Other than the roof, the dome was pretty pointless

Dumbing Down the Dome

150 years after the Crystal Palace was torn down, the Brits build this and claim it's progress! Since when do Wren's people call a big tent a dome?

After Florence, Rome, and Wren's London itself, I thought I'd never meet a Dome I didn't like (Unless, of course, they were doing something really stupid inside like playing American football). But this dome was a joke. It was so banal that it made TV look intelligent. We'd be better off if they had wiped it out in that James Bond movie. Strangely, the British Minister who built the place is quite proud since the Brits dared to build something on this scale for the change of century while the French (remember that Eiffel thing) passed for a bunch of one-time fireworks. We're hip -- they've got the upper lip.

We should have had a premonition of how bad things would be when we tried to buy tickets and had to wait a half hour because the computers were down! This is February 2000, for God's sake and they can't take a credit card (or even cash as it turned out). Over a billion dollars was spent to create this 20 acre space and they can't collect money as well as a Parisian sidewalk café.

At least while we waited a Dixieland band came by to cheer us up. (They had an amplifier but at least no computer to malfunction.) The ticket sellers handled it well -- like it happens all the time.

Here's a view of the outside while we waited for our tickets to print out on the only printer that seemed to work...

Look closely in the lower right and you can read over Pietrina's shoulder.

Doth size matter?

Inside the overall scale can be entertaining if you're willing to trade bigness for content. (We'd understand that in America, but this is the land of Shakespeare.) Here's a typical hallway scene with a large multicolored vacuum hose to make the place suck even more (or is it just a multi-ethnic Mcdonald's arch?):

The place is divided into a number of theme areas: Here's one of the body with one of the better meaningless displays:

Neat. But what for? Typically the exhibition area itself will have a bunch of meaningless sayings printed on the wall and a few tv monitors showing some videotape of limited value. We made the mistake of getting the audio guide and actually turned it back in halfway through. It merely quoted the words on the wall! Like we couldn't read. Like there was anything worth reading.

A really big show

The huge space had only two redeeming features. The first was the show. Here's a picture of the performance space in the middle of the dome before the show:

and

Just before show time, the blue fabric dropped down to darken the arena. The overall show didn't make much sense but it was like a superbowl halftime show: the plot was of no real use but the spectacle was interesting. Soon the show began with strange creatures streaming in from the sides and forming puffed dandelions and other critters:

Then the many aerial actors fell from the sky and starting performing in cages such as this:

Some great war and peace episode was going on in center stage which no one was noticing…

… but it was typically eclipsed by actors falling from the ceiling:

Soon it was over and we tried to escape into Greenwich proper but got sidetracked with by the second redeeming feature -- a cute Y2K movie about time travel (which the BBC could have shown on TV and probably will).

Ye olde sermonizing

About the time of the last millennium, some early English bard wrote Beowulf. The night before I visited the dome, I bought a copy of a new translation for about half the price of the dome ticket. In the year 3000 will any of our descendants buy a replica of this dome? -- even if it's in a fake snow shake sphere? I doubt it. I'll put my money on Beowulf. Progress was OK but it went on too long. Why don't we tear this dome down and put it in a time capsule buried deep in the earth, maybe next to a nuclear dump site in Texas.

Next we tried to make our way to the rest of Greenwich to see its navigational museums, etc. but we were running out of time so we headed back to known territory of the South Thames and walked by the rebuilt Globe Theatre and Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral. Please join us by clicking here and getting away from this wretched building.

Afterthought: The Eiffel tower got even worse reviews when it was built and was almost torn down when its 20 year lease expired. However, by then, it was saved because it was useful as a radio tower.

Afterthought for Geeks only: If you think Beowulf is a variant of Linux, then you are really in bad shape and should be smite in the back of the neck to make you smarter. (You know who you are!)

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