If anyone wants me to post the couple photos I have though, I would be more than happy to!
In the meantime, I went to my first "Silent Disco," which was really awesome. Everybody got headphones which allowed you to switch between three channels controlled by different DJs. There were colored lights on the headphones so you could see what everybody was listening to. I felt bad for one of the DJs, because nobody was tuning into the green channel! It was fun because you could individually control your own volume, so I didn't leave with my ears ringing like in a normal club! Awesome! PLUS, I didn't have to listen to stupid Rihanna all night, haha. I could switch whenever a lame song came on.
On Friday night, Bradley showed up! On Saturday, we went to Greenwich. That will make Mom mad, but it was a huge ordeal and I'm not sure she would have liked getting there. Our problem was that we took the tube to North Greenwich, thinking that it was within walking distance. Around 90 minutes later, walking through the cold wind and rain sprinkles, we regretted our decision not to use a bus to close in on "historic" Greenwich. By the time we finally got there, we were pretty tired. Here's a boat. It is called the Cutty Sark. Apparently there was a fire a while ago, so the boat was closed for renovations or else I could tell you more about it, haha.
Here's the famous clock!
This is from the top of the observatory hill! The couple buildings around the Maritime museum and Observatory were really pretty, and the grounds were large, but otherwise I was underwhelmed with Greenwich! It could be because I didn't enjoy being cold and hungry, haha.
We came back from Greenwich and made some tarragon chicken, yummers! We considered going to some nightclubs and things around Camden, but we were kind of feeling lazy, so we went to the comedy club where I've been a few times. The first two acts were ridiculous. It's like they had barely prepared at all. The crowd was nice enough to kind of chuckle a few times, but most people were just appalled by the awkwardness. After that, the acts were hilarious, so that made up for the wackiness of the openers.
On Sunday, we went to Wembley to get Southern Indian food! It was Brad's very first Indian food experience. He said it was good, but I think he was a bit overwhelmed by the spiciness of the dish he got. Sanjiv and Lakshmi took us to a candy store afterwards and got to pick out Indian candies / sweets. Then Brad and I went to Soho for a few hours to poke around and I convinced him to walk back to the house to avoid paying for the tube. We walked through Regents Park which was very nice. It was about a four mile walk, which I hadn't really thought about, because I normally start from campus not from Trafalgar Square! We were pooped. Fortunately, we got to sit down for a while when we went to Palm Sunday mass.
We tried to take people star tripping in the evening, but there are just too many lights in London! We couldn't find a good place for it, although we managed to stun a couple of people. Then candy poker and bedtime!
On Monday it was off to Canterbury! There were severe delays getting out of the city, so it took almost 3 hours to get there instead of 2, blah. I got so hungry that I ended up eating the sandwich I had packed on the bus instead of waiting until we got to town. Canterbury is a nice little place. It is around 40,000 people big, but all of the touristy stuff is inside the old city walls (which are remarkably well preserved). We went straightaway to the Canterbury Cathedral, a 6th (but mostly 15th) century building that serves as the seat for the Anglican Church. It's also famous because Thomas Becket was murdered there. Photos:
There were a ridiculous amount of detailed stained glass windows. I loved them! They have several full time glaziers working for the church. In the below photo, there is also a super old painting, whoo.
Stained glass!
Here is the Cathedral as viewed from the cloister next door.
After we visited the cathedral, we wandered around the town. The museums wound up being crazy expensive, so we sought alternate amusement. We walked for about half a mile and found a couple other little tiny churches and cemeteries, which were pretty cool!
Walking around Canterbury...
The old city walls!
We walked along the walls and found an old Roman burial mound to climb on. Here's the view from the top!
We also came across a Norman castle! It's too bad that it was falling down. It doesn't look like anybody is responsible for keeping it up. We found some staircases in the corners, but they were partially sealed off. We still got to go up to the second floor in one. A sign informed us that it used to be three stories!
We killed some time by hanging around the castle and wandering along the river before we went back to the Cathedral for their evening service. Normally they have a Vespers type service, but because it is Holy Week, everything was very somber. They moved the "evensong" service to the basement crypt (where lots of people are buried, like the Black Prince) and made it a spoken service only. The crypt is the oldest part of the cathedral, having been started in 597 or something like that. It was a pretty cool service. The choir was practicing upstairs during the service, so we heard faint echoes down in the crypt. It was awesome. We tried to listen to them practicing on the way out, but they were closing down the church so we didn't get to stick around long.
We went to a pub for dinner that claimed to be built in the 1600s with a secret tunnel to help monks escape from the cathedral (escape from what)? Brad was cold and shaky, which was weird because the crypt wasn't that chilly. He barely ate any dinner either. By the time we eventually got back to London that night, he was about to toss his cookies. I woke him up at 6:30 am all ready to go to Cambridge but it was pretty clear he had the flu or some gnarly bug in his system. So Cambridge was cancelled and he slept until almost 10 or something. He felt really bad about missing Cambridge, but it is almost 3 hours by bus, so the whole sick-to-his-stomach thing wouldn't have worked out particularly well, I predict. I dragged him to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum because he wanted to at least see part of London despite his illness, and he had to sit down for breathers after every stairwell, haha. That sucks because I'm guessing I'm next now! : (
The Natural History museum is in an absolutely amazing building. I tried to take a photo of the interior, but it's hard to catch the scope and intricacies of the decorations. Their dinosaur exhibit is pretty amazing too. The children were all enthralled by a robot t-rex that thrashes its tale and roars. I'm not going to lie, it's a very realistic animatronic creature with shockingly realistic eye movements, head bobs, etc.
Brad napped for a while and then we headed to see Zach Braff's show, All New People, at the Duke of York theatre. Here's the theatre! It was a dark comedy. I still don't know if I liked it so much as I can appreciate it as a stagework. It was about a guy who tries to commit suicide, but is narrowly rescued when an estate agent showing the house makes a surprise visit. She invites her drug-dealing firefighter friend, a prostitute shows up, and as they try to cheer him up it is revealed that all of them are semi-broken people with pretty twisted histories and drug problems. Mr. Braff's depressed character winds up being the most well adjusted person of them all, as it turns out. I was most impressed with how much work goes into resetting the stage for each show! They threw around a lot of cheetos, hundreds of beads from a "priceless piece of art", snow, lights, the "ceiling" of the house, and pretty much did everything they could to trash the set in 120 minutes.
After the show, we were starting to walk away when we saw a gaggle of people waiting outside the side of the theatre. We stood there for a second and then decided we didn't want to be too creepy, so we left. When we were about half a block away, we suddenly heard clapping and cheering, so we went back. There was Mr. Zach Braff himself! We were getting blocked from seeing him by a girl with a giant pink umbrella, and we were afraid that we might miss him entirely, but he spent a substantial amount of time with the people who were waiting. He had brought a marker with him and signed programs, shirts, and photos. He was a pro at taking photos; he took most of the photos himself in order to cut out the step of handing the camera to another person in the crowd. He seemed really tired and a bit uninterested, but he was still very nice. I can't blame him for being bored -- on a Tuesday night right after one of dozens of shows he probably really didn't want to stand around doing the celebrity service stuff, but he stayed around for a good fifteen minutes to make sure that he got to almost everybody. He even gave people the chance to take a second photo if the first came out blurry. We were trying not to be pushy and were afraid we might miss the chance to meet him because it looked like he was starting to think about leaving, but right at the end he swung around to us and took a photo! Definitely one of the highlights of the whole year so far. I was scared I was going to break my camera or accidentally delete the photo the whole way home, so once I uploaded it I made sure to email it everywhere in order to preserve it in digital form at least, haha. I'm really glad that none of us closed our eyes or had crazy hair!
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