We spent probably two and half hours there, which as I mentioned in my last post is the point at which my brain starts to get too overwhelmed with information. It worked out, though, because it gave us time to get some lunch and then go to a lunch time concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. There was a winds quintet playing and they were quite remarkable, but for some reason day three was when the jet lag decided to up and smack us in the face and so at different points in the concert we both struggled with staying awake. But, for the parts that we could pay attention too, really amazing quintet.
After that we had about a hour to almost literally run through the National Gallery before heading home to get ready for the ballet that night.
Except for the teeny weeny detail that our ballet tickets were for Wednesday. Oops! I'm not entirely sure how I got it in my head that our ballet tickets were for Tuesday, but I was pretty convinced of that, so imagine my dismay when we went to collect the tickets and the guy was like "The ballet isn't on tonight..." Um... but I bought tickets! Anyway, luckily the tickets were for the next night and not for the previous night. This did leave us with some time on our hands. We decided that we would start by having a leisurely dinner. This is the night that I introduced Lori to Indian food, and girl couldn't get enough of it after that. She loved the naan and the rice and the curries and the tandooris. I created a monster! After dinner we went to check out Covent Garden, but there was nothing really going on there (we were too late for the good stuff). So we decided that we'd make a trip out to Kensington Palace.
The grounds looked like they were lovely, and Hyde Park was also nice. The Kensington part of London was SO different from the other parts of the city that we had been in -- more modern feeling, I guess would be the best way to describe it. It was nice to see that and really recognize that for the most part, we were only seeing the tiny tourist part of London and that beyond that it was this busy, bustley city with all kind of different neighborhoods and personalities. We also took advantage of the unstructured time to take the obligatory red phone booth photo (thank you, kind strangers for offering to take this one of both of us!).
Wednesday was our last full day in London. After a comment from our walking tour guide on Monday that Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London covered the whole of London's history, we decided to skip the Tate which was originally in the plan and do Tower of London instead.
It was nice -- we got there first thing to try and beat the crowds, which seemed to work. My favorite thing was the engravings in the prison tower walls. Lori's favorite part was the crown jewels (she likes sparkly things.) We wandered around for a while learning about William the Conqueror and being like "This is a CASTLE! Like, a for real castle!" until we hit the "saturated with information" point, and caught the bus to St. Paul's Cathedral (we were a teeny bit sad to have just missed the old fashioned double decker bus that runs the route between the Tower and St. Paul's, but c'est la vie).
We oohed and ahhed about how beautiful it was for a while, sat for a while in the whispering gallery, although we couldn't get it to work, and then climbed the 3,476 steps up to the dome. (Obviously, that's an exaggeration, but it was a lot of steps. One of Lori's "favorite things" that day was "having made it to the top of St. Paul's" hehehe.) The view was TOTALLY worth it, though. Stunning.
Of course, I spent the rest of the day singing "Feed the Birds" from Mary Poppins, particularly the line "Early each day to the steps of Saint Paul's/The little old bird woman comes."
Our afternoon was filled by a performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" performed at the reconstructed Globe Theater. It was awesome. We bought the £5 peasant standing in the yard tickets, which was fun, and not as straining as expected.
The performance was excellent, if occasionally bit bawdy for my tastes (there were a few times I was like "I hope Lori either didn't see that and/or didn't understand what was going on"). And there were also a few strange chant/dance/Enya parts added in that were... weird. But we liked it. However, we were cutting it really close getting from the Globe to the Opera House for our dinner reservations that evening. The play went a little longer than expected and then we got a little lost trying to find the Tube station and there came a point where I realized that our best bet of arriving on time would be to hoof it. And we BOOKED it. Technically, I think you have to describe what we were doing as walking, but it was no leisurely stroll. I think Lori's feelings toward me during this part of this day could best be described as "deep and utter loathing" as she occasionally had to bust out a bit of a jog to keep up with my enormously long strides.
But, we made it to dinner on time. And we changed into our fancy outfits. And we had a fancy meal. And we saw the London Royal Ballet perform Mayerling at the Royal Opera House.
As with pretty much all ballets, this story line for Mayerling is pretty messed up. But luckily, it's ballet, so mostly you just care about the dancing and the dancing was absolutely breath-taking. There were these incredibly intense pas de deux performances, and some truly amazing male solos. But I think my favorite parts were the scenes in which this group of rebels tries to bend the prince's ear because it involved these really cool echoed dance moves; hard to describe but I loved it. Also really awesome was that our fancy dinner reservations at the Opera House's restaurant meant that we were able to go back to our table during the two intermissions and have dessert, and then hot chocolate. Very fancy. It was a great way to end our London adventures.
No comments:
Post a Comment