Singin' in the Rain

Every once in a while Amanda and I like to take a weekend away from our home in Bristol and explore the bustling metropolis of London. In the almost two years that we have been living in the UK we’ve made a trip into London nearly a dozen times and still have tourist sites left to see.

As has happened with many of our other trips to London, Amanda needed to meet clients in the City, so she left Bristol on the 6:30am train from Bristol Parkway to London Paddington Station.  I dropped her off at the station then headed home to take care of the packing and deliver Daisy and Ginger to their aunties Sue & Kim for the weekend. I caught the afternoon train into London and we met up at the hotel after she was finished with work.

One of the best things about London is the quantity and quality of its theatres. As an added benefit you can purchase discounted tickets the on the day of a show provided of course that seats are available. During Amanda’s lunch break on Friday she stopped by the discount desk and picked up two tickets to Singin’ in the Rain.  Amazingly, Amanda admitted as we were sitting down that she had never seen the Gene Kelly, Donald O’Conner and Debbie Reynolds classic much less a theatrical version. Will wonders never cease?  Anyway, the show itself was pretty good and even included a deluge of water during the title song which pretty well drenched the first few rows. (We were thankfully in row 10, so just outside the splash zone.)

On Saturday, we decided it was time to tour Westminster Abbey.  We arrived shortly after the Abbey opened, bought our tickets and walked up to the information desk to receive our audio guide. Like many other tourist attractions across the UK they provide audio guides in about eight different languages and while most of the time all we have to do is open our mouths to receive the proper guide however this time we didn’t even make it that far before the volunteer manning the station pegged us for American’s. After having lived here for just over 17 months I had begun to feel relatively confident that I no longer looked like an American yet somehow this volunteer new immediately that we were not from around here. When we asked him how he knew he just laughed and said it was easy, you are smiling. It’s now been a few weeks since that encounter and I’m still not sure if I should look at his observation as complement or not.

The audio guide itself was really informative and voiced by the supremely talented Jeremy Irons, truly one of the great acting and vocal talents of our time. It takes about an hour and a half to make your way through the audio guide although you don’t really notice the time thanks to the mass of information streaming your way courtesy of the dulcet tones provided by Mr. Irons. Of the many interesting facts I learned along the way perhaps the most fascinating was the positioning of Henry VIII’s daughters. Elizabeth and Mary Tudor are both entombed in the same monument although Mary was placed below her younger sister. In addition to monuments dedicated to numerous royals there are also copious monuments devoted to some of the great English minds like Chaucer, Churchill, Darwin, Dickens, Joule, Kelvin, Longfellow, Newton, Pope, Scott, Shakespeare and Watt to name but a few. It truly is a staggering place to visit and I am thrilled we got the chance to finally check this box off our list.

Once we finished up at Westminster Abbey it was on to the British Library. In addition to being the permanent home for one of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta the Treasures of the British Library exhibit also contains an original copy of the Guttenberg Bible, one of the first printed copies of Aesop’s Fables, Henry VIII’s prayer log, the Beowulf Manuscript, Shakespeare’s First Folio, numerous original compositions from famous musicians including Mendelssohn, Mozart and Beethoven, as well as countless other religious texts and scientific documents. Two of my personal favorites from the exhibit were some original notes and sketches by Leonardo da Vinci and a Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean & European Coast from 1339. Like so many of the other places we’ve visited over here you really could spend all day wondering through the different exhibits and galleries.

On our way from Westminster to the Library, it started sprinkling...then drizzle...then the downpour started.  Thank goodness we'd seen Singin' in the Rain the night before so we were prepared!

Sunday morning we decided to attend a choral service at St Paul’s Cathedral. Amanda really loves musical services like evensong so whenever we get an opportunity to see a choral service in a historic setting like St Paul’s we try to visit. Thankfully the hotel we stayed at is right on the square across from St Paul’s so it made for a nice short walk and allowed us to sleep in a bit after our long day. The choir sang beautifully as one would expect and the setting is one our favorites in London. It made for a really nice cap to another enjoyable weekend in London.