017 - wed 17/05/2006 - london

we slept in, again. we were slowing the pace down in london after a pretty hectic week in new york.

our first task in the morning was to head to leicester square to find cheap tickets for a west end show. that completed, we headed in the direction of covent garden where we found a lot of boutique and designer clothing stores. it started to drizzle a little; we found covent garden market. stalls, shops, food. there was this great string ensemble playing that we stopped and watched for a while, they looked like they were probably students but they were entertaining a large crowd of people with energetic popular string things. from covent garden we did a large circle that took in oxford street and regent street. all this time it had continued to drizzle, and we were starting to get pretty tired of it, so we ducked down a side street and into a pub for two glasses of wine, four expensive battered chicken pieces, and five expensive potato wedges. we were learning quickly that its best not to do too much currency conversion in your head - this meagre plate of snacks, whilst yummy, was costing us close to A$20. its interesting actually how food, drinks and rent are so inflated, but if you duck into a bookstore or a cd store, the prices are really very comparable to at home. its not like everything is way more expensive, its just some things. anyway.

we were a few streets away from our theatre, and we still had an hour or so to kill so we scouted out places to eat in soho. yeah we were in soho again, but this time in london. and then we saw our show - mary poppins. as soon as we'd arrived in london we'd started to see posters for it, and suz had gotten pretty excited, so it was the obvious choice. it was a great show, we had seats in the third row, right up in their faces. suz is a huge fan of the movie so i think it took her a little bit of time to warm to the show, because they had taken some liberties with the plot, removed a few scenes, added a few new songs. but in the end, it was a very impressive show with cool giant moving sets that interlocked and floated in and out.

after the show we had dinner at a curry house where the only other diners was a table of three english guys. we spent most of our meal eavesdropping on their truly jaw-dropping conversation, these three really wicked misogynists just carried on and on about their sexual escapades, those of their friends, wild nights out at strip clubs and brothels in prague. but they weren't like excitedly bragging or anything, it was just quite a casual chat over dinner. what we loved was the fact that it was just us, them, and the indian waiters in the restaurant. and we weren't talking, and neither were the waiters - we were all just fairly obviously listening in on this really weird convo between these assholes.

after dinner we found a haagen-daas ice cream shop and grabbed some ice cream for the tube ride home to limehouse.

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