London & The Old Red Cow

This is part of a series of blog posts recalling my overseas adventures in the United Kingdom in fall 2015.

Monday, Sept 21:

The Museum of London is quite close to our flat, and has a lot of great stuff covering London’s history. In fact, it is so large that we only had enough energy to get through the Great Fire of 1666 before hunting for lunch and grabbing souvenirs. The gift shop was one of the best so far. In the evening, Ann had her first of six showings of Hamlet.

Tuesday, Sept 22:

Buckingham Palace. For only six weeks in the year, the State Rooms are open to the public. As luck would have it, we were in town during this time, so we bought tickets to all three venues we could see – the Queen’s Gallery, the Royal Mews (stables), and the State Rooms. The Gallery was surprisingly small and focused on garden paintings. The Mews were bigger, but not as interesting as there are only so many times you can see a stage coach painted a different way. The State Rooms, on the other hand, were gorgeous and had plenty to see. The only disappointment from the State Rooms is that the only way to exit them was through the large palace gardens, which involved a half-mile trek after what felt like at least a mile of walking around in circles in the Palace. But the souvenir shopping was very good.

While Ann went to see if Hamlet was any better the second time, I went over to a nearby pub called The Old Red Cow. There, I met up with Trevor Holmes. Trevor was my RA in my second and third/final years at UF. We got along well then, but like most of my UF friends I had fell out of touch with. He happened to be on leave (he’s a Marine now) in Scotland and was planning a day or two in London, so we had dinner at the pub and got caught up.

Wednesday, Sept 23:

A wicked afternoon. That is, we went to see Wicked the musical. The seats were narrow and bunched together. Both my hips and shins were bruised by sitting there for three hours. But the play was well done, even if some of the lyrics were hard to hear at times. Ann, who was starting to feel ill, could barely get through intermission of night three of Hamlet while I was getting caught up on BBC’s Sherlock.