Oh-ee-oh, OOOOH-oh

Alice and I thought class was cancelled on Monday (though, actually, it's cancelled next Monday and we accidentally missed half of this Monday's class... woops... good thing our professor is nice) so we planned a chunk of sightseeing to do.

We started off by going to the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. It was actually pretty anticlimactic, but there was a huge crowd and I'm glad I got to see it. The guards just march in to music (hence the title of this post -- it was very Wizard of Oz-ish) , wearing those tall hats, and go behind the gate to the Palace. There's a little ceremony thing that we didn't see because the crowd was too big, and then we saw the other guards marching out.


From there,we went to the British Museum. One of the first things we saw when we walked in was the Rosetta Stone. It's behind glass, of course, but it reflected in pictures so you can see me in the photos I took.


I was pretty bored in the rest of the museum. There was one room with stuff from Waddesdon, and I thought it was pretty cool that there was a whole room in a national museum dedicated to stuff from a place that Poppa lived. But the stuff wasn't actually that intersting -- I think I'm pretty much muesumed-out at this point. Plus, the stuff was just old and boring.

At night, I met up with my friend Steph (from home; she's also studying in London) at Covent Garden to get dinner and see Spring Awakening. It was playing at the Novello Theater on The Strand (like Broadway/42nd Street; it's where most of the theaters are), the same place I saw The Taming of the Shrew. I was really excited because we only paid £10 for the tickets (and I'd wanted to see it at home, but it would have probably been more like $60).

We had dinner at a restaurant nearby, and I was surprised because they put ice in my water. In Europe, I've found, you have to ask specifically for tap water, if that's what you want, or they'll give you a choice of still/sparkling (which defeats the purpose, to me, because you end up paying for it). Some places in Europe won't serve tap, but I've never had a problem in London. They don't put ice cubes in drinks, though, which is why I was surprised to get one here. But that's the thing -- it was one. One lone ice cube in the whole glass. Kind of funny.

The show was good and really funny, but I think it's probably my least favorite of the musicals I've seen (Rent, Wicked, and Hairspray). The songs were good but I was only really impressed with one of the singers, and there were a lot of weird choices that the director made (like some dance moves and staging). There were also two sex scenes, which is funny because of all the plays I've seen in my life, only two have had sex scenes, and I saw both with this particular friend. At least this play was good and funny, though; Equus was frickin' weird.