Second London Trip

Tuesday we had class and ran errands and tried to get to bed early because we were headed to London again on Wednesday. I got to bed about 10:15 – a miracle for me – but had a hard time falling asleep. I couldn’t get my brain to turn off, and then I started stressing about getting to sleep because I knew I had to get up at 5 am. In the midst of my tossing and turning, I heard a little scratching noise and I froze. I was convinced I had imagined it. Then I heard it again: the distinct sound of little claws clicking on the wood floor under my bed. That’s right. I have a mouse living under my bed. I could hear it scurrying around, looking for something to nibble on, and I was too terrified to move.

Important to note is the fact that I am not normally afraid of mice. They don’t make me scream and run or jump on chairs or anything silly like that. But to hear that sound under your bed, late at night, alone, when everyone else is asleep, and your lights don’t work, is quite a petrifying experience.

I think it took me twenty minutes to get up the courage to grab my flip flops and run down to the kitchen, where I knew we had some poison under the sink. I grabbed the packet and ran back upstairs, sleep completely forgotten. I opened it, slid it under my bed and hurriedly climbed back under the covers. And shivered.

But I could still hear them (I don’t actually know how many there were). And the sound was driving me absolutely insane. So about 12:30 when our front door opened and I could hear some of the girls talking, I ran downstairs, anxious for any way out of that bedroom. Two of my roommates had gone to a late showing of Harry Potter and were just getting home. I told them my sob story of the scary mice under my bed and they were just as horrified. So we grabbed our blankets and pillows and slept on the couches of the Welsh house. I got probably 2-3 hours of sleep before we had to be up again to catch the train. It was going to be a long day.

The group I was with had plans to go to Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, the Tower of London, and finish the day with Les Miserables at Queen’s Theatre, to which we had bought tickets two weeks before on our first day in London. Well, everyone in the program started at the Museum of London and then we split up, so we opted to do the Tower of London first since it was pretty close and Westminster was on the other side of the city.

We paid to get into the Tower, and it was well worth it in my opinion. We spent almost three hours touring the rooms and the shops and seeing the crown jewels (my favorite part!). When that was over, we ducked into a souvenir shop to grab a few things, then got on the tube to see when Westminster did their Evensong (the way to get into a cathedral for free). By the time we got there, we had only an hour and a half until we had to be back for Evensong, so we raced over to Kensington Gardens to see if we could see anything cool in that time frame.

It turns out that we couldn’t. We grabbed some food because we were all starving by this time, and ate it as we ran back to the tube station and got on the right line but going the wrong direction so we had to get off and turn around and ride another twenty minutes and then run to Westminster in time to get really great seats…at a non-choired (I made up that word) Evensong. Just our luck that the one night a week that they do a spoken-only service happens to be the night we’re there. Dandy. And they didn’t even open up the halls so we could see anything cool. No Poet’s Corner for us! I was pretty disappointed. The only monuments we could get to were to people I’ve never heard of before. And then I felt bad for not knowing who they were. Way to be a downer, Westminster.

Between Westminster and Queen’s Theatre, though, we had some time to get a real dinner. And by real dinner I mean McDonald’s. And it was packed, so we had to eat our burgers out on the street. Awesome. By the time we got to the theatre, I was ready for the day to get better. I had been tired and hot and hungry nearly all day, surrounded by twelve million people intent on running me over.

Well it definitely got better. I had never seen Les Miserables before, and this production was the way to experience it. Our seats were way up on the top tier, but we still had a pretty great view of the stage. The stage itself was pretty small, but they made good use of it by employing a big turntable contraption that must have been a nightmare during blocking, but in production was genius. The singing was absolutely amazing, the acting was fabulous, the sets and costumes perfect. I’m a big fan. I cried more than once, and pretty hard, too. Worth every single penny I paid to see it.

After the show, we all dried our tears and made our way back to the main tube station to meet with everyone else. Surprise surprise, our train to Cardiff got delayed. We didn’t leave Paddington Station until after midnight, but at least this time the train took us all the way to Cardiff. We got into the central train station at about 2:15 and started on the two mile walk home. But the day was not over.

Our route happened to take us through downtown Cardiff, where we were witnesses to all the “drunken revelry” that I’ve never really quite experienced in the States, much less in a country famed for its liquor-holding citizens. For the most part people left us alone, making fools of themselves without any regard to who was watching. But we got to Queen Street and a group of guys caught sight of us, walking en masse, fully clothed and carrying backpacks. I guess that tipped them off. Here is a sample of what followed:

“Jack, look, foreigners!”
“Oh, foreigners!”
“Ah, a school group! Nos da!”
“Maybe they’re Spanish! Buenos Dias!”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” (This yelled while doing some corruption of a jumping-jack, achieved with surprising agility considering the offender was SLAMMED)
Chorus of “Buenos Dias!”
“Jack, you plonker, I don’t think they’re Spanish!”
“German? Guten taaaaaag! Guten taaag!”
“Mate, they’re not Germans.”“Then what could they be? Guten taaaaaaaaaaag!”

We had to wait until we were two blocks away before we finally let out the laughter. If drunk people only knew how dumb they looked.

We got home and I slept so soundly that if the mice came out again, I never knew it.

Museum of London. I am skeptical that London is actually burning...
In front of the Tower of London. Sorry it's so dark.The Ivory Tower part of the Tower of LondonIn front of the Tower BridgeThe part of St Paul's Cathedral that didn't have scaffolding on itThis pedestal was just begging for a statue pose... I realize it's not the most flattering pose, but oh wellI'm in Kensington Gardens!In front of Westminster AbbeyWestminsterBig BenSitting in Paddington Station, waiting for our train to Cardiff