London was aaaaaaaaawwwwweeee….some!!!
We arrived on Saturday. Bro & Sis were delayed (traffic), so I got myself a book, and started reading (finished it yesterday :). Within two hours, Anke & Rogier arrived, and after some phoning, we found eachother and were on the way to the hostel! Hostel was pretty good, though the room bordered on a very busy street… didn’t sleep well, then again, I didn’t go to London to sleep well.
First evening we just went out and for a walk, and happened upon a free theatre right outside the mayor’s office. The play was actually a lot better than I anticipated. I figured it would be a single actor, perhaps maybe as much as three people, and that it would be a rather boring affair, not well played. But no. Imagine my surprise when a group of about 12 actors were singing with verve, dancing, acting well, changing costumes, etc. The story was “Jason and the Argonauts“, and it was delivered in an incredibly fun and exciting way. We had just arrived in London, and we were stumbling upon fun :) Afterwards, we stumbled 20 metres on and found ourselves in a roller disco! Well, being untrained we all refrained from trying it, but it did remind me of going skating.. I definitely will in the near future.
The evening ended at the roof terrace bar of our hostel. As we didn’t realise that the bar would be open, we brought some of our own drinks. Then we met some people, it was fun, and we ran out of drinks. Since the bar didn’t serve anything interesting, I made a quick stop at a nightstore and we had something more to drink… As a result, I was fast asleep before my birthday :)
Sunday we slept in, and went to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. We happened to arrive early, so we took our time, enjoyed the sun and just hung about in the park a bit. After a while, we started to explore the park and happened upon a pond with pedalo’s. We lounged about on the pond for almost an hour, got more of a tan, and then we set out to score some theatre tickets. Unfortunately, there were no tickets that were interesting to all of us available, so we settled on Harry Potter. The movie started out in a fantastic way! We were in London and had lounged about London quite a bit in our 1.5 days of being here. Walked about South Bank, Picadilly Circus, London bridge, Tower Bridge, Millenium Bridge, the London Eye, St. Paul’s… We had seen quite a number of the sights already (not stopping to admire, because we all had done so before — we just passed them at one point or another). The movie commences with some Death Eaters flying over and through London, past all the places we had seen, past the skyline we had admired… it was very cool to see all of that while being in London :)
The rest of the movie was okay too, although (for my tastes) it is really an in-between story. It sets the stage for the final book, which is necessary, but in itself it’s just not that interesting. Well, not too surprisingly, the movie suffers from this as well. However, if you know the story, you’ll roughly know what to expect. Upside: the new actor for Dumbledore (I call him new, even though the “old” one only lasted one movie) finally has a moment in which he comes across at pretty capable, and perhaps even a bit cool. It is about time he did though. The old one just dripped awesomeness all over the movie, and this one finally gets a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
Other than that: Monday we went to the Phantom of the Opera. It’s a horror. I didn’t know, and that made it pretty unsettling for me. Of course, the music was still awesome :) On Monday, we also checked out the Prime Meridian in Greenwich. Boring! But the boat ride back (with a swifth catamaran) definitely made up for it.
Tuesdays I got Rogier a newspaper for breakfast (it was his birthday, after all), and we checked out Covent Garden (really cool place to be) and Camden Market (check out my new jacket!). After that, we chilled with Anke’s friend Bart at the far west side of London. Tuesday was good :)
That’s sort of what happened in London. Have to admit, on Tuesday I came across the t-shirt “No I don’t have F#$%^KING Facebook” quite some times. Later in the evening, when I hadn’t bought it, someone actually asked me for my Facebook. Guess I should’ve gotten the shirt anyway ;-)