London calling! Wicked! Aladdin!

[luckykaa]

It was time to say goodbye to Brussels, but not before visiting the "Beer and Chocolate District", in order to buy some beer. And some chocolate.

So we arrived at Brussels Midi with far too much time remaining, but I wanted to be sure to catch the train and not have to rush. Also wanted a little more time to visit the supermarket for some cheaper beer. Brussels City Centre has decent prices compared to Britain, but the supermarkets are extremely cheap for the more common brands, and still have a decent range. My bag became very heavy.

Should mention the new Eurostar trains. They're really nice. Much more roomy than the old ones (based on German ICE rather than a scaled down TGV). The powered bogies mean that they pull away so much more smoothly. Yes, I'm a train nerd.

So we arrived in St. Pancras after an uneventful journey, checked into a tiny hotel room in a grotty cosy hotel with no lift. Actually it wasn't terrible, but it was a little cheap and had no lift. And it was small. Still, it was a bed for a night, and that's all we needed.

We had until the evening to look around London. I wanted to visit the Natural History Museum to see the Blue Whale skeleton that they replaced Dippy with. And we spent a bit of time pootling around the museum looking at dinosaurs.

That took us up to dinner time, and I had a voucher for a meal and a musical. The meal was at the Prezzo at Victoria station, so clearly a high class joint. Still, pretty good value.

And finally it was time to see Wicked!

I've wanted to see this for ages.

And I really enjoyed it.

For the uninitiated, it's the Wizard Of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. Awesome songs, and generally a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. flickums seemed to as well, despite her assertion that it's basically "Musical, the Musical". I don't care though. I don't see enough shows to care about things sticking to a formula.

Coughing fit halfway trough was a bit of an annoyance. Fortunately we had the whole row to ourselves, so I could escape easily.

Woke up next morning and went down to a pretty decent breakfast. It had eggs, bacon, and non-soggy toast, so that's pretty much all I need. Also orange squash and burnt coffee.

French chap behind us was monologuing quite vociferously about use of English and how native speakers are too lazy to use it properly or something. He seemed very animated about it. Quite angry even. His companion managed roughly one word for every hundred of his.

We had tickets to our second show of the week - Disney's Aladdin - but we had a morning to kill. Spent a bit of it dropping off bags. Then went to Leicester Square to look at Lego. Flickums confessed to never having made a Lego kit so I bought her a Disney Aladdin set, to go with the show later.

Had a quick and tasty lunch just off Leicester Square, invaded Orc's Nest. Resisted the urge to buy anything.

So Aladdin. It was enjoyable. I enjoyed it. Flickums loved it. Magic carpet bit was cool. Shame the carpet wasn't a character for this one. We did get streamers fired at us though, so that was cool. Felt it was odd that the princess and her cohort seemed to have New Jersey accents.

Finished off the trip with a visit to Forbidden Planet, food at Nandos, and chatting to Pete. It was a nice way to wrap up the holiday.

So we said a tearful goodbye to London, at about the same time as the weather changed, and London said a tearful goodbye to us.