granary Square are lit up at night.

And the Floating Cinema was showing the Jungle Book outside over the canal.

This has been one of the more frustrating blog posts to write because about a quarter of the way through it something happened to my laptop.  I rebooted and couldn't get Chrome to open and I was notified that several things had crashed, including my Antivirus software.  That is not good. So I have had to type this up on my phone. Not fun and very slow. I hope I can figure out the problem tomorrow. It's 2:15 am.