reflections

These are good:

• Moving to London
• 0 cockroach sightings (dodging those giant cockroaches on the way up my driveway back home in Sydney is something that will never be missed)
• No flies
• No mosquitoes
• No morton bay figs

These are wrong:

• Bathrooms with carpet
  
• BT (not only do they connect our phone line to the wrong house and make us cancel our existing contract and open a new one to get the right connection, they have tried to charge us £250 for cancelling our original contract)
• One tap for hot water, one tap for cold water - how does one get warm water???
  
• The sun (or severe lack of)
  

plain white ts

For some reason I thought that only liking one song by a particular band is a good enough reason to buy tickets to their gig. Unfortunately by the time the gig came around I was not really into that one song anymore, and I was thankful that my ticket cost me less than a movie ticket in Leicester Square. Luckily Clara's taste is a little less discerning than mine and her excitement at getting out and going to a gig made me a little less apprehensive about the night out. In the end, it wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either. Being there made me feel quite old - the floor was full of teenagers and the support band were only babies! However there is always a counterweight - we were standing next to a woman who must have been in her 40s at least, and she knew all the words to nearly all their songs...

bridge over the river cam

The 4 of us went to Cambridge last weekend - our first trip outside of London. There isn't a lot to do in Cambridge, but I would recommend a punt on the river. It's a quick and easy way to see all the main buildings of the university, and if you're lucky (which we were) you'll be there on a bitterly cold day, get mistaken for uni students and end up with nearly 50% off the normal price. I had my reservations about this whole punting thing, as I found out from our previous experience in Bruges that if it's winter and you're exposed on a boat for an hour you'll end up numb and unable to feel any part of your body. However these punts were very comfortable with cushions and blankets (although that still didn't stop me from losing all feeling in my feet by the end) and we were also lucky enough to get a very good guide who was an able punter and fed us interesting snippets of Cambridge information.

hide your face, so the world will never find you

We just came back from Phantom of the Opera, and it totally blew me away. I only have a few songs that I really like (whereas I love every single song in Les Mis), but the entire production was fantastic, and the fact that the orchestra was huge (by comparison, again to Les Mis) and that we were in the front row so we could see every facial expression only added to the enjoyable evening. The Phantom was by far my favourite - his voice was so powerful and so strong and so so good. And the last scene was heartbreaking - even though his character repelled you, it was that last scene that made my heart reach out to him.

This was my first time watching Phantom, and I don't think it will be my last.

It's nights like these that make me appreciate living in London even more.

looking back - part 2

So where part 1 was all about travel, part 2 is about remembering the theatre and gigs...

Swimming With Sharks (Vaudeville Theatre)
This was our first venture into London theatre, and I really only bought tickets for this because it had Christian Slater in it and I was all caught up in the 'must-see-show-with-famous-Hollywood-actor-in-it' fever that I'd created for myself. I'm not actually a fan of Christian Slater and I think he looks even weirder now in his old(er) age.. something about his eyes and hairline I think. As the play unfolded I had the strangest sense of deja vu as I felt as though I'd seen it before, not on stage, but on tv late at night (the tv no one watches unless they're suffering from boredom or insomnia). Turns out I really had seen it before - Swimming With Sharks

Les Miserables (Queens Theatre)
I don't think it would ever be possible not to thoroughly enjoy a West End production of Les Mis, and it almost lived up to expectations. I was slightly disappointed with the orchestra - having a small musical ensemble meant they relied too heavily on the synthesiser, whose thin 'plastic' sound was not quite able to match the grandeur required at those crucial dramatic moments. Despite this and our not-so-great seats, I still loved it.

Avenue Q (Noel Coward Theatre)
I've always had a soft spot for muppets, and while these are not Jim Henson muppets, they were still very endearing and it was a hilarious show. We marvelled at the skill that must be required of the muppeteer (I don't think this is a real word - but think puppeteer for muppets) as they artfully maneuvered the muppets while singing and running about all over the stage all at the same time.

My favourite Avenue Q muppets:









Macbeth (Gielgud Theatre)
So the main drawcard here was Patrick Stewart as Macbeth (or as hubby likes to say 'Jean Luuuuuc!' or 'Captain Picaaaard!' - both of which mean nothing to me). The seat nazi in me was very upset about having dithered and delayed the purchase of the tickets (did I really want to pay full price for these tickets...), for if I had bought the tickets a week earlier, we would have been 2 rows away from Patrick Stewart, rather than the 15 odd rows away. But they were decent enough seats and Patrick Stewart was an excellent Macbeth - even when someone's mobile phone rang for a good 15 seconds during one of his soliloquies he only lapsed for a split second. I think everyone in the theatre wanted to thump the person who not only left their mobile phone on, but couldn't seem to find it for what seemed like an age. I found their choice of actor for Malcolm a bit unusual - a bit too prim and proper, he looked and acted like a younger, slightly skinnier version of Stephen Fry, not really someone you can rally behind to bring Macbeth down.

Newton Faulkner (Shepherd's Bush Empire)
I used to listen to Virgin Radio when I first started work (now it's BBC Radio 1) and I fell in love with Dream Catch Me, then All I Gotta Do, and then suddenly I found myself booking tickets to see the local lad. I managed to get my hands on most of the songs from his album, but after listening to them I found there were some songs that just didn't do it for me. So when the concert came around, I brought hubby along with a very small amount of trepidation (note that our music tastes are at times on opposite ends of the spectrum). However I needn't have worried as Newton is such a talented musician and the live performances of all his songs were so much better than the produced versions on the album. And to top the night off, hubby was even singing some of his songs on the way home after the concert.

Powderfinger (Hammersmith Apollo)
Was amazing! I don't know that I would have ever gone to see Powderfinger back home, but when I saw they were playing at a venue less than a 15 minute walk away from home, and that tix were only £22.50 I thought why not? (Side note: when you do the conversion, it's not really worthy of only status, but my entire value system has been in a bit of disarray since moving here. You could take into account the exchange rate, the differing salary levels, the cost of living and countless more variables, but in the end I just think £22.50 sounds like a pretty good deal.) And what made a good night a great night was that they played the 2 songs hubby most wanted to hear, and the 2 songs I most wanted to hear.

looking back - part 1

We arrived in London in August 2007, but due to many obstacles our first five months here have gone by without a single mention in this blog. So this is an attempt to capture some of my memories of our first few months here (or rather *around* the area)...

Rome (late August)
Our first visit to the continent! Also our first (and so far worst) experience of budget flying. A city of gelato, street pizza and old old ruins. I loved the map of the city that all the tourists have, with its little pictures of all the ancient fountains and squares and buildings available for viewing by the common tourist. While Fontana de Trevi is by far the most well-known and visited fountain in Rome, my favourite was Fontana del Tritone. There's something about wandering through the Roman streets in 30 odd degree heat among hundreds of other tourists, and suddenly finding yourself at a fountain spouting cool water to soothe burnt skin and hardly a tourist to be seen.

Brussels (23rd September)
I booked this trip for our first wedding anniversary however I was insanely sick with my cough of death. Luckily my unending supply of phlegm did not stop us from scoffing down waffles and chocolate (and in hubby’s case beer).

Bruges (late October)
When I found out that if you travel on the Eurostar to Brussels you can travel to any other city on the Belgium rail network for free, I thought it was a good opportunity to go to Bruges and see what everyone was raving about. It is indeed a very quaint and picturesque city, with an abundance of chocolate stores presided over by angry sales ladies with little patience for tourists.

Luxembourg City (late November)
We initially planned to go to Frankfurt for this weekend away, but upon discovering that Hahn airport was literally in the middle of nowhere (good old RyanAir) and that it was only an extra 45 minutes to go to Luxembourg instead of Frankfurt, we opted for the small quaint city instead of the large why-are-you-going-to-Frankfurt city. Favourite moment: climbing from the bottom of the gorge to the top of a hill in search of ruins, only to find the journey to the top and the view from there much more satisfying than the ruins we sought in the first place.

Madrid (early December)
I booked this purely so we could hook up with Clara somewhere on her holiday before she arrived in London. Madrid turned out to be the only destination where we had a free weekend and she wasn't in the process of moving onto another city. Madrid was mostly too grotty for my liking, but it was still a worthwhile trip – the 3 highlights being seeing Clara after many months apart, Picasso and Dali in The Sofia (Madrid’s museum of modern art) and Jason almost having his wallet stolen by a pickpocket. Almost? How did hubby manage to avert the horror of losing a wallet? It was courtesy of wife! We were at the flea markets where it seems everyone in Madrid flocks to, and at one point we’d stopped at a stall. When I turned around to make sure hubby was still behind, I glanced down and noticed some dodgy activity happening around his coat pocket – the pickpocket had covered his hand with a cloth and I can only assume behind the cloth the old man's fingers were working away at trying to get to Jason’s wallet. In these situations, one just does the first thing that comes to mind, and so what did I do? I yelled ‘Hey! Stop that! Go away!’ while simultaneously slapping his hand like he was a naughty schoolboy. I felt incredibly silly as he just walked away. We were both quite unnerved by the experience, but if you measure how disturbing an experience is by how long it takes to stop hugging your bag close to your chest, I think my mugging experience back in Sydney still takes the cake...

Paris (2007-2008)
What can I say about Paris? It was amazing and I loved every minute of it. One way to describe my experience might be to note the sites I climbed:
1. Arc de Triomphe - ~280 steps
2. Notre Dame - ~400 steps
3. Sacre Coeur - ? steps
4. Eiffel Tower - ~680 steps
But there was also the Musee D'Orsay, Rodin sculptures in the garden, the streets of Montmartre, chocolate crepes, 3 out of 4 of us falling asleep on a cruise on the Seine, snow on the Eiffel Tower (a gimmick, not real snow)... so many things to see and only 5 days - we're definitely going back to Paris

and all that jazz

We went to see Chicago last night - and as expected it was a thoroughly enjoyable night out. Celebrity watch:
* The main star attraction for Chicago at the moment is Kelly Osbourne as Mamma Morton but that night happened to be her night off, so we were treated to a performance by an Aussie instead. No idea who she was but she was an Aussie!
* The lead singer from Blue as Billy Flynn ('Who the hell is Blue?' I hear you say - but lucky for me I followed the Brit music scene back in my heyday...)
And that was it. I had no idea who the 2 leading ladies were but despite their wrinkles (the ageist in me is showing its ugly head, but when you're sitting 3 rows from the front you can't hide everything) they carried the show well. Finally the band was amazing - the sound was so much richer than the plasticy squeakiness of the synthesiser in Les Mis.