A Day of Rest, So to Speak Thursday, October 25, 2012

Thursday morning we were able to get up nice and leisurely, enjoy breakfast, catch up on the blog (transferring photos from camera cards, loading up photos, writing, editing, waiting for the Internet to catch a tailwind and speed up.) We did a little packing also. About 12 noon, Brenda said, “I don’t think this will be a good day for walking in a park.” It was rather rainy outside. When we had met the couple from Scotland at the Windsor tea house,  they told us they were going to go see Top Hat while in London. So now we said, “Let’s go see Top Hat.”  I called Ticketmaster and there were seats available in the stalls (what we’d call orchestra, I believe) available for the 2:30 matinee. We took them!

We hurried up and got ready and Brenda mapped out our trip on the tube. There are all kinds of routes you can take, some direct, some requiring transfer, etc. She found that for this particular theater, the Aldwych, in London’s West End theater district, we would take the 170 to Victoria, get on the Circle or District Line and get off at the Temple tube stop and walk to the theatre. We got there in plenty of time. Our seats were only like 6 or 7 rows back. Again we sat next to some wonderful people. The couple to Brenda’s right were from Cambridge and had come into London to celebrate their 44th anniversary. Interestingly, they had taken a similar tour of the western states and national parks in the U.S. as the people we met at the Windsor tea house. They also disliked Las Vegas, but loved the parks. They said they went for three weeks, but “you folks in the U.S. don’t get that much holiday time, do you?”

The show was wonderful, delightful, funny, light, just the right thing! Full of tap dancing and singing familiar Irving Berlin songs. It’s a musical made from a movie with the blessing of Fred Astaire’s daughter and others. We really enjoyed it. There were some great characters in addition to the leads. The lead male (Tom Chambers) had won the UK equivalent of our Dancing with the Stars (Strictly Coming Dancing) in 2008. An understudy played the lead female role for our performance, but we thought she was terrific.

When we left the theatre, we had decided to go to Harrods, so we walked to a different tube stop (Covent Garden) to catch a different tube line (Picadilly) to the Knighstbridge stop to go to Harrods, London’s signature department store. The tube station at Covent Garden was packed, jammed, a little claustrophobic. In order to get to the train platform, you had to take a lift (elevator) down, no escalators or stairs in sight. Getting onto the lift reminded Brenda of the Texas cattle yards, being herded through the chutes to be loaded onto the cattle car. (Pretty image, isn’t it?) We didn’t really understand what was happening, but we followed everyone else. Brenda, the observer, noticed the man manually operating the two lifts was actually keeping track of the weight of the cars and when it reached a certain limit he would close the door. It must have been rush hour on top of the theater matinees letting out that made it so crowded.

When we got to Harrods, we went inside and got immediate sensory overload. The store is posh, elaborate, and laid out in what I’m sure is a logical fashion to them, but not that easily comprehended by the American tourist who has just gotten off of a cattle car. Brenda notes that the setup was in rooms, rather than aisles or sections. We did latch on to a store map and that helped a bit. We had heard there were some food courts and we wanted to eat, but every place we looked had a long queue (line). We went up the escalators, looked around a bit, found a place that sold “Harrods” memorabilia and bought a couple things. The checkout counter queue was kind of long, but moved along quickly. The young man who waited on us was really nice. I asked him “Do you take a swipe card?” Mainly in Europe, they take chip and pin cards, which the U.S. has not seemed to catch up with. Just the evening before at Foxtrot Oscar, Brenda’s card had once again been declined.

(In case we haven’t said it, it works sometimes and is declined sometimes. Brenda had called the credit card company again when we got home from dinner the previous evening and talked to a couple of people who were perplexed. They didn’t know why it was getting declined and it didn’t show up on their records. She let them know quite clearly that the card her traveling companion was using worked just fine at the exact same locations. She had Capital One Venture; I had Chase Sapphire for those of you planning to travel abroad.)

The clerk at Harrod’s said, “We accept all international cards and can even show you and charge you the balance in U.S. dollars.” That was cool. I think he said they were the only store that could do that. It’s probably available for any currency. The place was like a very high-end international meeting place. Tourists from everywhere. Anyway when he rang up my purchase in dollars (it showed both dollars and pounds), I told him, “That could you lose you sales.” The price in dollars was considerably higher! The exchange rate right now is about 1.60.

That was enough Harrods for us. I did take a photo of a couple of statues in the store. The previous owner is the father of Dodi Al- Fayed who was Princess Diana’s boyfriend. The store has two memorials to them. Interesting. (Internet has more on this.)

We traveled the tube line back to Victoria, back to the 170, back to Tesco’s, and then home for an early night to bed as we would be leaving home at 5:00 a.m. for Belgium.