It is raining where we are today, for the first time in two months. I am wearing long sleeves and long pants for the first time in weeks. England’s long nightmare of sunshine and warmth is over. Luckily we got our sightseeing in this morning while it was still dry.

First stop was the remains of the old Roman baths.

The entry archway is one of the larger bits of Roman masonry remaining in Britain. These days it is called the Jewry Wall, but nobody knows why. There is a museum of iron age, Roman, and Saxon stuff here, but it is closed for remodeling. Damn you, Heritage Lottery Fund.

Never mind. Here’s a cool mural to make up for it.

On to the Newarke Houses Museum, which covers more recent local and military history in a jumble of rooms in two old houses which have been much remodeled over the centuries. Some details of the original buildings remain. Some early painted glass…

… angels holding a coat of arms and …

… a fireplace…

… with a pirate staring at a dog.

The collection includes toys…

… locally made shoes…

… reconstructed 1950s shops and streets…

… and a snuff box made out of a tiger’s head.

There’s a whole room devoted to the Asians who came to Leicester from Uganda in 1972 when Idi Amin gave all the Asians living there 90 days to leave the country, and confiscated all their money and property. There was already an Asian community in Leicester, so thousands chose that as their destination, putting a strain on Leicester’s housing, education, and social services. The local council put an ad in the Ugandan papers to try to discourage this.

This backfired, as it caused more Ugandan Asians to consider Leicester as a destination. In the long term of course, the arrival of a group of hard working entrepreneurs did nothing but good for Leicester’s economy.

Leicester, like San Francisco, has no racial or religious majority these days. In the last census it was 32% Christian, 19% Muslim, 15% Hindu, 4% Sikh, and 28% No Religion or Not Stated. The people of Leicester share in celebrating Diwali, Christmas, Carnival, and Ramadan. In fact, Leicester had the one of the largest Diwali celebrations outside India. It’s not without its problems, nowhere is, but it is one of those places, like San Francisco, that shows that people from different cultures can live and work together to everyone’s mutual benefit.

As we were leaving, I said to the lady at the reception desk how much I had liked the Ugandan Asian display, as I remembered seeing that on TV when I was a kid. She was an Asian born in Kenya, and told us about her own family’s leaving the country to come to the UK in the 1980s. “My father had to sit on my sister to hide her so she would not be pulled off the bus and raped.”

Our final museum for the day was the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, an eclectic collection of whatever happened to be given to the town, from dinosaurs to German Expressionists. Of course, I made for the dinosaurs first.

This is the Rutland Dinosaur. Rutland is a very small county, so I’m not sure how it managed to fit. Actually, it’s mostly a reconstruction. Only about 40% of the bones were found, and many of those are too fragile to be part of the display. This guy is actually from the Jurassic period, unlike the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park which were mostly from the Cretaceous. During the Jurassic period this part of England was a shallow sea much further south, so the local museums have plesiosaurus skeletons galore.

Plesiosaurs were fish eaters, so you can think of them as dinosaur sharks.

This one is the Blockley Plesiosaur. It was dug up so recently it doesn’t have a name yet.

I think we should call it Bruce.

Onwards to Egyptian jewelry…

… Victorian painting…

… and the official Foxes Glacier Mint polar bear (formerly a resident of Dudley zoo).

The Arts and Crafts Movement room has some De Morgan ceramics.

This one shows the Sphinx being attacked by Rabbit and Piglet, in a rare De Morgan/Winnie the Pooh crossover.

Upstairs in another room the have a 17th century Spanish plate with the glaze and style that De Morgan copied.

Then there’s this guy.

I wonder if he also has three buttocks?

These angels were intended to go at the corners of Cardinal Wolsey’s tomb, but when he fell out of favor with Henry VIII they were mislaid for several hundred years.

The current special exhibit is a collection of Star Wars action figures and memorabilia.

It’s called May The Toys Be With You.