Day: January 23, 2006

We're back in Cambs after a rather long weekend.

Thanks to a shady, back-room deal^†, I managed to score 4 tickets to go see Alegria in London at the Royal Albert Hall. Katy and I left Cambs at 11 on saturday and met up with Katy's parents at St-Pancs. The hotel I'd booked was ok. Nothing to write home to mom about. Seriously, next time we have plans in London, I'll go back to the B&B we stayed in but get a better room. The rooms we had were big and had en-suites, but we had to call the front desk to complain about one set of neighbours who were having some sort of party in their room at 11pm. At 1:30am, I was awakened by the other set of neighbours who were doing god-knows-what. Anyway…

We had a pootle in Kensington parc, where large swans threatened to eat small children. It was a nice day out and I took some cool pictures. They'll be online when I can be assed. We went to eat at an italian restaurant on Kensington High Street called Sopranos. It's a little mom&pop place that has lots of good food for reasonable prices. It was funny because it was one of the restaurants Katy and I ate at the first time we spent time in London, about a year ago now, when we were in town to go see Dralion.

The show was good. Katy and her folks enjoyed it, but I secretly think that it wasn't as good as the other times I'd seen it. The clowns were better, but some acts weren't there (like the strongman) and some acts seemed less impressive than memory served (like the speedtrack and the trapezes). Anyway, maybe I'm spoiled and biased because I've seen Alegria so often now (this was my 3rd time). Katy and her folks hadn't seen it before and were quite impressed. The show was also incident #1 in my I-am-really-starting-to-hate-people phase. The family behind us kept talking really loudly in arabic. The father of the family kept belching. I wasn't impressed. Katy told them to be quiet during the intermission. For the most part, they were. Except for the belching and the munching noises.

We spent most of today wandering around the Victoria&Albert museum, where I saw a kick-ass collection of stained glass, and the Natural History Museum, where incident #2 of my IARSTHPP reared its ugly head. The museum was packed. It seems like a really interesting place. Just the architecture of the building made me want to stop and gape. There was just WAY THE FUCK TOO MANY PEOPLE. You couldn't move at times, and when you wanted to stop and look at the exhibits, there was a queue of people pushing you in the ass to move forward. Throw in a ton of hyped-up kids who couldn't care less to be there and preferred to run and scream, parents who indulge them instead of giving them a good smack once in a while and it all made for a situation I was glad to get out of. And then there was the fat kid who kept trying to kick the pigeons (and when that didn't work, her strategy devolved to barking at them). Classy.

All in all, a good weekend, but people need to learn manners and social graces. I don't say that I don't burp (dear god, people who know me know that's not true). But I do it at home, or at least I try to be discreet…

^† I asked Nat.