honeymoon: london

So here we are in London, England. We got here Tuesday morning, promptly went to the nearest pub and had fish & chips and a beer (hey, it was like 3 am Winnipeg time, which is the time my brain was still on) and crashed for a five hour nap. But then we were raring to go! We headed to the West End for dinner and to see The Phantom of the Opera. I saw this when it was in Winnipeg (I was about twelve) but it was great to see it again. The sets are incredible, the music is powerful and the story is engrossing. Doesn't really get any better than that.

Yesterday we got up and headed to Oxford to visit my cousin Lindsay and her husband Geoff. (Ironically, as I haven't seen Linz for maybe four years, and then I saw her both in Winnipeg and then Oxford within four days.) We spent the day wandering around Oxford, looking at Christ Church (one of the thirty-odd colleges that make up the University of Oxford; Geoff is a student at Merton). Then we hooked up with Linz and Geoff and had bangers and mash at a restaurant called The Big Bang, which doesn't serve anything else. We finished it off with spotted dick (hee hee) and treacle.


Then it was time for the pubs.

I'm not sure exactly what kinds of beer we drank, but drink it we did. (England is for beer.) I have nothing to say except that I'm glad I wasn't the one who had to try and find our way home at the end of the night. English streets are confusing, all laid out in random curvy squiggles hundreds of years before cars were invented. Of course, it didn't help that I was, ahem, moderately inebriated. Thanks to Linz and Geoff!

Today we got up and headed back to London. We went to the Tower of London and saw the Crown Jewels, then walked over the London Bridge (which did not fall down) and visited the Borough Market (not much to see on Thursdays, as it turns out). We wandered back to visit the Science Museum and now here we are in an internet cafe. Tonight we plan to go for sushi and then to a jazz club.

[Added months later; apologies for the delay.]

The following day, we got up early and dropped our stuff off at the train station before we wandered over to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace (actually, there were so many people that we couldn't see very much -- damn tourists!) and then wandered around St. James Park, Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

And then we missed our train to Paris thanks to my not being able to distinguish between the "departure time" box and the "arrival time" box on our tickets. Oops. After thoroughly impressing the woman at the ticket counter with this display of sheer brilliance, we exchanged our tickets and eventually did, in fact, get to Paris.

Andy was in charge of getting us to train stations on time for the rest of the trip.