A grand day out

This weekend we had our first day trip into London, which was an excellent outing. Saturday morning we woke to cool weather, a bit windy, fairly high cloud ceiling, but the weather forecast was grim (predicted "pouring" rain in the evening). Accordingly, we left the bikes in the shed and called a cab to get to the train station. The train was fine-- we had a little muddle at the station trying to find a newspaper, but then settled in and had an uneventful ride. Took about 50-55 minutes with no stops. Kings Cross station was mobbed-- way more people than I had expected to see on a chilly Saturday morning in October (wonder what it's like in July!), and we had another mob scene in the Underground due to the fact that the Victoria line entrance was closed for the day to be worked on, so all of those guys pushed onto our train (the Picadilly line). Anyhow, we got to the Waterloo tube station without any problems.

The London Eye is pretty cool-- I think everyone really enjoyed it. The wheel travels at a ridiculously sedate pace, but in fact this is a good thing, since it gives you lots of time to soak in the sights. Picture taking is a little tricky due to the fact that the curved glass on the "pods" tends to warp the view slightly, so you have to pick your spot. Lovely views of Westminster / Parliment, the river, and you can even see St Pauls off on the distance to the northeast.

After we finished up at the Eye, we took a walk around on the riverside and then tried going across the footbridge for the view. On out way back across the river we got to hear Big Ben chime the noon hour, which was neat. At that point we high-tailed it to the restaurant for lunch: "Ping Pong" a sort of reinvented dim sum place (very sleek and modern, with contemporary furniture, etc). The food was quite good, although for some reason they wouldn't give me a bowl of rice to go along with the dumplings, so I was still rather hungry afterwards (wound up eating both the carrots that I had brought as part of kid snack food).

The weather was nice (still quite cool and breezy but only a hint of rain every now and then) so we decided to walk to the theater district. We went past Trafalgar Square, where they were having some sort of very large Unicef demonstration on child poverty, then up along Charing Cross road, which was also quite crowded. That area has a lot of the same qualities that you find in the Broadway theater area in New York, except that it's all crammed into a much smaller area
with narrower streets.

Amy had arranged ahead for theater tickets in the afternoon, the 3pm performance of "Stomp". When we arrived at the theater, we still had plenty of time, so we decided to go for a walk the area. There are several used book stores along Charing Cross that we got to explore, and then we cut over into Chinatown for a bit to see what it looked like. Chinatown was just a bit too crowded (also we were getting tired of walking), so we ducked into a bakery to buy a couple of coconut buns, then headed back to the theater to wait for the show.

"Stomp" was terrific-- amazing dancing and music (percussion, that is). Many of the individual percussion performance pieces during the show were just jaw-dropping ("how the heck did he/she do that!!!"), the group pieces were terrific as well. Very entertaining; my expectations were greatly exceeded.

Afterwards we thought about eating dinner in the area (there was actually a nice restaurant that we walked by), but it was still fairly early and we didn't feel like yet another tromp around the city before dinner. Instead we decided to make our retreat to Cambridge, so we hopped on the tube to King's Cross and caught the 5:15 train back to Cambridge (just made it in time). It had indeed started to rain at that point, so we felt good about not having biked (also felt good to take a warm cab ride back to Newnham!).

For dinner we had pizza + pasta at the Red Bull, one of the local pubs in Newnham (right down on Barton Road). Very cheerful place; friendly staff, nice atmosphere. The pizza we ordered for the kids was good, although the pasta dishes were a little on the bland side. The waiter who brought us our food turned out to be from Colorado (he actually had a very British look to him, and we were certain he was a local until he opened his mouth and started speaking). After that we walked the rest of the way home-- raining lightly but not too cold. All in all, a nice day.

Today, Sunday, we woke up to more find that the rain had started in earnest, so we had an "at home day" catching up on laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, and (of course) blogging. The kids and I are having a lot of fun playing the board game ("The aMAZEing Labyrinth") that Rustin gave Ethan for his birthday. The rain finally let up long enough for me to go for a run-- it was a hard slog (my legs are still store from the walking yesterday, apparently).