West End trip 1

Yesterday ended up being a very busy day. We’d planned on getting up early and doing a day trip to Brighton with London Walks. When we got up and looked out the window, we saw it was overcast and drizzling – not the best weather for a trip to the seaside.

We decided that instead of gallivanting in the rain at the seaside, we’d get some chores done that we’d been putting off for a while – specifically a trip to the madhouse that is Primark on Oxford Street.

Primark is a bizarre store. It’s sort of like a combination of the prices of Winners and the absolute crap clothing and house wears you can get at Wal-Mart. On the other hand, at £5 for a towel, it’s hard to go wrong. Unfortunately, it’s the back-to-school shopping season and at £2 for a shirt, I think most of the school-age girls in London were madly winnowing through stacks of polyester crap looking for the perfect ensemble. We managed to get our towels and ran for the hills, sanity more or less intact.

After a few hours of recovering at home, we headed out again. Ken had managed to get half-price tickets to Boeing Boeing – a play in the West End starring, oddly enough, Rhea Perlman. The show was hilarious, although Rhea wasn’t quite up to the task and definitely seemed out of her league.

After the show we decided that a pint or two were in order so we headed over the road to the pub (one of the best things about London is that there’s pretty much ALWAYS a pub over the road, regardless of where you are). As it was getting late and it being a Monday, they started closing up so we were forced to wander over to an open-late bar that caters to West End actors over by Charing Cross. A bottle of wine later, we were all ready to go.

The tube stops running at 12:30, so we had to grab a cab back home – didn’t work out to be as expensive as I’d expected – only £20 and that in a black cab – next time should be cheaper if we take a mini-cab...