London (A Slightly Late Update, I Know)

Well, I have promised myself that I would complete my blog entries before I arrived in the States. I will begin more than a week ago, and shall hopefully encapsulate everything that has happened since then without dragging on too much.

I believe I left you with an account of Sunday's adventures. The next day, Monday, I woke up and went with Ashley and Mr. Underwood to Leicester Square. This is an area in the heart of London which has a great many retailers of discount theater tickets. London, home to one of the most well known theater scenes in the world, has a huge number of musicals and dramas. Half of their family chose to see "We Will Rock You" and the other half "Dreamboats and Petticoats." Now, you can imagine which one I immediately crossed off my list (you can't judge a book by its cover, but I choose to judge this play by its name). Unfortunately, seats for both the Queen musical and the other play i wanted to see, Les Miserables, were more than I wanted to pay, so decided not to go.

From Leicester Square Ashley and I took to the tube to the Imperial War Museum, which I found fascinating. They had exhibits as well as retired implements of war - tanks, missiles, airplanes, etc. - and we wound up staying for almost three hours without realizing it. We ate a late lunch at Panzer's again, and I also tried a Chocolate Dreamcake doughnut, which Krispy Kreme only offers in the UK.

For dinner we went to Ping Pong, a Chinese restaurant serving dim sum. These are little samplers of fried dumplings and spring rolls. I had never tried them before but really liked them. That evening they went to see their respective plays and I returned to the hostel and tried to catch up on some journaling.

On Tuesday we went to Covent Square Garden and browsed through the shops and stalls. It was much smaller than Portobello Road, though, and Madison and I quickly abandoned the market in favor of watching a street performer; it was Madison's ardent wish that she see a "good street performer" while in London, and this one wasn't bad. He was a performer with a showman's air about him, and did things like driving a nail into his nose, followed by balancing on the top rung of a ladder for at least ten minutes while telling jokes and catching bowling pins that were thrown to him.

This was followed with a walk to the British Museum, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It reminded me of the Night At The Museum film, and was maybe the most interesting museum of them all. It had the Rosetta Stone. It had three thousand year-old Egyptian mummies. It had a stone head from Easter Island. We only stayed for an hour and I had already decided to see it again by the time we left.

The rest of the afternoon was spent at several department stores, including Selfridge's again, this time for a less frenetic visit. We rejoined the Underwoods, who were very kind in allowing me to tag along with them for part of their vacation, at the Haagen Dazs restaurant near Piccadilly Circus for dinner. Yep, it was a sit-down restaurant that only serves ice cream. I chose a tray with scoops of Belgium chocolate, strawberry cheesecake, caramel and praline, and creme brulee. It was delicious, obviously.

Before heading home we stopped in M&M World, which was a big store on Oxford Street devoted exclusively to, you guessed it, M&M's. London has everything it seems.