To Find Luggage or Not To Find Luggage

I'm in London! Which is really exciting, since I've wanted to visit London since... forever. It's totally cliche, and overdone everywhere in literature and TV/Movies, but I don't care at all. I actually can't really explain it either. Strange.

As a nice welcome to London, the flight was delayed by 2 hours. Now I know it's not really the airport's fault that a plane had to catch on fire (no one was on board, luckily) but it is really, really inconvenient when you're trying not to miss your midnight tickets to A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe.

It's even more annoying when you go to pick up your luggage and after waiting for an hour or so, they finally tell everyone waiting around that the baggage return system has shut down, and will not be resuming. Basically, a whole bunch of people aren't going to get their stuff til.. well no one really knows when.

Every person in this picture is missing their bags

Momentarily putting aside the baggage woes, we went off to see what we could of the play. (I mean, what else were you going to do.. and it's Shakespeare. So really, a no-brainer) Thanks to a really awesome cabby, we got from the airport to the theatre in record time, just making it in before intermission. The performance and atmosphere were absolutely amazing, so if you ever have the opportunity to go, I highly recommend it.

You felt like you were watching the play with a huge literary family

 When we woke up in the morning (taking a bit of a late start after the midnight showing of the play) the bags were.. still no where to be found. On top of that everyone was doing the same thing and crashing their systems (both web and phone) so we just gave up and went out to see the city.

Our initial plans to walk around outside were overwritten when we discovered that we were in the middle of a heat wave. Improvising a little, we ended up at the British Museum, notable for it's crazy foyer architecture and housing the Rosetta Stone. I had never really gotten what was so great about some stone, but looking at the 3 different languages carved into it basically right next to each other, I came to a bit of an understanding of how useful it would be to help decipher something that honestly didn't even resemble any known written language.

It was like being outside, but without wind, sun or litter

Walking back from the museum, we passed through Covent Garden, a place that used to be the center of flower selling, but is now both a shopping mall and open market. Continuing our meandering walking tour, we wound our way down toward the Thames and walked along the river front enjoying live music from a swing dance group.

As a tourist, I am obligated to take this photo

To top off our enjoyable evening out, we went to our second theatrical performance: (quite a bit different from the first) Spamalot. It's a musical. It's based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's got SPAM. It's got improv funny enough to crack up the actors. I'm not sure anything else really needs to be said.

London has many weird looking pedestrian bridges