London: Day 5
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We slept in a bit today. I went for breakfast while Geo slept, then showered. We wanted to go to the British Museum, but it was closed on New Year’s day, so we wandered the pedestrian shopping mall streets just off Tottenham Court Road. There was actually a plaque on one of the buildings dedicating it to the working class merchants of London, from a royal somebody. All I could think of was Alfred Doolittle and the “Undeserving Poor”. Geo found a Sci-Fi book store that had all kinds of British authors in it that he’d never even heard of, so he was thrilled to pick up a few books he wouldn’t find at home. He also found a camera store that he got a good price on a memory card on.
We wandered all the way back to Convent Gardens, and I was thrilled to take pictures of the buildings from the opening scene of “My Fair Lady”, where Prof. Higgins first hears Eliza Doolittle. I almost broke into song with “Wouldn’t It Be Lovely”. I goofed off in some of the clothes stores in the market building, and tried on some stuff, but the cloths here don’t fit me. We picked up some good tea and cookies for Jean & Ralph from Whittard’s, then set off to find something to eat.
We found a great place for lunch at 4 New Ron, Convent Garden, a place called “Harry Brown’s” that serves great hot grilled sandwiches and huge breakfasts all day. We both had excellent grilled chicken sandwiches that left us stuffed. The waiter was very high energy and entertaining.
We were tired, so we headed back to the hotel to drop off our shopping purchases and have a snooze before heading out again. We decided to go to Baker St. and find the Sherlock Holmes residence. We found 221B Baker St. and took some pictures and visited the gift shop. Geo got a 221B pin for his bag. We also stopped by the Beatles memorabilia shop on Baker St. It had some funky old items in it that were fun to look at.
We walked the rest of Baker St. down to Oxford, and wandered through Selfridges Department store for a while. We bought some more baklava at its gourmet food dept. and wondered through the jewelry dept.
We went down some back streets behind Selfridges, and found a great little restaurant called “The Stockpot” (50 James St. W1) for some good and cheap minestroni soup and cafe lattes.
From there we caught the tube to Victoria Palace Theater to see FAME. One of the ushers selling programs was from Lindsay, Ont. It’s a small world. We had a good laugh over the British response to the weather. The people who sat beside us in the theater were teachers from California. We had a very interesting discussion about the differences between our education system and theirs, and our benefits compared to theirs. There’s pluses and minuses to both systems.
The curtain went up (after Geo and I took a few pictures of the theater). The show was high energy and the singing and dancing was highly entertaining. The show was great. The whole audience stood and clapped a rhythm to the big finally.
After the show we caught the tube back to the hotel and contemplated going for chicken vindaloo, but it was 10:45 pm and I didn’t want to chance my stomach not taking it, so we’ll do it tomorrow.
Over heard from some American tourist in the Sherlock Holmes gift shop: “So Sherlock Holmes really lived here? Yeah, this is his house…” Unbelievable.
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