Extravaganza

In the beginning of last week I had been to London once in my life. When I was 12. When I almost didn’t know any English other than “Hello, my name is…”. Before I got my glasses. Before everything, really. We saw Mamma Mia! and I didn’t understand anything. We went by subway and can still quote the loudspeaker lady; “This train terminates at…Stratford”. Um that’s about how much I remember. Soooo…

…I went back. 
Me, Jen and Tom met at Heathrow on Thursday, April 2nd. 
We spent four days in a sunny, awesome, feeling-like-Sweden, London.
This is kind of what happened:

We took a bunch of Jen-w/-flowers-pics. (= Here with some almost overblown daffodils.

Three Swedes. Two cameras. Guess who’s in most of the pictures =)

One of the main purposes of this trip was to see a bunch of musicals. Three actually. The first one out, Thursday night, my b-day present to those old fellow travellers of mine; Billy Elliot – The Musical. I got the songs from Jesper a year ago and I really liked them and if you ask him this musical is a must-see. So we did. And it was good, very good. That little kid playing Billy – I think he was 13 – was AMAZING. He was dancing like I’ve never seen anyone dance before. Especially not a 13-year-old. Unfortunately the sound sucked, but I would definitely recommend the show anyways. 

The weather was really nice all the time! Spring-ish and sunny and awesome. We went strolling in a couple of parks and there were lots of flowers and people eating ice cream and playing with their dogs and just having a good time. 

Friday was Jen’s birthday. Happy birthday. =)
We went to see some tourist stuff. Big Ben. The London Eye. Westminster Abbey. Piccadilly Circus. Buckingham Pallace.

We also took the underground to King’s Cross Station to be nerdy for a while. Platforms 9-11 were closed because of reconstruction, but kindly they had moved the entrance to platform 9 3/4 outside that area.

While Jen helped an American woman who wanted pictures for her grand kids, me and Tom spent some time taking pictures of each other…


 

When planning this trip six months ago our plan was to see all the Swedes that moved to London in the beginning of fall; Natalija, Tea, Johanna and Cristine. Well, Tea and Johanna moved back again before we got the chance to visit them. And Natalija spent her spring break in Sweden… But after some communication problems we got to see Cristine for a while, eating ice cream in the park. Random thing; the ice cream guy was Swedish..

Enjoying the grass.

This photo should be used by a travel agency to get people to go to London in April.

This is probably one of my favorite pictures ever! Very funny.

 
Musical no.2, the one thing that we all said we wanted to do in London, without having to think about it; Wicked. Our expectations were high. HIGH. Everyone has been talking so much about this show and the music is awesome. And it was great. It was awesome. It made me want to do musical theatre. There were a couple of wow-moments, but I think there would have been more of them if we didn’t have that high expectations. I want to see this show again though, for sure.

Imagine this: you are in a foreign country. You are walking the streets of the huge capital of this country. Suddenly you see a familiar face. “Wait, wasn’t that…?” But the others haven’t seen what you have. You start running after the person trying to hear if she’s speaking Swedish. You’re about to give up but can’t really let it go. So you take a huge step up next to this person who at the same time turns your way. Imagine her face when she realizes that all three of you are there, at the very same street at the very same time in the very same country. What are the odds? Well it was fun! =) And we got picture evidence.
 

The third musical we saw was We will Rock You. It was more of a concert/show-feeling than the cheesy musical-feeling. But wow. It was very very cool! The song numbers were amazing, great singing, dancing and yeah it was cool!

We had a really good time! At least I did =) 
Great company, nice weather, awesome shows, Italian food.
Let’s hope I’ll return within the next 8 years…

When the lights are low, and the stage is set
All the actors race, to begin their plays
It’s all burning, like magic everywhere
Tonight is the night, when you must prepare
     (Extravaganza; Backstage Story – Ett Spel i Spelet; Lovewell Sweden 1996)