As we were down to our last bit of clean clothes, yesterday began with laundry. We had booked this particular studio because the offered laundry facilities in the basement. It seemed simple. After getting ready and moving our laundry over to the dryer we took a short walk over to Holland Park and Kyoto Gardens. Both were very beautiful and made you forget you were in London.
We then returned to check on the laundry. It was still soaking wet in the dryer. We think maybe if we take some of it out it will work better. Maybe it's just too full. So clothesline was purchased and the clothes we took out were hung in our studio.
We set off then for the Portobello Road Market, mostly to check out the Vida Vida stall. Vida Vida is the small company that makes all of the leather bags that Jake wears all the time. It's been nearly 6 years since Jake bought his first bag from this shop when he studied abroad so it was fun for him to come back. We also enjoyed browsing the other shops and stalls.
Then it was back once more to check on the laundry. It still wasn't dry!? And so the rest was hung as well. With the laundry taken care of, we were free to explore London further. We took the tube to Tower Bridge, and enjoyed the views from the top. When you walk across the upper walkways, sections of the floor are glass! You can see all the way down to the road and the river below!
From there, we walked along the Thames for awhile towards St. Paul's Cathedral. We attended part of the Evensong to listen to the beautiful music in the Cathedral and then continued onward towards the Globe. Here's us outside St. Paul's.
We had dinner at a place called Pizza Express, but it is not fast and the service was lousy. There were a bunch of waitstaff but they all seemed to be doing whatever they wanted whenever they wanted with no regard to the customers. Anyway, afterwards, we got ice cream to improve our mood and got in line for the Globe. We had tickets for the yard, which means we would stand right in front of the stage throughout the show. Historically, the upper class would sit in the seats and the working class would stand in the yard. Standing for the whole show may not sound like fun, but if you get there early, you can get a front row view and actually lean on the stage!
To say the least, the show was great. We saw Macbeth and it was intense. The witches were creepy, the choreography was entertaining, and the actors spit a lot. Seriously, Macbeth had such emphatic enunciation that we got spit on a couple times during his monologues. It was awesome!
Since we were right up front, we even interacted with the characters during a couple scenes. During one, one of the witches popped out of the front of the stage in this duffel bag and Jake had to undo the tie so she could get out. Later on, one of the characters rolled another "dead" character right at us and shouted at us to move so he could push the dead guy off the stage. It was crazy!
After the show, we took the Tube to our studio. And, yup, you guessed it, some of the clothes still wasn't dry so it got left on the clothesline over night.