A day out in London

Even though the Olympics are on and London and its transport system were supposed to be busy beyond belief, we thought that it was about time that we spent a day just exploring London.  So we headed in on the fast train and made it into Waterloo by 10am on Saturday morning.  Our first stop was to be St Paul’s Cathedral.  Our last attempt to see St Paul’s had been when the Dalai Lama was visiting and so we missed out.  We were also careful to make sure that we didn’t go visiting on a Sunday after last week’s visit to Salisbury.  As it was a lovely morning, we decided to walk there.

 

St Paul’s took a lot longer than I was anticipating.  While it is an amazing building from the outside, it is even more spectacular inside.  We spent a while marvelling at the internal architecture, and the beautifully sculpted memorials to various English heroes.  I guess it was a sign of the times, but they were nearly all remembered for being great commanders in the various armed forces.  It was good to see a couple of memorials to doctors / physicians who had kept some member of the royal family in good health, or just been general good guys.

Having scouted around the ground floor, we then took on the challenge of the stairs.  There are 3 levels to St Paul’s.  The first lot of stairs takes you to the whispering gallery which goes around the inside of the dome.  This gave us a great view of the paintings on the ceiling of the dome.  From there we ascended further, but this time ended up on the outside of the dome.  Instead of looking down inside, the views were of the city.  While the views from here were great, going up to the last level and looking out from the top of St Paul’s was more amazing.

The view from the base of the Dome

Looking down from the top of the Dome

After St. Pauls, we made our way in the Tube to Leicester Square to look for one of the cheap ticket kiosks.  While I had a particular one in mind, we found that there was one actually in the Tube station which was much easier.  We bought tickets to We Will Rock You, and then tried to work out how to fill the time until 7pm. 

The fountains outside Kiwi House

We hopped back on the tube to Kings Cross St. Pancras in order to visit Kiwi House.  This was set us for Kiwi’s in London to go and watch some NZ coverage of the Olympics.  We got there and there was a queue for about 25 metres.  We got into the queue but were soon told it would take about an hour for us to get in, as they could only let new people in when others left.  We had not had any lunch, and there was an outdoor area with a BBQ smelling fantastic.  The fact that we weren’t going to get any of it for an hour was a bit disheartening.  Reluctantly we left the queue and went in search of some lunch.  We had burned quite a lot of energy climbing St. Pauls after all.

After some nice pizza not too far away we re-joined the queue, ready to wait for an hour.  In fact it only took about 40 minutes and we were in.  It was quite fun inside; there was a really big screen and a random selection of chairs around, but the place was very loud.  We couldn’t really have a conversation while watching, and there were no NZ events on at that time either.  We got to watch Serena Williams annihilate Maria Sharapova and we couldn’t even hear Sharapova.  Maybe that was a good thing…

Sadly, none of the NZ Olympic team showed up to show off medals (the rowers came in on Sunday instead, rotters) so we had a drink, sat around a little and then continued on.  We decided that we didn’t really want to get back on the Underground and instead walked to the British Museum.  This was, of course, choc full of very interesting exhibits but we were getting quite foot-sore by then.  And we also felt that the Museum wasn’t very user friendly in terms of giving directions around it.  I did particularly enjoy the Iron Age Europe exhibit though.  We might have to go back when we haven’t spent so such of the day walking.

We just had time left for a leisurely pub meal before our show; Grant’s cold beer and my cup of tea were extremely welcome by that stage too.

The theatre was very easy to find – it’s hard to miss the gold Freddy Mercury up on top of the portico!!  We armed ourselves with ice-creams and found our seats pretty easily, and settled in for an evening of Queen.  We loved the show – the story is pretty cheesy but really, it’s surprising how well Queen’s songs can be woven into a narrative.  The music and singers were superb and we got right into the singing along.  I hope our near neighbours didn’t mind too much!!  At interval I bought a programme and was most surprised to find that Bohemian Rhapsody wasn’t on the list of songs for the second half.  A celebration of Queen’s music without Bohemian Rhapsody?  Yeah right.  It was played as an encore and I reckon EVERYONE in the audience was singing!  What a great night out (although, as the guy in the ticket office said, “If you like Queen it’s great fun.  If you don’t like Queen you are in for a long night!”).

Weary but still humming, we made our way back to Waterloo and onto a train home.  I’ll say one thing for coming home late, at least you get a seat!