EXPLANATION
Writing about my UK trip all shuffled in with my regular blog shit was getting too confusing for me, plus I just got access to all the trip photos that I wanted to include along the way but people don't look at the old entries so much as the new entries, so I feared they'd all be lost. Lost, I tell you. Anyway, even if you read the shit all along, I've added
SHIT, both story and pictures, as I've remembered things and put them in a more proper order. All dates are when things occurred, not necessarily when I wrote them. If anybody knows how to make it so these entries start with the oldest instead of the newest, that'd be nice, but I figure my friends are smart enough to figure it out, even if it is backwards and weird. And if you are not my friend, what the fuck do you care about my vacation? Fucking weirdo.
That is all. I love comments, but not as much as I love you*.
*And by "you" I mean "Crunchie Bars."
Epilogue
Never found my wallet. My mom thinks it may have been pick-pocketed while I was calling the cab, since she saw some guy go to the phone next to me but not make a call, and I was pretty out of it by that point. No charges to my credit cards or anything and no one's stolen my identity yet, so all that's good. I still haven't completely unpacked, mostly since what's still in my backpack is all dirty laundry so I've just been avoiding it. I feel like I should say something pithy about the whole UK trip experience, but I can't think of anything particularly conclusive, so I'll just shut up and be done.
The end.
Home again, home again
My brother and I were up and ready to go before the rest of the family, so we took orders and made our final trip to La Baguette. I had a scrambled egg and cheddar baguette. Mark started feeling sick while we waited for our food to come up and headed back to the room. I guess it was just his turn to be diseased. Lynn's flight to Paris (where she'd be spending New Years with a bunch of her college friends) was supposed to take off about an hour before our flight to London, so we were at the airport more than three hours before our takeoff. They wouldn't even let us check in until two hours before our posted flight time.
I made a point of spending the rest of my pounds on hot chocolate and
Crunchie bars (oh, Cadbury, why don't you do more in the US?) Lynn's flight took off late due to bad weather in Paris (quote from her friend Rebecca: "It's snowing like bird flu here!") so she left just a little before we did. She only took one large carry on and her purse while we took the rest of her shit with us. I popped a Dramamine and barely remember anything about that first flight. We landed in London and had to change planes.
Heathrow is fucking huge and we had to take a shuttle to get from
one terminal to another. We weren't sure if we should be checking in through British Airways or American Airlines at this point, so I tried my credit card in the eticket machine, but it didn't work and we went to the American Airlines area. I immediately spotted the sign that said our flight was already boarding and that we should allow for 20 minutes to walk to our gate, but my parents either didn't hear me or didn't believe we were boarding so early, so they went shopping at the Heathrow
to spend the rest of their pounds. A whole lot of tea and biscuits later, my brother and I were getting nervous about the boarding time and started urging my parents to hurry up. When it finally clicked in their heads, we ended up half-running across much of the terminal to check into our gate, where we discovered they "board" passengers into the gate area before the plane even arrives. Oh well. It was still only a few minutes before they began "preboarding" the platinum passengers, which apparently my dad is thanks to all his business travel. We found our seats and my brother and I started in on the MENSA quiz in the airline magazine.
Flying
to London is a lot faster than flying
from London, thanks to headwinds or something like that. Long fucking flight. Over 8 hours.
I watched part of Wallace and Grommit's Curse of the Ware Rabbit, slept, and spilled cranberry juice all over myself and my brother and in my purse. I took everything out of my purse and tried to dab up as much of the wet and sticky as possible, but I'd just given all my shout wipes to Lynn in the Edinburgh airport. Figures. On the flight in, due to the compressed time with moving through time zones and such, it felt like they were feeding us constantly. On the way back, I was significantly hungry and into the Crunchie bars long before they bothered serving us food. Shitty airline food. Some non-descript chicken in beige sauce with green beans. Mark needed a lot of entertaining (youngest child thing, I think) so for the last few hours I switched seats with my dad and sat by my mom instead. We were all zombies by the time we got our luggage, went through customs, and out to the pay phones at O'Hare to call the cab. I had the easiest load (my backpack is quite manageable and I only had one of Lynn's small bags besides my purse) so I bee-lined it to the pay phone and did the cab calling. I then decided to try calling the kennel where Freud was to see how late they were open, just in case I could make it there and get him that night. I'd put the kennel's business card in my wallet. My wallet wasn't in my purse. Fuck. The cop stationed outside customs and the American Airlines connections desk let me go back in to try to ask someone to call to see if I'd left it on the plane. My passport had been separate, and the last time I was absolutely positive I'd had it was at Hethrow when I tried to check in to our flight with my credit card. What made the most sense to me was that I'd taken it out when I spilled juice in my purse and hadn't put it back in, and since I traded seats with my dad I didn't get to do my normal OCD check of everything to make sure I didn't leave anything on the plane. I had to wait in the line with all the people trying to change planes and check into domestic flights and shit before a ticket agent would help me, but she was very nice and called the gates until she found my plane and told them our row and seat numbers and described my wallet (large and leopard print...) and then I had to wait. Meanwhile, my dad and Mark took all the luggage in the cab I'd called back to Oak Park while my mom waited for me. The gate people told the ticket agent they didn't find anything, so I was told to file a police report. Fuck. A very strange but friendly cop came down and I again had to describe my wallet and its contents. It had all of my Hanukkah gift cards in it, not that much cash, my license, my credit cards, my bank card, my Uno Wild Card, my car insurance card, my expired International Student ID, and my health insurance card. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. I just wanted to crawl into bed the moment I got home, but I had to cancel all my bank and credit cards and leave a message with the AA lost and found. My mom and I wanted Crunchie bars, which had been put in Lynn's computer bag. Where was Lynn's computer bag? We couldn't find it in the house anywhere. My parents called the cab company, who called the cab driver, who also did not have it. At midnight, my parents drove back to the airport where they found Lynn's computer bag (containing Lynn's computer as well as the Crunchie bars) sitting quietly by the pay phones. So much for airport security, but lucky for us. That computer had all the photos on it from our trip, as well as Lynn's entire semester abroad. She would have killed someone. I was asleep before my parents got home.
Castle day
So it was our final day in Edinburgh and we were back in La Baguette with my father who was feeling much better. Our family takes for-fucking-ever to order anything, but we eventually had food and were on our way to explore the castle.
Right by the castle's entrance is the
Tartan Weaving Mill. It's about 95% gift shops and they set it up so you have to go through each little store to get anywhere, but in the center of it all is this big working loom. I wish I'd had the camera because I would have taken pictures because it was extremely cool.
I will instead rely on the website's images. There were tons of spools of yarn lined up in a basic pattern on this
big spooly griddy contraption (left).
These fed through to the
loom, where they magically turned into lots of plaid fabric. A guy stood by the loom and occasionally poked at things. And that's how you make tartan.
My mother, having apparently been deprived of gift shops in her youth, feels obligated to spend as much time in gift shops as humanly possible. She got scarves as gifts for people, I got a scarf as a gift for a person, Lynn got kilt socks, and my brother got bored and cranky. We were in the mill for a very, very long time and I felt obligated to touch every pretty wooly and cahsmerey thing in sight, despite my wool allergy. This was extremely dumb of my and my palms continued to itch for a solid hour after I touched my last fuzzy thing.
Also in the immediate vicinity of the castle were all sorts of old government buildings and churches. One church had been turned into an internet cafe, club, and shopping center. Crazy juxtaposition of old and new.
As we wandered around the curvy old streets we saw a sign for the Writers' Museum. Me being me and my mom being published, we had to go in. It turned out to be mainly dedicated to Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott. Highlights included a room that, upon entering, started booming a recording of information on Sir Walter Scott. Also notable was the plaster cast of Burns's skull (if I ever become famous and die, I hope someone makes a plaster cast of my skull) and the case of random crap belonging to the subjects of and mentioned in Burns's poetry. There was a parasol and a snuff box from some guy named Johnny next to a quoted reference to it in a poem. Since Toph's full name is Christopher Robert Burns and his dad was named Robert Burns, I had to buy him a post card.
Worth mentioning: there was a guy dressed as William Wallace standing next to a sign that read "Children with leukemia are the true Bravehearts."
After several hours of pre-castle castle-related wanderings, we finally paid our admission and entered the castle itself. While there was no moat, the place where a moat once existed still had to be crossed via entry bridge with big spiky gates. Awesome.
"The castle" is actually more of a giant fort, 
encompassing many paths, cannons, and buildings, including (but certainly not limited to) the Great Hall, a big impressive church, a small chapel, the Scottish national war museum, the Honours of the Kingdom exhibition, memorials for fallen soldiers, a cemetery for soldiers' dogs, and the Stone of Destiny. The Stone of Destiny (a major Scottish thingy) was apparently in the Westminster Abbey in London until 1996 when it was mysteriously stolen and returned to Scotland in the middle of the night. Reminded me of stealing an opposing school's mascot or something. The soldiers' dogs' cemetery was sad but entertaining, with flowers up against gravestones that read things like "Winkie," "Major," and "Sport." Somewhere along the edge of the castle walls I started having my first heights panic attack in ages. I was trying to stay towards the middle of things and calm myself down when my dad insisted I come over and see something by him near the edge, so I did. It was the soldiers' dogs' cemetery, which I'd seen already, and of course Mr. Panic Attack didn't like me going back to the area with a sheer drop. I can now add Edinburgh Castle to my list of Impressive Places I've Had Panic Attacks. 
I went and hid out in the chapel for awhile, trying to calm myself down. The chapel had no heating source, but was surprisingly warm considering how fucking freezing it was outside. My brother had clearly had more than enough of the castle, my mom wanted to stop in every gift shop along the way, and my dad wanted to spend six months reading every plaque and staring at every stone. My tendency would have been closer to my fathers, since there was tons to look at, but once the panic attack hit and it was clear everybody else's turkey timers had popped, we headed out. 
Figured that out involved a lot of steep stairs. Stupid phobia.
Lynn needed to print out her flight information, so she, Mark, and my mom headed to an internet cafe. I wanted to mail my letters and post cards, so my dad joined me in the hunt for a post office. When we met the others at the internet place, they still had much to do so we sat bored and waiting. They'd bought much more time than they needed (something about hour-long blocks and it all being cheap anyway) so I got to spend a few minutes posting to my blog and checking my email.
We were all completely exhausted as we headed back to the hotel for our pre-dinner naps, but I realized I still had people I had to get souvenirs/Chranukah presents for, so I power shopped it at a bookstore and souvenir shop and still made it back in time to completely pass out before dinner.
Our taxi ride to dinner was long and winding thanks to the "torch parade" we didn't know about. We actually got to catch a glimpse of what appeared to be tons of people walking through the streets carrying torches (think: every torch-bearing mob scene ever, but calmer) and then heard the fireworks going off from inside the restaurant. Poor timing on our parts, but we were all getting along quite nicely and eating more fabulous food at a Frenchy restaurant and playing "categories," which is very much like the alphabet game but without having to start each item with consecutive letters of the alphabet and without drinking. It would actually make an excellent drinking game in different company.
Back at our hotel Lynn spent approximately 6 months packing. I had my big teal backpacking backpack, so my packing was three minutes of cramming everything down the big squishy cylinder. I couldn't sleep so I wrote a little in my journal and read some of the Kafka short stories my sister bought in Rome by the light of my Christmas cracker flashlight. I felt completely brilliant when I came up with a way of keeping it lit without having to squeeze it constantly (several 5 pence pieces and a hair rubberband). I eventually dozed off for the last time in Scotland.
Shopping and eating in Edinburgh
The next morning my dad was completely out of commission. Terrible vertigo and barfiness. Across the street from our hotel were three French-ish sandwichy shops. We wandered into one of them (La Baguette) to get my dad some tea and ourselves breakfast. I had a brie morning roll, which was a small round whole grain (like, chunks of oats and other grains) roll with big slices of brie on it. They had about a bazillion different options and as we stood there trying to decide the guy behind the counter asked in his thick Scottish brogue, "Spoiled for choice?" Something about the phrase with the accent was just perfect.
We decided to move seeing the castle to the next day and went off to do things he wouldn't mind missing, which quickly became shopping shopping and more shopping. The post-Christmas sales were plentiful. Mark was still in willing-to-buy-fashionable-clothing mode, so we mostly looked for him, though we did spend well over an hour in
Zara. Zara is a store I loved when I spent the summer in Vienna and apparently Lynn loved this past semester in Rome. I got a really cute sweater in an intense teal green that I like very much. We also saw the first 10,000 of what was to be 83 bazillion Scottish scarves.
Apparently the reason for all the sheep-fucking is to make the cashmere softer and plaidier.
Lynn had to try on 93% of the hats. Obviously. My mom and brother went back to the hotel to check on my father, while my sister and I were supposed to meet them after we went to the drug store to look for single serving face masks. Unfortunately, I wasn't wearing the smartest shoes so my sister was walking in front of me, seemingly leading the way. I guess I'd forgotten who my sister was, because I assumed she was
actually leading the way and knew where she was going. After several blocks of just trying to keep up I noticed we were going the wrong way and I hadn't paid attention to how we'd gotten there. My sister had been walking and assumed I'd tell her if she went the wrong way. Oops.
Using the castle as a landmark I got us what I thought was back on track, but I wasn't sure so we tried asking someone. He didn't know where the Sheraton was, but I remembered there was a pub across the street called Shakespeare's and, according to Zach, all UK residents are alcoholics, so I asked if he knew where the pub was. This he did, though he wasn't sure how to get there, but he knew the street it was on and described its position in relation to a large clock. Zach, you were right. Well, we still didn't know for sure how to get back and I'm much more confident if I have a map, so we went into a convenience store and spent a pound and a half on a
map of Edinburgh. I found our location and where we needed to go, at which point I realized we were half a block from where I would have known exactly where we were and should be going, anyway. Figures. At any rate, we made it back to the hotel not too late and the drug store we went to didn't even have face masks.
My dad was feeling sufficiently better to come with us for an afternoon of--what else--shopping! so we went to the nicer streets and wandered around and looked at more cashmere and wool.
We also stumbled upon an
outdoor market with neat little booths selling jewelry, mulled cider, cheese, and (my favorite) Scottish children's books. I'd been looking in the US for a book of plays of an appropriate reading level for my students, but Amazon and bookstores kept failing me. Random stand in Edinburgh, on the other hand, had a perfect book of fairy tales in play format with a CD of them being read. 10 pounds well spent.
Before heading back to the hotel for naps, my siblings and I split off from my parents and went to a different drug store in search of the
single-serving facial masks and voila! an entire section. We chose six: two relaxing, two deep-cleaning, and two peel-off exfoliating. I love those things.
Dinner. My dad had asked the concierge at the hotel to recommend a Scottish restaurant. My stomach was finally all better and wanted some real food, but we all knew it was possible we'd be eating bread and staring at blood pudding and going for munchies late that night. Oh how wrong we were. The menu had two pages to it: one with four appetizers and four entrees that made up the prix fixe menu (18 pounds) and the other had about six appetizers and entrees that could be chosen individually with individual prices. Pheasant, wood pigeon, venison, salmon herring and hare were the Scottier options with a few vegetarian dishes, steak, chicken, and assorted fish making up the rest of the menu. I had the venison, and it was seriously the best thing I ate the entire trip. It was incredible. Like a really fine, tender beef with a sauce that tasted like Jesus.
I also had a
Hoegaarden for the first time since my Maastricht/Vienna summer. I know it's not Scottish, but it's delicious. The general atmostphere was much more what I'd expected. It was dark and stone and kind of dank and castle-like. I sat next to the radiator, which was wonderful because it was motherfuckingcoldout. When we were more than sufficiently stuffed, we ordered dessert. My brother was having a moment (being 16 is a real piece of shit) and didn't help eat the dessert, so I completely overstuffed myself beyond reason.
After dinner we all walked back to the hotel. Lynn and I had both promised Mark we'd go out with him, but I was uncomfortably full and too damn lazy to go anywhere farther than
Shakespeare's, so Shakespeare's it was.
Lynn and I each got a pint of
Tennents because it was Scottish and on tap. Verdict: not very good. We sat around and bonded like good siblings.
Mark doesn't drink for somewhat medical reasons (it interferes with his crack habit) but
he posed with the pint anyway and was by far the goofiest. I just wanted to go lay down and sleep from overstuffedness (beer is heavy, especially in an already full tummy), so once our single pints were drained, we waddled back to the hotel. Mark had the serious munchies (again, I point out he had consumed no altering substances) and he and Lynn went looking for food downstairs but were up only minutes after me as everything was closed except 24-hour room service. The boy ordered an enormous and expensive club sandwich that seemed to be making him very happy as I passed out in my food-induced coma for the night.
Tate for Tat--or--From London to Edinburgh: a study in the transportation of the Rosenberg Family
Tuesday the 27th was our last morning in London. We packed up, stocked up on the Savoy's toiletries, and headed out to the
Tate Modern. Since the day we left was the only day museums and stuff were open (silly Christmas), we all had to pick the one we wanted to go to. Lynn had already done many of the tourist sites and museums on an earlier trip this semester and so the
Tate Modern topped her list of where she wanted to spend more time. This was fine by me (though I would have liked to see
Shakespeare's Globe, I knew I'd be alone in that endeavor and we had to be on the train to Edinburgh by early afternoon) and I believe everyone in my family besides my father likes modern art best
(as opposed to eleventy billion paintings of the exact same creepy looking Mary holding creepier looking baby Jesus) so
Tate Modern it was.
We walked, as we did most everywhere most of the trip, which was much more expected there than, say, Chicago, where the assumption would be that one would take public transportation anywhere more than 5 blocks away. We never actually took the tube after the first day coming from the airport. On the way we stopped at a tiny bakery/sandwich shop place on a wharf on the Thames that looked like it was probably hoppin' during the summer but practically abandoned during the winter. My stomach was still off, so all I had was tea.
The first floor of the museum had a
very large exhibit of piles of casts made from the insides of boxes.
My sister had mentioned seeing this on her earlier visit and described it as looking like a bunch of sugar cubes. Now maybe I would have seen it this way without her suggestion, but as we wandered around that's all I could think of. They did look like sugar cubes. I very suddenly felt very shitty and my mom came with me as I ran to the bathroom and puked up my morning tea. I can now add the Tate Modern to the list of impressive places I've thrown up. Swell. But I felt better having puked and who knows when I'll ever make it back to London, so on we went into the rest of the museum.
The collection was pretty impressive. If you have any interest at all, I recommend looking at the
Tate's online thingy. It's shows most of the art categorized the same way it's up at the museum. I didn't actually make it through the Nude/Action/Body wing (stupid time constraints) but the rest is pretty much as I saw it. Reality is much better, but this will have to do.
I do want to specifically mention, however, that
Francis Bacon creeps me out, I like pretty much anything
Jackson Pollock touched, and Salvador Dali is still my hero. My favorite piece in the whole museum was a Dali sculpture, appropriately titled
Lobster Telephone.
The picture doesn't do it justice, as it is actually an object and not a painting, probably just a telephone Dali had around his house with a fake lobster resting on the handle. That man certainly had a sense of humor. I managed to split off from my family to wander the museum (Mark and Lynn walked together and my parents were both together and apart at different points) which was a very good thing because I hate looking at art with my mother. She's very funny, but she tends to go through the room and say "that one's just ugly," "I could have painted that," and "that looks like a _____" to half the pieces in the exhibit. I prefer being a quiet little sponge when I go through and saving my snide and sarcastic comments for after I've digested everything. Personal preference, really.
We ended up taking a cab back to the hotel to save time. My dad asked us if we thought we should ask the cab driver to stick around and take us to the train station, since we would likely need two cabs anyway. We said we didn't know how long it would take to get our luggage out of the hotel's storage, wanted to go to the bathroom, didn't want to rush, and thought the cab driver would keep us on the meter, making it cost more. Plus, there were always cabs at the hotel so it's not like we wouldn't be able to find one. Three minutes later my dad started to ask the cab driver to stick around. We all jumped at him (verbally, though we would have liked to physically...) and he stopped and changed his question to the driver. My dad does that a lot: ask our opinion on something and then go ahead and do whatever he was thinking in the first place. Lucky for him we are all hyper-critical of him and yell at him whenever he does this, but he usually does it anyway. He was better this time.
We managed the unbelievable feat
of getting all of our shit and all five of ourselves into a single cab. British cabs are bigger than their yellow American counterparts, but not by much. They look like what PT Cruisers try to be. Lynn had been gone all semester, so her shit quantity was particularly large. The train station was full of drama because, when my parents are involved, all travel is required to be difficult and stressful.
My sister and I discussed the fact that, without the parents, trains, planes, busses and the like are really not that hard. With the parents, it's a huge fucking deal when and where and ohmigawd do we have everything and ohmigawd where is everyone and do we have enough food and no, you need to go get more food and if we aren't at the front of the line to board we might not all get to sit together (even if it's a huge freaking train with about 3 times the number of seats as there are people in the station) and then it will be the end of the world and we'll never see eachother again.
By the grace of God alone (because just reading the sign and getting in the right line and then walking onto the right train couldn't have anything to do with it) we ended up on a train to Edinburgh.
I took
Dramamine and fell asleep across two seats in the fetal position within the first half hour. I awoke several hours later to some loud annoying MIDI clip of electronic game triumph that played every minute or so for the last hour of the trip.
The queue for the cab was another Big Fucking Deal as my dad had to make sure we got one big enough to fit us back in and did we remember how we all sat in the last cab so it all fit and if the cab that comes when it's our turn is too small we'll let the person behind us go and the next and the next until there is a big enough cab and we all had to be informed of this 27 times and go over our positions in the cab and what bags went where 94 times. When the actual cab came, we only had to let one person in front of us and then getting in was (shocking!) not that fucking hard.
At last, we pulled into our
Edinburgh Sheraton. Certainly not the Savoy, but still quite spacious and lovely, and they already had the cot set up when we checked in, so points for that.
The funny thing about Edinburgh is much of it looks like a fairly average modern small city, except there's a HUGE FRIGGIN' CASTLE right in the middle of everything. Turn left to see the Gap, turn right to see the CASTLE. More to come on the castle...
We were hungry but it was late and nothing was both open and still serving food, so we ended up at a Chinese restaurant a few blocks from our hotel, even though the night before we'd been at the amazing Chinese place. I was actually quite happy because I was starving but still worried about digesting things so I got chicken fried rice and it was perfect. My brother wanted to go out and play but I just wanted to pass out so we went to bed with the promise of going out before the trip was over.
The Boys, The Girls, and the Dyspepsia
Christmas night I couldn't sleep and spent a long time hanging out in the Greatest Bathroom Ever (so I wouldn't wake Mark and Lynn) leaning against the heated towel rack and writing. Lots of stuff for the hypothetical musical (Brian- don't let me forget to tell you about what I did) and my usual late-night insomnia. When the parents tried to wake me the next morning I must have been rather convincing because the rest of the family went off to shop for
a new wardrobe for my brother and let me sleep. I don't know what happened to that boy since, oh, five minutes ago, but he went from refusing to wear anything with zippers, buttons, or socks to
Mr. Stylish. He let my sister (who's always been the most aware of and willful about trends/fashion/appearance) help him pick out all kinds of quality sweaters, pants, shirts, and even jacket-like items. He's going to be hot stuff when school resumes.
My brother and father then headed off to a
Chelsea-Fulham "football" game.
My brother's two cents:
The game was fantastic, you had people yelling 'wanker' and swearing at the ref the whole time, the Brits sure know their football!
While the boys did boy things, the girls obviously had to go shopping. After a lovely pub lunch (my steak sandwich and "chips" were delicious) we headed to the Boxing Day sales. My mom and sister had already shopped for several hours that morning, but we found an open air market that was extremely cool. Lots of random collectibles and crafts and flea market-esque junk.
HANNAH SPENCER DON'T READ THE RED TEXT THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW A GOODLY PART OF YOUR PRESENT.
One booth particularly caught my eye. I've seen people make jewelry and other things out of silverware before, and it's kind of neat, but usually it just looks like they bent a fork around their wrist. People did this a lot in my metalsmithing classes at Interlochen and I've seen more professional versions as well. This guy's stand was completely different. He'd done incredible things with the tines of the forks, twisting them and twirling them into almost Celtic designs. The artist himself was running the stand and he talked about each item with a certain nostalgia for the original piece of silverware. I ended up buying Hannah a ring that I particularly liked and thought she would, too. He turned it over lovingly in his hand and said that it started as a sterling silver cocktail fork. He polished it up and offered to resize it to my finger (damn you, Hannah, and your fingers that aren't the exact same size as mine) and I did a lousy job of bartering the price but I felt somehow obligated to pay for the entertainment value of the whole experience in addition to the ring. Yes, I know that's stupid. Bad pictures of the ring taken with my phone: 1 and 2Lynn got hungry and we stopped for cappuccino and snacks at an Italian-style coffee chain. This is where I saw a sign I really liked and took a picture. Here is that picture:
Around this time my stomach started making very loud painful glurpy angry noises. We kept shopping, it kept hurting. We were meeting the boys for tea at 4:45 so we headed back to the hotel. I promptly barfed up mostly stomach acid and had my tummy explode. I stayed in the room during tea, spending much time in the bathroom, in the fetal position, and in bed.
After a long nap, two
Pepto-Bismols, and an
Imodium I felt a bit better, or at least better enough to join the family for the
London production of Chicago.
Yes, we Chicagoans went to London to see Chicago. Irony abounds. None of us had ever seen the stage version before. It was very good. Somewhat entertaining to hear Brits trying to hold Chicago accents (some did better than others) and both Velma and Roxy were played by older (probably in their late 40s or early 50s) actresses. The ensemble was tight and the dancing was awesome and the men were particularly beautiful. "Pop Idol finalist Darius Danesh" played Billy Flynn. This is apparently a big deal, though I don't even watch American Idol let alone its British counterpart.
After the show we walked for about six months and in somewhat of a circle to dinner at Hakkasan. We had no idea how trendy this place was going in and my sister and I were a bit embarrassed at being both blandly dressed and with our parents. My stomach was still very cranky but the Chinese cuisine provided for some easily digestible and delicious options, including the jasmine chicken I chose. The rest of the family devoured an exotic fruit plate for dessert that I wish we had a photo of. That's what I get for not bringing my own camera. We insisted on taking a cab home as it was late and cold and Cranky McTummy went to sleep.
Best Christmas Ever
Christmas morning my parents were cruel enough to wake me by 10 AM. We did a lot of wandering the streets of London, up and down the Thames,
past Big Ben and Parliament and
Buckingham Palace and the Prime Minister's house. 
Lynn got excited everywhere she recognized from Love Actually, made my dad and brother sit on a bench by the Thames and have Mark say he was in love. My dad had never seen the movie and didn't quite understand, at which point we all decided he had to watch it that night before dinner.
We'd discussed going to a Christmas service at the 
Westmister Abbey because we are such good Christians, and since most of London was closed we were in line for 3 o'clock evensong by 2:10. When the doors opened promptly at 2:30 we were ushered in to unbelievably good seats. As we walked into the huge, gorgeous, incredible building we saw the graves of the many famous people buried inside the church: Sir Isaac Newton, Shakespeare, Longfellow, poetic lords Byron and Tennyson, composers including Handel and Purcell, and Queen Elizabeths, just to name a few I remember. 
The huge organ (hehe...huge organ) filled the hall with music. According to the program, the following (in order) entertained us before the service began:
Bach's In dulci jubilo BWV 729
Dietrich Buxtehude's Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ BuxWV 188
Olivier Messiaen's Puer natus est nobis from Livre du Saint
Sacrement
Buxtehude's Wie schon leuchtet der Morgenstern Bux WV 223
Charles-Marie Widor's Andante sostenuto from Symphonie Gothique Op 70
The service itself started promptly at 3 PM (gotta love those Anglicans/gentiles and their timeliness) with the entrance of the all-male choir. 
Soprano and alto parts were sung by young pre-pubescent boys (very cute) and all the music was incredible. Everything was clearly church music, but it spanned a good 500+ years, making it Church Music History in a Nutshell. Also strange to my Jew upbringing was having actual music written into the program so we could sing along. In the Jew world, it's 5000 years of beautiful tradition that lets you know the melody, fuck you if you don't already know it, and half the people can't carry a tune anyway. Gentiles write it out for you, allow for new melodies to be brought in regularly, and sing everything in major keys. Dissonance showed up in the more recently composed pieces, but always major and musical and happy.
The following composers were represented over the course of the Christmas Festal Evensong:
Michael Praetorius (1571-1621)
Bernard Rose (1916-1996)
Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988)
Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672)
Nathum Tate (1652-1715)
My favorite piece was actually after the service ended:
Improvisation on Adeste fideles by Francis Pott (b 1957). I'm not sure if it was an actual written down composition or just the organist's personal improvisation, but it was quite interesting and marvelous.
By this point it was dark out and the fam headed back to our hotel. We all crawled into my parents' huge bed and watched Love Actually on Lynn's laptop, which is a great movie to begin with but was even more fun because it takes place in London at Christmastime so we could say "we saw that today!" to half the movie. As per usual, I was drawn to the unrequited love plots. Somehow it seems more romantic when they don't work out. "Is there anything worse than the total agony of being in love?" That's closeish to one of the lines, spoken by the kid. Is happiness just not glamorous enough for me? Shit I'm annoying sometimes.
Christmas dinner was at the Savoy's restaurant (centerpiece pictured to the right). 
As part of the standard English Christams tradition, each of our plates were adorned with a large Chistmas cracker. Grab each side and yank for a loud pop and inside you will find a prize (I got a flashlight thing), a sheet with games, 
and a gold paper crown to be worn during the meal. A 
very drunk Santa and a mediocre magician and a cute Dutch waiter and too much good food and 
rose-colored champagne made the evening special.
So ended the best, most Christmassy Christmas in this little Jewgirl's life
