After we woke up on Friday we headed out for dinner and to walk around town. We ate at an Italian place, then walked to Leicester Square so Nick could check out the casinos. One only had slots and we didn’t end up going in the other. I was extremely fatigued but didn’t want to go back to the room. We ended up seeing the movie Rendition before we headed back to the hotel. When we got back we decided to power up some stuff. I had purchased a wall converter earlier that day. Unfortunately it only converted the outlet and not the power supply itself, so after Nick plugged in his power strip it blew a fuse and half of our room was without power. The maintenance guy explained to us that we needed an actual power converter to change our 110V to 240V. Woops. So much for charging anything. By 3:00am it was still hard to fall asleep. There was a game show on TV with a word find that lasted about 3 hours. We were too enthralled to turn it off without knowing the outcome.
By Saturday I had no idea what day it was. The only clock in the room was on the TV, so when the TV was off the time wasn’t visible. With the thick curtains the room was completely black, so we ended up sleeping until 3:00pm. So much for not sleeping the night before we left so I could get in tune with the 6 hour time difference. It kind of screwed me over.
With the laptop battery dwindling, we decided to try plugging Nick’s laptop directly into the wall (with converter of course). The black box on the cord said 110/240V, so we hoped it would work as he plugged it into the wall and I shielded my eyes. Phweew, it worked.
Nick and I decided to do some touristy things. We headed out in search of Big Ben. Of course, with it being overcast and the sun setting so early, once we had breakfast/lunch it was pretty much dark out. Big Ben lit up, but it didn’t make for a very good photo op. We headed back to the hotel to get ready for the main event of the trip, the play Swimming With Sharks starring Christian Slater!!
The play was great!! Christian was fantastic in it. The other actors were good too, despite their poor American accents which were almost distracting at times. The play was well worth the trip.
On Sunday we got up at 6:30am to do some more exploring. We wanted to get some pics of Big Ben in the daylight. Turns out Sunday is road construction day and the street we needed to take was blocked off. We ended up walking across to the channel and eventually found Big Ben and got some pictures before our camera died. (Couldn’t charge the batteries, remember?) We also found a dive shop, but it was closed. Nick was all disappointed that we could only window shop. We came to a little nature park also. There was this giant ass goose/duck/pelican thing, but it was too far to tell what it was. It was huge though. Then there was this fat little squirrel who took an interest in us. I thought it was going to attack me at one point. After we made our way to the other side of the park we realized Buckingham Palace was only a few blocks down. Nick managed to get one last picture before the camera was absolutely dead. We haven’t looked at it yet, hopefully it turned out ok.