Wicked!

Last night the class had one of their planned cultural activities, which means I have to go too. I was soooo excited for this one! We went to the musical Wicked last night at the Apollo Victoria Theatre! It was absolutely amazing! I can't tell you how excited I was to go see it and how excited I still am after seeing it. I hope to go to some other shows while I am here, but that was the one show I really wanted to see while here.

Here are a few pictures from the night:

Heading to the theatre.

I agree (even though I haven't seen many musicals in the past decade)!

The stage before the show started, yes we were in the back, but it was still great!

Natural History Museum, Part 1

I started my adventure through the Natural History Museum on Tuesday morning. This is a huge museum, so I know it is going to take me a few trips to get through it all. Good thing it is free!

The museum building is absolutely beautiful. Here are a few pictures, but I don't think they do the building justice.

I wasn't the only one who thought going to the Natural History Museum was a good idea on Tuesday, this was the line I had to wait in to get in the building. Plus there were lots of school groups there.

Once I got in the door, this is what greeted me, a beautiful ceiling and a big dinosaur!

I started in the Dinosaurs section. It was pretty cool, but super crowded. I took a lot of pictures in the museum, but I will try to spare you from all of them!

After the Dinosaurs, I went to the Mammals section. This place seemed to have every mammal I had ever heard of and even more than that. The main part of this section was the very, very large room with lots of displays and animals around the blue whale and a skeleton of a blue whale. I couldn't really get a picture of the whole thing, because it is kinda big. So here is the best I could do.

After the mammals, I bought a ticket for the current exhibition called, Butterfly Explorers. This is a really neat butterfly garden that exhibits species of plants and butterflies from around the world. I couldn't always capture the butterflies in good pictures, but here are a few.

I don't know why, but I loved that there was a Gnome with a butterfly in the outside garden in the exhibit.

I mentioned that there were school groups at the museum...there were a ton! In all, this museum was packed with children. It is a good thing that I like children, but it does become a little annoying when you are trying to get around the museum. I think the saving grace of the school children is that they have cute British accents and have on matching uniforms. At this museum if they are under 7 they get an explorer backpack to use throughout the museum, I especially like the hats they get to wear!

A good time to do some shopping!

Today I was able to do some tourist activities. I started by going to Old Spitalfields Market which is a covered market in London. Monday is a slower day in the market with only the permanent stores and a few stalls of vendors open. I was able to get a few really neat gifts and souvenirs. It was really cool experience and I can't wait to go back on a Sunday when it has all of its vendors there.

I also ventured to the well-known store called Harrods. This was an amazing and overwhelming experience. This store is huge! It takes up a whole city block and is 7 stories tall. I got lost several times They are having their once a year sale right now, so there were some good deals going on.

Harrods even had a section called Pet Kingdom. It is ridiculous the amount of stuff they had there and the price of everything. Sorry Parker, you won't be getting anything from Harrods!

They had a large section of Pet Fashions within the Pet Kingdom.

In the toy/gift section of Harrods, I think I found the best present for Avery, Madelyn, and Drew. I think I could get each of them one, I hope you have room in the house for these Beth! There are about 4 different versions of these very large bears, so I can get each one a different kind. I just need to figure out how I can afford them...these things were priced at 1,900 pounds, which is about 2,868.43 in US dollars given today's exchange rate.

In the underground level of the store, there is a memorial for Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. Dodi's father was the former owner of Harrods. I didn't realize there was a memorial in the store, so I was a little surprised when I saw this while getting off the escalator.

On my way to Harrods I found this bakery with a scrumptious looking display. They also had individual slices of cakes, cheesecakes, and other treats below the cakes. I decided not to stop in...but I really, really wanted to! I may just have to go back in the next few weeks...

I will post soon about my other adventure of the day...going to the elephant walk!

Wimbledon = Fail, Portobello Road Market = Success

On Saturday morning a few of us got up early to go to Wimbledon to "queue" (also known as wait in line) to get day of tickets for the tournament. Wimbledon is one of the few large sporting events that still sets aside tickets (several thousands, like 6,000) for day of event sales. So, you can go out and queue for tickets.

You know it was a bad sign when getting off the tube the announcer said if you are going to Wimbledon don't bother if you don't already have a ticket as they have sold out, don't waste your time. After an hour of travel, we decided to still walk to the grounds to see what was going on.

As we were entering we were told to go to the large tennis ball:

Well sold out wasn't exactly true...we could have waited in line and gotten in, but it wouldn't be until after 5:00, did I mention that we got there at 8:30 in the morning. This was the end part of the line, we never even saw all of the line, that is how long it was!

When you enter the queue, you are given your queue card. I was pretty excited to get the queue card, until I saw the number on the bottom. I was the 9,422 person to enter the queue for that day, depressing.

Here are some other pictures from the day:

Sadly, you could only get into the shop from inside the grounds, so no souvenirs for me.

After leaving Wimbledon, we went to Portobello Road Market in Notting Hill. It was a great market, but was super busy as you can tell from the picture.