2010 Trip: To London

11th June 2010

Shena took me to the station mid-morning to catch the train back to London and in a few hours I was back at Euston station. From here, I caught the tube to Swiss Cottage and found my hostel, a restored Victorian home that seemed rather popular with Americans.

I dumped my stuff and headed out to explore the city, stopping at a rather awesome little open market just down the street to procure (for only £4) a massive serving of all sorts of vegetarian Egyptian cuisine - from falafel and eggplant, to stews, salads, pilaf, and other deliciousness.

In order to have time to eat this, I wandered down to the next tube station, St. John’s Wood, which was a little further than I thought. It gave me a little time to reflect on the layout of London, specifically how the city isn’t just one sprawling metropolis, it is two cities - The City (to the East, now the financial hub) and The City of Westminster (to the West, containing most of the things people associate with London). This is surrounded by a whole heap of boroughs - small towns and villages that have grown over time. If one walks between two boroughs the commercial changes to residential and then back.

I caught the tube to Green Park, in the centre of the city and the start of Piccadilly Street. I spent the next few hours wandering down the street, looking into the huge book sellers (WHSmith and Waterstones), the department stores, buying hugely expensive but delicious Marron Glacé, chilling out in Leicester Square, wandering through the back streets, and buying a ticket for the show tonight. Having a student ID certainly has its perks! Yay, cheap tickets!

So at 5pm, I headed to see Avenue Q. A must see that I had been itching to tick off my list. Its quirky and clever, and this production seemed very well presented. Excellent numbers like “Everyone’s a little bit racist”, “Schadenfreude”, “It sucks to be me”, “The Internet if for Porn”, and the touching “There’s a fine, fine line”. (If you are not familiar with it, look it up on YouTube.) It was very well polished and has become very much a mainstream classic. I really really enjoyed it.

As it was an early show, I spent the rest of the evening people watching as the beginnings of World Cup fever started to appear - bars everywhere advertise that they will be showing the game (some, however, explicitly the opposite - “World Cup Free Zone”). In Leicester Square there is a live video feed with the USA, England’s first opponent, and gentle mocking goes both ways. After a while, I headed back to the hostel.