Free Weekend #1

Painting on The wall of Excavation site

Well this weekend is our first official free weekend to so whatever we would like. For the most part most of the group packed up and went to another part of Europe, this included my roommate Sara so I was left to do my own thing. The first thing I did on Friday morning after I woke up was head to the corner store to buy some detergent so I could do my Laundry since I was pretty much out of clothes. I only paid £2 for it and it smells really good. I grabbed a muffin for breakfast and headed back to the dorm to get my laundry done. What I wasn't expect was for it to be so expensive to wash my clothes. I ended up spending the equivalent of $16 on 3 loads of Laundry and 2 dryer loads, not exactly what I was expecting. A little later in the day Alison sent of message to the 6 of us that stayed in town letting us know that she was going to explore shoreditch for the day and that we were welcomed to come. Not wanting to waste my day indoors, I agreed to join her and she let me know that where we were going was not too far from the Mask shop I went in search of the other day. We took the tube for a short way and then decided to try a different method of travel and road on one of the double decker buses so that we could take a scenic route. When we eventually got to where to shore ditch, we hopped off the bus and went in search of the site of two old theater spaces that were around during Shakespeare's time since (The theatre and the Curtain). Alison would be doing a lesson over these two in the coming weeks so she wanted to make sure she knew exactly where they were. They actually just recently found the remains of what they believe to be The Theatre and have been busy excavating it. We hoped that when we found it we would be able to peak through the fence, but it was all boarded up and someone had even taken the time to decorate the fence. We continued on to find St. Leonard's Church where we will be doing a crypt tour while in the area in a few days. Well we were quite surprised to see that the church was very unkept and was now being used as a homeless shelter. We weren't even sure if services still took place there because it looked so runned down. As we had a look around the outside of the church (since the man running the shelter refused to let us in) we noticed that a lot of the homeless residence were just hanging out on the church grounds drinking beer and sitting on gravestones and benches, somehow I found this very sacrilegious. We continued on to head to Mad world Costume shop and on the way found this really cool outdoor bar/lounge that was called the red market. We headed in for Lunch and some drinks from the bar. The atmosphere was very relaxed with sofas and makeshift tables and chairs all around. They also had some really awesome graffiti on the wall that leaned more towards the artistic side rather than tagging.The area that we were in was the complete opposite of what we had been use to in the Central part of London so Graffiti was very common everywhere we looked. After our late lunch we headed to Mad world and ended up finding it without a problem. In fact I felt really dumb because Sara and I had to have passed it at least 4 times when we went looking for it the first time. After taking a look inside, we hopped back on the bus and headed to watch a play at the NT that was still in its preview stages called A Woman Killed with Kindness. For the show we ended up getting really good deal on student tickets and i was the 6ths row from the stage and only paid £10 for it. While we waited for the play to start there were some acrobatic performers that were entertaining the crowd outside and so we decided to join and they were quite good. After both shows were over we headed back to the room and called it a night.





Acrobats

On Saturday, we had planned on going to Parliament and took the bus to there around 11. By the time we got there the line to get in was crazy and super long that we decided to pass on that idea and book tickets in advance for either the next Saturday or the weekend before we leave. It's been a really gloomy day here in London with lots of rain and standing in line for who knows how long just didn't seem like a good way to spend the day. After leaving the craziness of Parliament square we wondered down towards Trafalgar's square. On our way we passed the Prime minister's house as well as the area where two guards on horses stand guard and somewhat do a changing of the guards type of ceremony that people like to watch. Since it was so busy in that area, we decided to just walk by and try to look at those areas some other time. We were quite hungry by this point and decided to stop somewhere to enjoy lunch. We settled on Texas Embassy, being the proud Texans that we are and decided to see what they had to offer. Let me just say now that this has been by far the best food I've had since I've been here. I ordered a Chicken Pimento and it was absolutely delicious. It was also one of the most expensive places I've eaten at, but hey at least you know the food you pay for is going to be good. I definitely plan on coming back to eat there again before I leave. Their food would have made Texas proud. After lunch we split up and Christian and I headed to the National Portrait Gallery to work on our Project a bit. We figured since it was so nasty outside it would be best for us to be inside somewhere. When we got there we found that other people had the same idea, since it too was also packed with people. We toured the rest of the places in the Gallery that I had not yet been too and then headed back to the dorms. It was starting to get chilly and since it was still raining I decided to call it a day and plan on staying inside for the remainder of the evening.



XoXo