Day Thirty – Bubble and Squeak

July 3rd; Bubbles for the Aquarium and squeaks from the Dungeons. We were up bright and early today. If I remember it was pretty sunny, with a bit of rain later on that I bravely braved in search of internet cafes.

First up was the Aquarium. We caught the subway down to Westminster again, right by the bridge. We crossed that bridge over not-too-troubled water. The Aquarium had some cool stuff in it. Fish. Inverterbrates. Water. It isn’t really a touch on the Sydney or Melbourne outfits. I did like one thing though… themes! Nearly every enclosure had some stupid fantasy theme. Think big underwater Easter Island heads with big Nurse Sharks swimming around them. Fish and rays swarming around some Greek looking sculpture in a little sunken city. That was cool. It was also very unlikely. If anyone wants to take me diving by some Atlantean ruins or Mermaid towns, please, drop me a line. Catch me on the down low.

London Dungeon. It can be torture in there. The line was long too. Nothing Disneyland-like, but long enough for me to drop out and get a burger and fries from one of London’s many slow fast food places. They really are terrible. Oddly enough, they turn out worse than the big name junk food rackets. Maybe it’s because they have one guy working there who can’t tell the difference between a chicken fillet and a chicken nugget. I don’t know. Once you get inside the actual Dungeon building all sorts of silly things happen. Gargoyles shoot water at you. I thought the effect would be better if they actually spat acid. Water is pretty harmless. Unless you’re an alien from Signs. The place would be pos-i-tively fright-en-ing!

We paid our money and stood in another line. There was a line through the whole place. I watched a dummy chuck up yellow water for a short while. Then he stopped for about six seconds before starting again. Really, he only got a few seconds relief from his minutes of throwing up. It really was a dungeon. I was scared. There was a few other people stuck to walls and things. They lead you through doors once the show in front had finished and then try and scare you a bit.

The first one was cool. It was a maze of mirrors. Made you walk around a few times, walking into doors and expecting something scary around a corner. I was in front, so it was mildly disappointing when someone came running up behind the ground and opened a secret door for us. She then Informed us about the plague. Informed in the way that a costumed lady talks to a bunch of kids who don’t know much. Everyone knows the plague! It was a little patronising. Then a mad doctor popped out and started showing people gooey bits of people. Then the body on his table jumped up, so of course we had to rush out. I can’t remember what happened next. There were bits with Jack the Ripper which weren’t too bad, a little boat ride, a terrible court scene, a bit more plague, a few dark mazes which had everyone grabbing each other in fear. It ended with one of those big drop rides, apparently since we were all sentenced to death. I didn’t feel like I’d done anything wrong. The others felt that they had spent their money quite wrongly. It smelt pretty bad in there, but I think that was the effect. It was, all up, a little dodgy. There were one or two good parts, and a whole lot of bad parts. Too bad! Maybe if there was a day without line-ups it could be worth a splurge.

We had lunch in a park somewhere near Trafalgar Square that day. We went to a Student Travel place nearby to see if they had any exciting ideas of where to go. Kate started asking about tours. Thirty plus day tours! I was, quite honestly, enraged. Amongst the angriest I’ve been in my whole life. I said not one thing. Not at all, just paced up and down and thought about things and listened. They asked for my opinion. I said I would tell them that night. Kate asked why. I said something along the lines of ‘Because I am quite angry. If I said anything now, I would cause a scene. I do not want to cause a scene.’ I was about to cause a scene.

I held off though. We had a show to go to that night in any case. We got fifteen pound tickets to the Lord of the Rings musical. If you know anything about me, you know that I really, really love Lord of the Rings. The books quite a bit, the movies an amazing amount (blame it on zeitgeist), anything to do with it really. I jumped on those tickets! Four thirty we arrived, just on time, running a bit late and a bit lost actually. Four thirty. Right on time. There was no one at the theatre.
‘Ummmm.’
‘It says the show was at two thirty,’ said Ben.
‘Ummmm.’
Turns out I had something quite silly and misread 14:30 as 4:30. Fine work by me. Luckily the guy at the ticket desk gave us our seats for that nights performance for no extra charge… they were worth a good forty or fifty pounds at least. We just had to hang around for a few hours. Cue food across the street – bad fish and chips.

I thought the U.K. was the home of the mighty Fish and the Chips. I certainly haven’t eaten a slab of cod that has warranted any capital letters. If I remember it was Rick Stein that said at the end of his Seafood Odyssey that his favourite food, once beached, was fish and chips. Maybe I need to be in a far away fishing town on the coast, but I haven’t come across one chip I’ve liked in this country, let alone a piece of fish that wouldn’t be described as a batter-dwelling creature. They drown them, which is extremely hard to do to something which has gills. Get on that, England!

The show was great. It took from the book and not the movie, so it was different. Good to see it in visual form. There was one or two good songs as well, which helps in a musical. And the rangers had sweet outfits. I got all excited when they came out. Oh, and don’t get me started on the set! A great big circle split into three rings with another little circle in the corner. The rings were spit into little jagged bits. As they rang around they all span separately and popped up and down and all around and changed with each scene and the entire theatre was covered in these crawly, viney, woody branches and there were hobbits popping on and off stage and it was cool. And then… the intermission. Wow. The most amazing intermission sequence ever. Just before it cut halfway the Balrog rose up from the centre of the stage, Gandalf got all pumped, the Balrog got bigger, the lights got dark and then flared bright red and as Gandalf yelled ‘You shall not pass!’ a great wind blew up and actually blew over us on the top balcony and my hair was flying everywhere and so was everyone else and then tons of black ash got shot out and blew all around everyone and it was loud and epic and it was probably the single most epic thing I have ever seen!

You can tell… I was a little excited.