Saturday in London!

We woke up early…OK, not so early. We were up and out by 9:30 AM. We’re finding the Tube easier and easier to navigate. After a breakfast of fruit, croissant and coffee, we found the Tube to Knightsbridge and made our way along the shop-strewn streets to Harrod’s, the department store than swallows up tourists whole for days at a time, and spits them out depleted of their life savings. Harrod’s reminds me of Vegas. Everything is glitzy, overpriced, and designed to seduce. Kate had a bathing suit all picked out that she liked, only to look at the price tag (note: after deciding she liked it) to discover it cost $116. You could get 10% off if you used American Express – whoopee! We didn’t get it. I did, however, purchase a socket converter to allow us to recharge our devices; universal – lots of attachments – would work with anything right? Wrong. But more about that later.

Our next item of business was to visit Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard. Unfortunately we had missed it by ½ hr, but we had a nice look at the Palace and the grand statue outside. Our next agenda items was the half price ticket outlet for the famous west end shows. We had two picked out (Avenue Q and Wicked), but when we got there, tickets were available for neither (at half price). However, the Mel Brooks musical comedy ‘The Producers’ was available, and we had good tix for 30 pounds. So we had a date!

Our next stop was the famous Tower of London. We decided against the full tour and instead walked around the outside and down along the Thames for a bit of sightseeing. By that time we were getting a bit footweary, so we hopped on the tube and came back to the hotel for a nap. Refreshed, we set out for the Royal Theatre on Drury Lane. We weren’t prepared for how grand the theatre was on the inside. Beautiful balconies and lights, beautifully decorated. The play was very well done and hilarious. We topped off our evening by dropping by a wild-looking restaurant we had spotted on the way to the theatre. The restaurant was called Sarastro, and was decorated to the hilt in theatre garb. Four wild gypsy-like musicians were strumming wildly away at wild music as we entered. The prawn entrée and stir-fried chicken breast/vegetable dishes were excellent. As we looked around we realized the décor was even crazier than it appeared from the outside, and the bathroom décor was, well shall we say, indescribable. I’ll leave it at that. What a day!