Bank Holiday Weekend – Plays, Trains and Carnivale!
As you know, we got tickets to see Footloose on Saturday night, so what should we do on Friday night other than hire the original film with Kevin Bacon and have a movie night.
We went to get our walking sandals on Saturday, from this giant outdoors store called Decathlon in Canada Water. Of course, there was only one pair that we both liked, so Lija got them and we went up to Oxford St to see if we could find any for me.
We had Yo Sushi for lunch, which is the sushi train place, as Lija said, our last expensive lunch before travelling. But this time we worked it out better cos each plate we got we shared, so we got to try more, but didn’t spend more.
Needless to say I didn’t find any sandals, but I did find a nice pair of normal sandals – like Birkenstocks that fit between the toes but the Shue brand which was £30 cheaper! I got them because my old brown sandals have been talking to me – I’ve scuffed them so many times going up and down the tube stairs that they’ve actually snapped at the front. It was time. So it’s not really a NEW pair of shoes par se, but more a replacement pair. I can so get away with that.
Well, we shopped for so long that we didn’t have time to go home and change, just went straight to the theatre which is at Embankment station – overlooking the Thames. We couldn’t get the other two tickets filled because Sarah couldn’t come and everyone else we knew had gone away for long weekend, so I emailed to cancel them, but I don’t know if it worked. When we got there, she couldn’t find the tickets under my name, but the ones I’d supposedly cancelled under Lija’s name were there – and the lady said they were very good tickets!
So we didn’t bother finding the others and just took those. We were in the stalls! As in, five rows from the front of the stage stalls! It was awesome, we didn’t leave our seats all night. The beginning was a bit disappointing because the dancers were out of sync for the first song, but it just got better and better after that.
Of course they changed the script a bit for stage, and added some new songs, but the singers were awesome. The girl playing Rusty had this really strong voice and she belted out “Let’s hear it for the boy”, and all the girls sang “Holding out for a hero” in a cafe setting on top of the counter with the old radio microphones, complete with rollerskating staff. The dancing was intense, and the music loud – the band was in the balcony.
Oh my God and should I mention the lead who played Ren?! – He was gorgeous! So so hot, I’m glad we weren’t on the balcony otherwise I’d have been drooling on the crowd below! haha When he was working in the cafe on the rollerskates he actually did this turn and fell over – and laughed – but eased back into it gracefully with a bit of improv!
It still wasn’t as good as Dirty Dancing, but DD had a bigger stage so that could have made a difference, although Footloose utilised their stage space really well with all the dances. It was just the wow factor, I was sitting there half the time with my mouth open in awe of the dancing, the singing, all of it.
Afterwards it was still early so we decided to go for a walk along the Thames, hehe, it was really funny I had this guy call out ‘Hello to the pretty lady in the green shirt’ as we were going up the pedestrian stair bridge, yeah I was the girl in the green top – Lija and I giggled and kept walking. There were so many people out though, restaurants were full and there was a bit of street entertainment still – it was probably half ten or so.
Because we didn’t find any other shoes along Oxford, we went back to Decathlon on Sunday morning, I got the same style as Lija, but I got the pink ones – she got the tan grey ones – you can’t really tell anyway! From there we caught the train to Green Park, switched to the Picadilly Line and caught that out to Heathrow to pick up Elissa, Lija’s best friend from Alice. Elissa’s here for the Busabout part of our trip. She was due in at 1.30pm, but didn’t come out the gates until about three-ish, it was really busy being long-weekend etc. And then we got to take the fantastic trip all the way back into the city, swap at Holborn for the central line and back to Mile End. By this stage I’d been on the tube for about three hours and was going a little crazy, so ended up hanging off the ceiling hand rails like monkey bars – I WAS BORED – GIVE ME A BREAK!!!
Hey and then guess what? Once we dropped Wizza’s bag off we got to catch the train AGAIN! We went back into the city and had a wander around, showed her Trafalgar Square and up through Leicester Square, and then we went back to Liverpool St and over to Brick Lane to have Indian. Brick Lane is like the Chinatown for Indian food, and we finally made it to try it out. Well, the hawkers are horrible here, they all stand outside the restaurants and they don’t let you look at the menu in peace, they yell out offers and ‘come here’, ‘we’re the best’ etc, hassling us.
When we’d walked down and then back up, telling them we can make up our own mind, we were standing on the opposite side of the road trying to decide and one guy, who’s been annoying earlier, dared come across the road to hassle us more! Well, we were all telling him to bugger off and in the end Lija’s just like “YOU ARE HARRASSING US – LEAVE US ALONE – GO BACK TO YOUR RESTAURANT – GO BACK” with all three of us giving him the evil death stare. Well, he had one of the nicer restaurants but on principal we decided to bypass him and choose another a couple of doors down.
And it was really nice, I had lamb tikka masala with rice and pashmina naan, but the naan wasn’t as nice as the one we had in Clapham, or back home.
Monday was bank holiday, so when we got up we went into the city, did a bit of window shopping (I swear I didn’t buy anything – almost) and had lunch down James Street, we had pancakes with avacado, mozzarella and tomato (mine was) and then hopped a bus and headed up to Notting Hill Carnival.
It was absolutely mad! Lija read that over the two days 2 million people attend the festival, which closes down about ten square blocks of houses. There is the main carnival route where big buses and dancers go past, including trucks with huge sound systems and DJs, singers and dancers on them. Then there were static music stations, with huge speakers mounted together playing different music on every corner. There were heaps of backyard (albeit in the frontyard) food places, kids selling cans of drink, people offering their toilets for a price. I mean, they did have portaloos, oh gosh they even had urinals which is literally, well you can go look at the picture! They are open air six stalls together with a small tube to pee in – so funny that anyone could see!
Some parts were so busy that we were bum to chest with the people all around and it took about ten minutes to move twenty feet or so! And then when we wanted to leave, we couldn’t find the exit – I said if we take one more left we’d end up going in a circle – we had to turn the second time cos of the parade, then we’d get a good vantage point so we’d stand and watch for a while, then keep moving and so on. We eventually got out of there and had to walk all the way up to Notting Hill, we ended up in a totally different suburb, and got the bus up to Marble Arch and then hopped a train back to Mile End.
We were meeting Terri and her hubby John, Lija worked with Terri in the Alice Springs hospital, they’re from America and going back there to live for a while longer. Terri and John have two young kids, and Terri was media advisor for the hospital. She was also media advisor in the Reagan years, which I find terribly interesting because I did several assignments about Reagan during politics at uni. So I got to pick her brain about that, and will also get in touch when we get back to London, because Terri has a friend working in the media in Bern, Germany, where I’d love to work so she might put me in touch with Katherine, I think it was, as well.
We had to mee them at their hotel in Russel Square, but we were a bit late because of trying to get out of the massive throng called Carnivale, so we got a black cab from Holborn up to Russel Square so we didn’t have to try and find the hotel. We found a nice Lebanese restaurant just up from the British Museum, it was so nice – Lija and I shared dolmades and I had a lamb mince with spices, eggplant, red peppers and couscos. And you’ll never guess who came in with his wife to have dinner – my first celebrity was an Aussie!
Yes, the one and only portaloo man Kenny, played by Shane Jacobsen, was in the same Lebanese restaurant as I was in Russell Square, London. The funny thing is, when I started looking at him, he started checking to see if I was still looking at him. And then when we were walking out, Terri’s like ‘Do you want me to get a picture?’ hehe I said, no, no, let’s go and leave the man in peace!
This morning we directed Elissa to the Big Bus Tour that we did, and tonight we’re seeing Queen’s We Will Rock You. We got the tickets when we went into Leicester Square on Sunday night, and Lija paid for Elissa’s one for her birthday last week.
YAY! Now I’m just counting the days and hours until we leave…
Tags: Travel
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