London town's a go-go

From Warwick in the rain to London in the...partly cloudy. Friday Marika and I explored Oxford Street and Carnaby. She managed to find the one Anthropologie in all of London.

I'm not sure what Carnaby is officially but it was a pedestrian sort of mall with lots of higher-end stores but also a fair few vintage/alternative/local designers.

We have dinner at a little place called Bistro 1 which serves cheap but decent Mediterranean/British/Italian cuisine. Then we go back to the hostel and crash (Earl's Court with Hostelling International, which I highly reccommend).

It's good we do because the rest of our evening is Very Exciting. We had splurged on tickets to see Billy Elliot at the Victoria Palace Theatre.

The show was terribly, wonderfully, excellently good. The young man who played Billy in our performance was Ollie Gardner and did an absolutely phenomenal job. There was one point where he had just finished a routine and was waiting for the applause to die down before continuing, but either he knew he had done particularly well or he was surprised by the audience reaction because he started grinning, clearly very pleased about something. It was just awfully cute to see him standing there, all surprised and happy.

In the seat next to me was a young man from South Korea. It was his first day in London he told me. He also fell asleep by the intermission and Marika and I were debating whether or not to wake him up. Luckily he woke up for himself by the second half.

The next morning, Marika and I went to the British Library. Oh boy was that exciting for a couple of English nerds! You aren't allowed to take pictures so I don't have anything of what we saw but it makes a marvelous list.

First off, most incredibly for me, the Beowulf manuscript! The actual, original, only one in existence, manuscript! They were displayed the first page (Hwaet! etc.) and I got all excited and silly about catching bits that I could understand (that waes god cynning). I don't know how to type a thorne so 'that' will have to remain with a th.

There were also works from Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Philip Sidney of the festering thigh wound, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden, Milton, Johnson, Wordsworth (I liked this one because someone else had scribbled 'By Wordsworth' with a doodle over half of it), Wilde, Lewis Carroll, the original score of Handel's Messiah, Beethoven's tuning fork, hand written Beatles lyrics, the Gutenberg Bible and the Magna Carta.

The Magna Carta.

There was of course lots more but these were some of the highlights. So anyone going to London, go to the British Library!

Marika headed back to Bristol after lunch to study and I went for a wander. A very long wander. I started at Charing Cross, walked across the Jubilee Bridge, along by the London Eye.

The London Eye is really really enormously hugely large. Really. Look at it! See that building behind it? That's like 4 or 5 stories high.

I crossed back over the Thames at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, took in those and Westminster Abbey. Although the Abbey itself was closed, the Abbey shop I noticed, was not.

Then I got lost a bit but ended up at Piccadilly Circus, which is a bit like Times Square in New York City. Theatres, billboards, tons of people, crazy traffic, lights, noise, confusion. Also like New York City, Piccadilly had a theatre playing The 39 Steps which was a play I had seen when in NYC, much to my enjoyment. I noticed that people were going in, realized there was a 4pm matinee (it was about 3:45 at this point), and asked at the box office about tickets. What luck! They had some and at a decent last minute price so soon enough I was sitting in the adorable Criterion Theatre (decorated all in pink and rose and cream) ready to watch The 39 Steps!

The show was just as fantastic as I remembered it, especially with the added bonus of being able to anticipate the jokes somewhat which only makes it funnier. The London audience didn't appreciate the broad Hitchcock references as much as the NY audience did ("I can't go up there! I get terrible...*looks at audience* VERTIGO"). All in all, though, it was a fantastic spontaneous way to end my stay in London.