It’s only mid-afternoon and we’ve already had an extremely busy day!
Seen, in order: London Bridge, Thames Ricer Walk, Tower Bridge, Tower of London, Rsndom Pub, London Eye, Big Ben, Houses of Parliament (ext.), Westminster Chapel (ext.), Buckingham Palace (ext. w/guards), Green Park, Picadilly Circus again, and Soho.
Phew! We stopped for a pint in Soho and met up with one of my favorite Britons, Zach Burns — a great photographer and a super guy, it was a pleasure finally meeting him in person.
Now we’re back at the hotel to freshen up, then we’ll grab some dinner and head over to see “The Mousetrap.”
It was a challenge, but we managed to stay up until 10:30pm last night, watching Graham Norton after seeing the play “3 Days of Rain,” which I really enjoyed.
From the window of our cozy hotel room you can see a sliver of the billboards in Picadilly Circus (think a miniature Times Square), as well as the London Eye (where I think we’ll start things off today.)
True to form, I popped awake at 4:30 - and I’m amazed that the habit managed to find me on the other side of the world! We skipped dinner last night after eating all day (or so it seemed) so I’m famished.
We’re hopefully going to meet up with a couple friends for a pint this afternoon, dinner with Tania, then off to see “The Mousetrap” for it’s eighty millionth performance. (Not really, but it has been running forever.)
We did run into a surprise yesterday when we walked into a square where they were filming a huge crowd of people for an upcoming mobile phone commercial. A huge LED screen was set up and there were dozens and dozens of microphones handed out in the crowd… Then they played Karaoke tracks and the whole crowd was singing evrrything from Beatles to Britney. It was pretty wild!
That’s it for now!
We’ve arrived in Amsterdam for our connection to Heathrow. Naturally we immediately found a Casino and (unless you count currency conversion fee) we’re up 1,50 EU! Now we’re sipping Fanta and water and waiting for our (enclosed) gate to open.
The flight over was great - upper deck Business Class on KLM. Good food — too much of it — and nice crew. I even managed to get some sleep without drugging myself.
Just seeing what little of The Netherlands we can from the plane gets me excited for the stop here later this week. It is gorgeous out there!
