practically perfect

Happy Birthday to my Dad!

This morning I woke up very early to meet Cristobal to go into London to work on his photography assignment. He had an ipod, a CD, a cassette and all of London's great monuments and architecture at his disposal. We reflected the London eye in a cd and big ben on the ipod – it was surreal to just walk around the city as if it was ours, feeling the furthest away from a tourist as possible… well, minus the giant cameras around our neck.

The funniest part of the morning was getting into London. To save money, we buy day travel cards which allow unlimited travel by bus, train and underground all day. To save even more money, we buy the “off peak” travel cards, which allow all of that travel, but starting after 9:30 am to allow the working-class Londoners to get into the city early.
We arrived at Seven Sisters station, the underground station at 9:15. Chris and I grabbed a newspaper to read for 15 minutes until our cards would be operational at 9:30. As the time got closer to 9:30 more and more people were gathering where we were, right outside the electronic gates, waiting for 9:30. By 9:28 there were around 50 people congesting the entrance to the station. There was a digital clock on the wall that read 9:29.30 – people were anxiously watching it, though they didn’t want to look like they were, trying to glance at their magazine every few moments. As the seconds crept closer, the crowd began casually meandering towards the 10 electronic gates, there was so much tension in the air and anticipation that Chris and I couldn’t help but laugh a little. Finally the clock had 10 seconds to go, as we counted it down silently as if launching a shuttle into deep space. Once it hit 9:30.00 the crowd made a break for it, jamming their ticket into the slot only to be greeted by a loud buzz rejecting their card. The machine wasn’t calibrated to the nanosecond to that of the digital clock 10 feet away, but after a wait of 5 seconds, the machines began letting us through.

Cris and I also stopped off at Kings Cross station to take a picture under ‘Platform 9 3/4,’ made famous from the Harry Potter novels as the platform where the Hogwarts Express departs from. They have placed a cart that is half way through the wall to take pictures with, which we did.

After walking around London taking pictures, Cris had to go back to Cat Hill to go to class, and I decided to walk around a little more on my own. My feet were very soar and needed to rest, so I looked for the nearest Starbucks, which happened to be right behind me – and I sat down for a while with a frappachino.
I began walking down towards Tottenham Court Road which houses the theatre district. I walked up to the Prince Edward Theatre, which is showing the show Mary Poppins, the most popular theatre show in London at the moment, and just walked inside to see if they had any tickets for the night’s performance. Coincidently they had one in the 5th row dead centre, and I couldn’t pass up the cheap ticket. I went back home to drop off my bag and rest a little before heading back into London to catch the show. It was nice to do an activity alone, as sad as it might sound, but being around so many people all the time is a little draining, and this was a necessary break from going everywhere in groups of 5 or more.



The show was really incredible. The set consisted of a dollhouse like set up where rooms would actually come forward, fly up and down and shuffle around. Mary Poppins also made a pretty cool exit at the conclusion of the show when she flew from the stage, above the entire audience and into the ceiling of the theatre.

As she says, my day was practically perfect in everyway.