England III / London

From Cornwall we took the train clear across England to London, during which I continued to work on the book that I had been reading by Arne Zettersten, a Swede (it's in Swedish), which was about his impressions about Tolkien by his meetings and work with Tolkien.  I read a lot that I had read before, but there were of course new and neat things to be learned.  I also used the book as a flat and quite surface to play dice on.  Once in London the first thing to do was meet Chenoa's friend Trygve, who is American, has a very Norwegian name, and was in Norway this semester.  The only thing that we did on the first night was eat Indian food, which I had never eaten before.  I literally had no idea what a single thing on the menu meant.  So what we did was basically go on what the waiter (who was very nice) recommended.  The food was fantastic, and then I was stuffed and ready to go to bed back at the hostel.  The next day we had plenty of sight seeing ahead of us, which sounded nice, but at the same time, exhausting, which it proved to be.  We did the Tower Bridge tour thing, which was fairly cool.  We got a great view of the most disgusting river I've ever seen in my life, the Thames; but we also got to see a fair bit of London from that high.  We did quite a bit of walking along what I think is called the Queen's walk or something along those lines.  There were tons of street performers, good bad and unmentionable.  Trygve made the appropriate observation that it really is amazing what some people can think up.  For instance one of the guys was just painted(?) all blue and playing a blue accoustic guitar.  We saw Westminster and Parliament.  I am of the opinion that they are absolutely two of the neatest buildings in London.  Probably the most beautiful was St Paul's Cathedral.  Apparently I took no pictures of it, though I was sure that I had.  We saw and heard the St Olaf Choir there, which was one of the most beautiful things ever.  I had never heard a choir in a cathedral before.  I really can't say much other than it really was one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.  

Now, I must say that I've always enjoyed Shakespeare, but just not been thrilled about him; but, one of the best experiences of London was seeing "The Comedy of Errors" at the replica of the Globe Theatre.  I say replica, though it can't be an exact replica.  It is however thought to be fairly accurate.  The play was, at any rate, hilarious.  The humour was very slapstick and light, which was good after an exhausting day.  The whole comedy is based on the errors made when two pairs of twins, sharing the same names (Antipholus and Dromio) end up in the same town and create a stir.  In this case, there were not four actors to play the four characters, but rather two actors played both twins.  They took off their glasses to indicate that they were one or other of the twins.  At the end when all four met in the same place at the same time (for the first time) there were life-size cut-outs of the actors to be the other twins, which was very funny.  To wrap it up, it was without a doubt the most fun I have ever had at a play.  With our feet and backs exhausted we headed back to the hostel for rest up before another day.