A Perfect Day in London

So I think that our day on Friday should be submitted to one of those "Day Trips in London" travel guides that tells people how to spend a perfect day in London. Because it was pretty wonderful.
My day started with my Portrayal of Royalty class, one of my electives for the required Images of Britain Through the Arts class, and it was my favorite class of the week. My professor is the cutest little British woman who works as a museum curator. She gave a lecture on portraits of the royal family in the 1500s for the first half of the class--I never knew you could learn so much from a painting! And the best part is that during the second half of class, we went to the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and actually saw the paintings we had just heard about IN PERSON. Can you tell I was a little excited? (yes, that's probably an understatement...) I just felt so lucky that ND's classroom building is so close to such amazing museums and really gives us the opportunity for our learning to come alive, as cheesy as that sounds. Where else can you hear a lecture about something and then actually go and see it? Some of the highlights of the visit were portraits of the infamous King Henry the VIII and his many (yes, six) wives by Hans Holbein the Younger.

After eating some lunch and buying our tickets for our trip to Windsor on Saturday, Dan, Dan, Kaitlin, Megan, Kelly, and I headed out to Camden Market, via the famous Tube, London's subway system. It was a simple, 11 minute ride, the perfect way to ease into using the Tube. After riding the Tube, I don't think I ever want to go on the T again. It was clean, efficient, and even had comfy seats. On the escalators, I had a little trouble remembering that you stand on the right side and walk up on the right. Except by walk, they mean race, and I almost got trampled a time or two (is anyone else noticing that me almost being run over is becoming all too common?).

Camden Market is a great market to go to during the week in London. It had clothes, leather goods, some crafts, touristy stuff, and then lots of other random stuff. Part of it was in what used to be a stable, which was really cool. I was grateful that it didn't still smell like a stable though...And of course, we got some goofy pictures with the horses.

Then we took the Tube back into the city to take a gamble on tickets to Legally Blonde. A lot of the theatres do last minute ticket lotteries the night of a show and you can get them for reduced prices. We waited in line with about 30 other people to get our lottery numbers at 5:30 and then anxiously awaited the drawing at 6 pm for the 7:30 show. They drew several names and we were starting to get nervous when they drew my name! They faked us out by drawing another person named Megan, but then our Megan was picked next. By some miracle, we had our four tickets to the show! For some strange reason, the Dans didn't mind heading off to the pub instead of going to the show (ha, ha). One of the women in line near us even said that she had never seen that many people at a ticket lottery, so we really lucked out. Because we were in a rush to make it to the show, we grabbed a classy dinner at Pizza Hut--how American of us. Although, the Pizza Huts here are a lot nicer than the ones I remember in the U.S. However, I think we are planning more cultured meals from now on.

Our luck continued when we got back to the theatre and Kaitlin and I realized our tickets were in the FRONT ROW. It was absolutely amazing to see a show from the front row. We saw every wink and smile and expression on the actors' faces--the girl who played Elle Woods was phenomenal and we could see she was actually crying during one of the really emotional scenes in the show (no spoilers here, because I'm sure Julie is reading this and doesn't want me to give away the ending!). I was really amazed at how well all the British actors did American accents--they were all so talented and had amazing voices. The show itself was great, so fast-paced and upbeat. I was smiling the whole time!

London is a pretty amazing city, that we can do all of that in one day! And yes, if Frommers or one of those other guidebook people call, we would be willing to share our fabulous adventure planning skills. For a price, of course. ;)