england #6-is it really true there are elephants.. in The England Chronicles - October 2010

…and lions too in Piccadilly Circus?

Well, no, there are not. At least not that I saw. But Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square and Soho etc etc etc were, of course, just as fantastic as all the rest of London!

BUT, first…

I am halfheartedly trying to do DePhoMo, although I’ve already missed half the days. One of today’s prompts is “Unexplained”. So here’s a picture of something that’s unexplained – the Uffington White Horse:

One day, long in the distant future, I’ll be posting pictures and telling stories of our post-London experience, However, in order to actually post a picture relating to a prompt, I will skip ahead. The Uffington White Horse is not far from Swindon in miles, but took forEVER to get to, of course, even with our BFF the GPS (oh, a major player in the post-London tales! “Recalculating…recalculating…. recalculating….take the fifth exit off the the roundabooot … recalculating…recalculating…..what are you, a complete and total idiot?!? Try that again, dumbass! Recalculating… recalculating….) guiding us. The Uffington White Horse is one of a whole bunch of mysterious white horses made of chalk on hillsides in Wiltshire, scattered throughout Crop Circle Country. The Uffington White Horse is the oldest one, though, dating back perhaps 3000 years. Nobody knows why it’s there, or who made it. So it totally fits the “Unexplained” category. It also fits “amazing, breathtaking, coolest thing EVER” categories, but that will have to wait until one day, looong hence, when I finally get that far in my never-ending Tale of The England Journey.

Okay. Back to London!

Next day we went to Leicester Square first thing. We wanted to see a play, and if you go to Leicester Square you can get cheap tickets for same-day shows. Actually you can probably get cheap tickets for other-day-shows, but we were going for same day tickets. Kim really really REALLY wanted to see a play. Oddly I wasn’t really dying to see a play to the degree Kim was… but Kim is one of those people who always does what everyone else wants to do because she thinks what SHE wants to do isn’t nearly as important as what everyone else wants to do…. so I thought if Kim wanted to see a play, then we would go see a play for sure. She didn’t have a particular play in mind, and although I wasn’t picky either, one thing I DID know I’d like to see was Wicked. Being so Oz-related and all – and I’ve also read (and really liked) the book.

So.

It was early again, and glarey bad light. But…. LONDON!!!! And also elusive blue skies-

I was surprised by how big Burger King is in England— as was KFC. McDonald’s seemed like a very minor fast food player in comparison to Burger King and KFC. I was also surprised at how even the major fast food players were not EVERYWHERE like they are here. They were scattered around the city, but not on every streetcorner. Starbucks was pretty much all over the place in the city, but I appreciated that since we didn’t have internet at our lodgings and Starbucks was free. And although breakfast was included in our room fee, the coffee was….. instant.… so I really learned to enjoy Starbucks burnt, bitter regular coffee.

Tickets!

And they WERE cheap. We got Wicked tickets for something like $35 US dollars. Wicked came to Charlotte a year or two ago – the Broadway production- and I think the cheapest tickets were something like $80. So I was very pleased.

Piccadilly Circus!

You know – one thing we never did was ride a double-decker bus. That was kind of sad, even though the double-decker buses are not the same as the iconic double decker buses you always think of when you think of London. Those got retired because they were not handicapped-friendly and people kept getting killed by trying to hang onto the outside of them. But I’d have liked to ride even the new-fangled ones. Next time.

We walked through Chinatown too, but weren’t all that impressed —- it’s possible we missed part of it, but it didn’t seem like a DON’T SKIP THIS!!! area. We just saw a couple of streets, which did have interesting shops.

I think the Hippodrome was in Soho — which is a much tamer area than it used to be, apparently. We went back one evening and had a beer in Soho. Saw nothing shocking. I think it’s mostly touristy these days.

Charing Cross Road! Very nifty, lots of bookstores –

And this one had a bunch of sale books outside. I stopped to look through them, and got quite the synchronistic shock. When I was trying to decide on what to bring with me to read on the trip (especially on the planes), one of the books I started to bring was Three Men and A Boat. , a paperback I bought for like a quarter a LONG time ago, in a used bookstore. It’s by the very oddly named Jerome K. Jerome, was written in 1889, and is the absolutely hysterical account of three guys taking a boat trip on the Thames. For some reason I decided against bringing it – but what did I find in that sale book bin outside this Charing Cross Road bookstore?? ANOTHER book by Jerome K. Jerome – Three Men on the Bummel. About a cycling tour in Germany. Of course I bought it.

We got tickets for the evening showing of Wicked, so kept touring around the area. Of course we had to go to Harrods-

Then we walked around the elegant and high-class Knightsbridge:

And then – the tube to Victoria Station! Wicked was playing at the Apollo Victoria-

And a little bit of Wicked set!! Then the usher came around and asked everyone to please stop taking pictures.

I really enjoyed Wicked. It’s been awhile since I read the book so I kept forgetting what happened when – and the book was a LOT more complicated than the play — but I thought it was very well done. The sets were fantastic. Totally worth the money.

And that’s it for tonight. Next stop, Buckingham Palace! The outside, at least.

Last updated January 16, 2019