Dreamboats & Petticoats

March 30, 2010

Time to meet our next CouchSurfer, Rob! Tuesday morning we got up early to leave when Jit went to work since we wouldn't be staying with him anymore. We made him eggs in the morning to thank him for his generosity. Somehow he had gotten through 26 years of life without having homemade scrambled eggs, crazy. It was a small gesture but all we could really do with the time limit.

The weather was awful, raining and cold so Hilary and I found a cafe to have breakfast in. We went up to the second floor, ordered some toast and water and ended up sitting there starring out the window for almost 2 hours people watching. We weren't meeting our next host until 12:30 so we had some time to kill. At 10:30 we decided it was time to move and went to the bus station to get our Brussels tickets figured out. Once we did that we went to meet up with Rob. He was kind enough to meet us during his lunch break so we wouldn't have to carry our bags around with us all day. If I every have to have that on my back for more than a couple of hours I'm in trouble...

Once we dropped off our stuff we said goodbye to Rob and made our way back to Covent Gardens where we had gotten dinner with Emmanuelle the night before. She said it was worth checking out during the daytime. There was a market going on and a bunch of street performers. Hilary was looking for a T-Shirt that says "Mind the Gap" which is what the announcer says every time the tube comes to a station. "Mind the gap to the platform." Hilary never knew what that meant before and was pretty excited when she figured it out. I was looking for a shot glass. I figured those are small enough that I can hopefully get one from each country without them weighing me down to much. Neither of us had luck finding what we wanted so we decided to take a break from the rain and head back to the Porterhouse. Great decision. We got there, ordered some beers and talked for over an hour. As much time as we have spend together it has mostly been with other people, sightseeing, or sleeping on the transportation systems. It was fun to just sit down the two of us and have a real conversation.

Next we headed to Westminster Abbey. It was a cool building but we didn't want to pay to go in so we really just walked around in the rain for awhile and took some pictures. Then we headed to Buckingham Palace. We sort of ended up doing the same thing here, took some pictures, read some plaques and then were on our way. We were able to find a tourist shop outside of the Palace though where Hilary found her shirt and I found my shot glass, yay! Hilary left her debit card at home so she had her parents ship it to our original hostel. It had arrived that day so we went to go get it since we had some down time. Coincidentally I don't have my debit card either because I realized it was expired 2 days before my flight from the states. I'm hoping to get that by the time we hit Switzerland. We will be in Western enough countries until then that only a credit card shouldn't be a problem.

From the Hostel we headed down to the PlayHouse Theater to see "Dreamboats and Petticoats." Our 12.50 pound tickets got us front row seats on the third balcony -- were way better than I was expecting. The show itself was pretty good. It was smaller and not as well known so it is hard to compare when the only other shows I've seen have been huge ones like Chicago, The Lion King and Wicked. But it was definitely entertaining and the female singers had amazing voices. The first half I nodded off a couple times and then both Hilary and I took a quick nap during intermission but by the second half we were fully rested and away the whole time, ha.

We somehow made it back to Rob's place. I'm still impressed with this since we had only quickly gone there once before and it was on the other side of town; Hilary and I have had a habit of walking in circles a lot here but by this point in the week we were getting pretty good at knowing where we're going. Back at Rob's we had a glass of wine, some conversation and then headed to bed.