Westminster

We got off to a late start today. I woke up at almost noon which is by far the latest I've slept in since I've been on this trip. Ryan bought a new video game yesterday and stayed up the entire night trying to beat it. He tells me he got to bed at around 7:00am this morning and he didn't wake up today until almost 3pm when I'd finally had enough of sitting around the house by myself and forced him out of bed. I was a little agitated at first that we'd lost so much time, but the stuff we were going to do today anyway doesn't really seem to take that long when you take the subway (or tube as they call it here). I've really been frustrated by the fact that I can't walk everywhere in this city. Until now I've always been able to just get up early and head out for the day. I very rarely have used public transportation up to this point besides the occasional bus ride which is a good way to get your berrings in a city, or use when you're too tired to walk. However this city is far to big, and things are way to spread out for you to just head out in the morning and walk around, and the tubes are obviously underground so you don't get any sense of where you are or what you have and haven't seen. So what you have to do is say this is what I want to see today, and then you plan out a route of tubes to take to get there, and whatever time spent traveling is all just downtime here. So essentually it takes you 20-30 minutes to get to the sight you want to see, and then you sit there and stare at it for a couple minutes, take some pictures, or walk around it, and then you hop back on the tube and go to the next place. I hate traveling a city like that, but there's not really any better way to do it. But anyway, it seems to go sight seeing in this city all you need is a couple hours of light (If you absolutely have to see whatever it is in the day, I actually think most things here look better at night when they're all lit up), so it works out fine getting out of the house at around 3 or 4pm. So when I finally rolled Ryan out of bed we ordered a pizza because niether of us had eaten all day, and watched a little of "Anchor man" before finally leaving to go down to Westminster to see the Abby, and Parliment and Big Ben which are all in that area. I really for some reason don't like the tubes. I've already expressed a little that you can't see anything interesting from them, but I also just don't like using them. I'm not even sure what it is. I'm not afraid of them in any way, they're just so impersonal I guess, and being underground is never a comfortable feeling. But in this city I wouldn't take the bus over the tubes because the tubes are just faster and easier, even though the buses are a little cheaper.

Big Ben, if you've ever seen it, is actually a lot smaller than I anticipated. It seems like it's an Empire State Building sort of deal in all the movies, and it even looks like it is from far away, but in reality its only like 32 meters (about 8 stories high). Parliment, as you might guess, is heavily guarded. They wouldn't let anyone near it, and there are security cameras, and gates and guards everywhere with fully automatic weapons. It's like the pentagon, but I guess it is their equvalent, so it makes sense. When we were done walking around Westminster it was still only like 6:30, so we thought we could probably still walk up to Piccadilly Circus and see another show tonight. So we walked up there and bought tickets for the 8:00 performance of Spamalot.

Spamalot was hilarious! I now love that show, and if you ever have the means to see it somewhere, you definately should. It's a whole bunch of jokes from various different Monty Python sketches all woven into a musical based off of The Holy Grail. The actor we saw as King Arthur in the London cast was evidently this guy who plays the grandpa in the OC, and is also in The West Wing and Ugly Betty. He's really famous over here for a bunch of TV shows also of which I don't know the names of, but he was pretty funny. He couldn't really sing, but the part of King Arthur doesn't really sing much anyway. The actress who played the Lady of The Lake was AMAZING! She had this beautiful jazzy voice, and she was funny and charming, and absolutely gorgeous. however, the show evidently draws a bunch of American tourists to it because we were surrounded by them while we were there. They were the really terrible ones too, the ones that give Americans a bad name. They were stupid and obnoxious and had no theater ediquite, which has always been a button of mine even back home. Ryan kept reminding me that I was an American tourist too, and I told him I'm not, I'm a backpacker, there's a difference. Tourists come with money.

I'm not sure now if I'm going to be able to make it to Wales while I'm here, and there are a couple reasons for that. The first is that we were all talking about it (Ryan, his flatmates and I) and it takes like 4 hours by train (which are expensive to begin with) to get there, and that means 4 hours back, which also means I can't just go for the day and come back. They also were saying that there's really not a lot worth seeing in Wales. There's a beautiful countryside, but that's about it. They told me, no one wants to be in Wales, not even the Welsh. Evidently it's the Canada of the UK. I'm making up for this by instead of flying from egypt to Isreal, I'll take a bus and stop in Jordan at Petra. I wanted to see that anyway, so I can just count that as going through another country.