After the very exciting day full of walking at the studio tour, we spent the evening relaxing in Kerry's apartment, still trying to catch up on sleep from the week before, and making plans for Thursday and Friday, our final two days in London.
Thursday we went first to get tickets to One Man, Two Guvnors, which has recently come to Broadway but has been playing in London for over a year. The Theatre Royal Haymarket is right near Trafalgar Square, where we got off the tube, so after getting tickets we stopped in at the National Gallery. Mostly we wanted to see the works of van Gogh, Monet, Degas, and Gaugin, so we didn't spend too long there before heading out to make our way to the Tower of London.
Trains were a bit of a mess that day and it turned out the two lines we could have taken from that stop to Tower Hill were both not running, so we had to brave the bus and hope to get off in the right place. We made it to the Tower of London and before heading in stopped outside for fish and chips, which I didn't try the last time I was in London, even though I'd wanted to since I saw Spice World when I was seven.
Turns out Mom and I aren't big fans.
So we headed to the tower, which is actually much less tower-y than I expected. None of the towers are very tall, and there's actually twenty of them. So the name is quite misleading. We did a walking tour in the hot sun, learning from a yeoman warder (a beefeater, as they're better known) about executions and tortures and all sorts of gruesome things. Mom's main interest in coming to this particular tourist attraction, however, was to see the crown jewels, so as soon as our tour was over, that's what we did.
In the crown jewels exhibit are several crowns dating back to at least the 17th century and probably earlier. We also got to see the royal regalia Queen Elizabeth II wore to her coronation in 1953. (This year, next week in fact, is the celebration of the Queen's diamond jubilee, the beginning of the 60th year of her reign. She's just four years shy of tying Victoria for longest reigning monarch of England.) Everything is shiny and gold and gilded, brocaded, etc. We watched a video of her coronation. It looked like mostly it involved sitting a lot and holding things - two scepters and an orb - and looking somber while people talked. She didn't look very happy, but I think she was about my age when she became queen, and I wouldn't have been happy about having to act all proper on behalf of an entire country either.
Once we finished with the crown jewels (which also included looking at a lot of really ridiculously fancy gold plates and punch bowls and what have you) we caught a brief theatrical display of two women arguing over whether a judge who had been loyal to King James (can't remember which one) should be hanged for all his decisions to kill people, since James (a Catholic) was no longer king. The acting was pretty bad and the situation hard to relate to though, so it was a little disappointing when the description had sold us on something about betrayal and the war not really being over.
A little more walking around (in which we saw a bunch of crown settings with no jewels, oddly enough, because they frequently reuse them when they make new crowns), and we were both exhausted and ready to go back to Kerry's to relax before the theatre. (6 hours of walking around at Harry Pottor follows by several hours of walking on cobblestones at the Tower of London did our feet no kindnesses.)
After an hour to collect ourselves and rest our feet at Kerry's apartment, we set out again for the theatre. After we were already on the train we found out the station we had used that morning to get to the theatre was closed. Luckily I knew enough to get us to the theatre from the next stop, and we made it to the show with a couple minutes to spare.
When we got to our seats (front row center, oh yes) a band was playing on stage. It seemed to be country music, but British, which thoroughly confused me, and I wondered why that, of all aspects of American culture, was what had made it to Britain. The lead singer had an infectious smile though and the guitarist looked like a young Leo DiCaprio, so I was content despite my confusion. I'm not quite sure how to explain the show - it borrows some plot elements of Twelfth Night, some traditional slapstick comedy, some audience participation that resulted in the lead actor never being able to keep a straight face, and more British country music during scene changes, occasionally with various actors coming out to play random instruments like steel drums or xylophone. At one point the woman sitting next to me got brought up on stage for a lengthy scene and... Well I don't want to spoil it for people who may go see it in New York. In fact I may go see it again to try and figure a few things out.
During intermission the band played some more (numbers sometimes included a harmonica, a washboard, and spoons) and then the show resumed. At the end of the show there was inexplicably a musical number performed by the whole cast. I have no idea why; it had nothing to do with the band. Overall it was one of the weirdest shows I've seen (and I've seen a lot of weird things) but we had a good time and laughed a lot.
Gelato on the street, a man playing a traffic cone like a trumpet, and home again home again, jiggity jig.
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