Londontown and Cheeky Inkey

London was everything I expected it to be and more: sprawling, busy, touristy, morally questionable, dangerous for pedestrians, crowded, multicultural, and expensive, mainly expensive. But worth it.

We arrived at St. Pancras train station on Friday, which my friends Jordan and Katie prefer to refer to as "St. Pancreas". Anyway, we got there about 11:30, went to our hostel and checked in and then got down to business.

We started at the British Museum which is basically awesome. It has stuff from all over the world. Britain basically took the five finger discount from all of their colonies when the sun never set on their empire. Thus they have accumulated and astonishingly large number of artifacts. Egyptian, Greek, Assyrian, Roman, Medieval, you name it they have it. It's like the Wal-Mart of museums they have whatever you're looking for. The Rosetta Stone was quite impressive. But really the most impressive part of the museum was the sheer amount of artifacts present, we could have been there for days. Instead we saw as much as we could in about 2 and half hours.

After the museum we went to Trafalgar square and then down by Big Ben and the houses of parliament and I went across the Thames and did the London Eye. The eye, aka the big wheel was cool, but expensive. It was like eating at an expensive restaurant, it was good but when you walk out the door you wonder if it was worth 20 pounds for a steak....probably not but it was worth doing once.

After I did the eye I met up with the J-man and we went to get some food and then headed over to the theatre for our evening entertainment. We saw "Breakfast at Tiffany's" Now is it moderately to heavily effeminate for two males to go and watch Holly Golightly ruin other men's lives on stage? Well, I'll leave that up to the reader. What I will say is that the only other men I saw there were with their significant other's, and there were lots of girls there on a "girls night out". I guess there could have been some dudes playing for the other team there but I didn't see them, and that was probably fortunate because they might have gotten the wrong idea about Jordan and I. I'll bet that's what they ask each other at gay bars, "Have you seen Breakfast at Tiffany's live?" Anyway, I thought it was actually a pretty good production. However I will say this of Holly Golightly. She is an out of control, man-eating floozy. She should be punished. Harshly.

Saturday morning we went to the Tower of London and met the beefeaters! I assumed these rotund bearded men were simply over-dressed pompous buffoons trying to lose some poundage via the Atkins diet! I was wrong in this assumption. They are actually officially titled the Yeoman Warders and have been guarding the Tower for centuries. Now, they just shepherd overeager precocious tourists around all day. The Tower tour was fun and informative. The real excitement was the Crown Jewels. Not to be confused with the family jewels, these jewels possess no reproductive capabilities. On the other hand, they are not subject to shrinkage. They are basically as many diamonds and precious gems as can be crammed into a hunk of gold in the shape of a crown or scepter. They seemed to have an aura. Pretty pompous pieces of jewelry if you ask me, but I guess they've earned their keep. I mean if Bill Gates couldn't buy them even if he wanted to that's got to count for something. England could probably buy Poland with these jewels if they wanted to, of course they don't really have to do that because about half of Poland works here already!

After the tower, we walked through the financial district to St. Paul's cathedral. The financial district was dead as it was Saturday but St. Paul's was hopping with tourists. It was similar to the York Minster in its grandeur, but in its own way. The dome was amazing and it was really cool because we were able to climb to the top and get some great views of London. The inside of the cathedral was colorful and immaculate, the crypt was well...cryptic. I would highly recommend going to St. Paul's. We didn't spend as much time there as we could have because we were on our way to Harrod's.

Harrod's is like the Super Bowl of department stores. It is spectacularly large, plush, posh, over the top etc. The doormen were dressed better than any of the shoppers! They have pretty much anything you could want there, and if they don't have it they'll order it. I'm pretty sure you could buy William "the refrigerator" Perry there if you wanted...He'd probably cost a pretty penny though because stuff there is ridiculously spendy. We just browsed for awhile and then vamoosed before being tempted to remortgage the house to but a candy bar or something.

Saturday evening we mad a great life decision and met our friend Danyelle and went to a comedy show. At first I was afraid I might have overspent in spending 12 pounds to get in, but within five minutes with my sides aching I knew I'd reckoned well. The comic was Inkey Jones (that's his real name if mine's Turd Ferguson) who was really funny. Disparagingly funny jokes about the Irish, Americans, French, Germans, Poles, and Bulgarians were just the tip of the comedic iceberg. If laughs were currency Inkey was trading in all currencies at all times all night. He was like a stockmarket....and he never crashed. The guy was a riot. Couldn't have been happier with the show.

I'm going to stop here because this is the second time I've typed this after my internet crashed the first time and I lost my draft. Plus I know this has already gotten long, so I'll get a post up about Sunday with some pictures soon. If ya don't know, now ya know...