Let's start at the beginning. We dragged ourselves out of bed bright and early to go to Portobello road.
We found a booth that had a bunch of fascinators. They'd been used as props in a show, and were being sold.
No, I did not actually get this one. I got a different one, and don't have a picture of it yet. This was the runner-up.
Then strawberries!
We ate the whole thing. They were delicious!
Then off to a place called Hampstead Heath. It's sort of a forest with the town grown around it. Like Central Park in NYC, except far bigger. Staggeringly big. We got lost and didn't even know it. Very Robin Hood area.
Keats had a house built in the town there. Well, he actually rented rooms in a duplex with a roommate, and fell in love with the girl on the other side of the wall. For a year he wrote poetry - almost every piece you've ever heard of his was written there. Then he got consumption. The girl on the other side of the wall nursed him until he went to Rome in hopes of improving his health. He died there at the age of 25, thinking he was a failure.
Then we trekked off through the Heath (and got lost) and made our way to Kenwood house. It's a fabulous art museum that closed five minutes before we got there, despite our best efforts.
We'll have to go back. Still, the grounds were lovely!
Footsore and handsore, we staggered to the edge of the property (surprisingly near the road, if you're not lost), and got a bus. Front seats on the upper level of the bus, to be exact.
That's the kind of view you get from the front seats on a double decker bus!
We made our way to Regent's Park.
Now, when I say park, I mean the place with a baseball diamond and maybe a soccer goal or two and a jungle gym. And trees.
When they say park, they mean a big swathe of green that goes and goes and goes. For those of you who know Provo Canyon, it's like dropping South Fork into the middle of a city, only it's maybe six or seven or eight times bigger than South Fork!
The sidewalk that goes around Regent's Park is four miles long. That's like walking from my house to BYU and back again! Then there's a full-fledged zoo, a university, and an outdoor theater tucked away in various corners. Also two boating lakes, a reataraunt, and a canal. It's so big that they have maps posted every so often with little red You Are Here labels on them.
The theater was playing Peter Pan. I've seen and read more incarnations of this story than almost any other, barring Cinderella. So I've been looking forward to this one. No pictures allowed, sorry.
It was very interesting to see Peter Pan performed in a park in the city where it was written, only a few miles from the park where it was inspired: Kensington Gardens.
They did it rather creatively. There were no Indians at all. None. Not even Tiger Lily. Me. Darling never figured either. They cut them out entirely.
The whole thing was staged against a WWI backdrop. It started with soldiers in a hospital barracks with nurses helping make them comfortable. One of the nurses finds a book under one of the soldier's pillows and begins to read. As she does so, Peter Pan flies in through the window, and the familiar part begins. John and Michael are two of the soldiers, and they and the young nurse (Wendy) fly away with Peter.
The flying was really well done, by the way. Long steel bed jutted out over the stage towards the audience, and a crew member in a WWI uniform would run out and attach a line to Peter that ran up to one of the beams. The line ran across the beams to one of the tall light/structural towers on the side of the stage in the shadows, where another crew member was attached to it as a counterweight. When Peter made a running jump to go into the air, the counterweight crewman would quickly climb down the ladder, yanking Peter into the air, where he could soar in dizzying spirals or catch hold of a ledge and look like he was floating effortlessly.
All the props were made of sheets and hospital beds and gas masks and corrugated metal. The mermaids and Tinker Bell were puppets, and very well executed.
Well, that's about it!
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