Scottish Adventurrres 20 - Brain Brain Go Away, Come Again Some Other Day

No, I'm not referring to zapgun4hire. I'm referring to my Brain.

I'm feeling a little depressed. No reason for it really, I should be feeling pretty good, especially since I just watched Avenue Q (which was hilariously funny - I think I only stopped laughing for the intermission.)

Part of it is that my vacation is almost over. Part of it is the fact that I've gained a ton of weight and I've pretty much given up trying to eat right on this trip. Another resolution broken. Mostly it's facing up to my curse, which is never easy.

I'm tired and a little emo. Instead of posting I really should just go to bed. But I'm in London - I want to explore. It'll be a few years before I'm here again.

Can't keep my eyes open though.

Not So Scottish Adventurrres - The Big Smoke

I didn't just want to see Scotland while I was in the UK. I had to go to London too. And if I was going to be in London, then I had to check out some West End musicals!

Getting there involved a train trip from Dundee to London. This took six hours. If I had the whole thing to plan over I'd have flown instead. Charming as the Scottish/English countryside is, I'd have rather had a shorter trip - even if it cost a little more (and frankly, domestic flights can be very cheap in the UK). We got there on time and then had to brave the tube. This was relatively painless as was checking into our hotel. The room was wee, but we weren't going to be using it for anything other then sleeping, so that's OK. Thankfully zapgun4hire doesn't snore.

I did have a few moments in and around London that I likened to being a hillbilly on his first trip to Kansas city - like when I gawked at the nuclear power plants, or saw someone wearing an honest-to-Allah burka, or saw something related to the Royal family (like Buckingham Palace). I felt a little silly about my reactions when that shit happened. I was jaded by day two though.

We didn't have much time before Wicked started though. And it was actually south of the Palace (rather then in the actual West End, assuming I've got my directions right). Couldn't get any cheap tickets for Wicked so we just bought them right at the front. Well worth it though. Wicked was, well, wicked. The lead, Shona White, was normally the understudy for the role of Elpheba, the Wicked Witch of the West, but this was her West End debut. She's got a helluva set of pipes and did a great job. The look on her face at the end when she got the standing ovation was worth the price of admission all by itself.

Afterwards, I wanted to explore. Having a map, we decided to walk back to the hotel (about 4K). Brain briefly expressed concern that we might walk into the bad side of town. On the map the route we would take would take us past Buckingham Palace (Probably one of the safest places on Earth as far as muggings are concerned) and the West End. We had no problems.

London is a girl-watcher's paradise I discovered.

The next morning we went to the British Museum. Spent a few hours just grooving on that. The bad news is that I hit a wall. I had had my fill of history. I stopped trying to absorb what I was seeing and just looked for neat junk. After awhile I couldn't even do that. I needed a change. We had a few hours to kill before our next show, so I talked Brain into checking out one of the double-decker bus tours. One left from our hotel, so it would be easy to check out. Plus, the day had (despite the natives' predictions of rain and gloom) turned out rather nice.

We got onto the bus with one girl whom Brain started chatting with. Turns out she was from Calgary too! So Karen from Southwest Calgary, traveling to (ultimately) Belgium, here's to you. You were a fun, lively girl and it was pure pleasure hanging out with you for three hours.

As for the tour it was a lot of fun. We checked out all the big landmarks (sometimes more then once given the circuitous nature of the roads) and it was very entertaining. The tour guide was a ham and that's the sort of job where being a ham is an advantage. We could have done with less of his singing Queen tunes.

Avenue Q was the best simulated Muppet sex I've ever seen. They had to have an intermission in the middle of the show so you could gulp in some air from laughing non-stop throughout.

That night there were issues, which went away once I finally forced myself to go to bed.

The next day we just went window shopping. We wandered deliberately and suddenly found ourselves in the midst of numerous sex shops and adult shows.

"We seem too have taken a turn into the skanky part of London", I said.
"Dude, it's Soho", replied Brain.

We found some weird little, commercial-avenue-esque shops and I ended up buying some stuff. Among other things, I found a rather scholarly book about the making of Yellow Submarine.

We ran into some trouble when we got to King's Cross station to go back to Dundee. We both thought our train was at 1500. Turns out it was actually at 1400. We were there at 1445. Whoops. Well we did some quick checking and found that there was another train at 1500, but we couldn't use our reserved seats. We had to take what we could find. Thus another crisis was averted. The other problem is that our original ticket was for Dundee and this train only went as far as Edinburgh. Luckily ScotRail doesn't care. We simply transferred to another train in Edinburgh.

On the train trip back we kept seeing these weird ass structures around greater London. There were these columns of latticework that looked like the grills of a silo, but without the walls. They didn't seem to be in a state of mid-construction, so I'm not actually sure what they could be for. Oh well, I'll show pictures to mallt and see if she knows. She knows the strange ways of the island natives.