filling the darkness with order & light
Suffice it to say that in between the days of February 11 and February 19 I did almost nothing of note. On February 12, Lincoln’s 200th birthday, I had every intention to go the Lincoln statue at the US Embassy because their site said that they have a Lincoln statue in their lobby and I wanted to pay my respects. Joke was on me though, as the guard said that they wouldn’t let me into my own Embassy and I was wasting my time. So I had to satisfy myself with sitting across the street from the Lincoln statue in Parliament Square, looking at him rising above workers on their break and 4 lanes of traffic and reading the Gettysburg Address to myself. That sounds so depressing, and it kind of was. I felt like no one cared except me, so I watched the footage of the Bicentennial Celebration in DC on c-span that night and contented myself to that. Oh, and I made cupcakes of course. I also tried to go to the Natural History Museum to participate in Darwin’s 200th birthday which was the same day but all the events I had either missed or they were already full. Cool.
I literally cannot think of a single productive thing I did in the next five days. I vaguely remember a lot of sleeping and sitting around in my pajamas. I’m glad I’m making the most of my life. It was Reading Week though, which means we had no classes and I didn’t have the motivation to work on my papers that early. Also, Virgin Trains stole all my money while I was trying to buy a ticket from them, so I was basically broke for a few days. It was awesome.
However, that Wednesday, the 18th, Manuel, Chelsea and I went to the Natural History Museum because we like free things. For some reason, the place was incredibly packed on a Wednesday, so there was much complaining from the Chelsea camp about the uselessness of children and their prams. I think we all still managed to have a fine time, mostly by imitating the poses of the taxidermy. Well, not so much me. I took a ton of pictures but they’re mostly of dead animals, which let’s face it is depressing, so here’s just a few.
Afterward, we were wandering around in search of food for them and found out that the Natural History Museum is in the rather posh part of London, aka the only place with no restaurants and we finally had to get out of South Kensington before we found anything suitable.
After they had eaten, Chelsea decided to go back to Wood Green because I think she was meeting up with someone, and Manuel and I decided that the time had finally come for us to see Les Miserables since it’s all we’ve been talking about doing pretty much, and we are in the city that it first played it (and which I’m pretty sure has been playing in London since it opened? At least it was advertised as the longest running play in the world — 23 years I think). We wandered around Piccadilly and SoHo and went to Starbucks until the box office was open and then got ourselves some student tickets. Despite the fact that I know virtually every lyric to this play and know the entire story and have listened to it thousands of times since my childhood, I had never actually seen Les Miserables performed onstage. That being said, I don’t think there would have been a better place for me to see it for the first time, and it was absolutely beautiful. I’m pretty sure it would take both hands for me to count how many times I cried in that play. By the end of Stars, my favorite song, I was a mess. It was just such a beautiful production and…yeah I don’t even know what to say. Perfect.
The next day Manuel and I went to Stratford-Upon-Avon, which deserves and entry of it’s own, probably tomorrow.
