There's No Business Like Show Business

One of our favorite things to do in London is to attend shows, so we squeeze in as many as our time and our bank account permit!

This summer we started by making a list of shows we'd like to see, and then we prioritized them as Must See, Hopefully See, and Might See.  I started following Official London Theater on Twitter several months ago so that I would know which shows were on during our stay, and Josh regularly checks the Internet for theater updates as well.  

I had read that Bradley Cooper was planning a short run of The Elephant Man, and Josh read that Jonathan Pryce would be appearing in The Merchant of Venice.  Those quickly shot to the top of the Must See list along with War Horse (which Josh and I saw and loved in 2011), Matilda, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Knox has never seen Wicked, and Kinley wants to see Les Miserables, so those are on the Hopefully See list.  And our Might See list includes The Railway Children, Man of Steal, The Phantom of the Opera, American Buffalo, and Bend It Like Beckham.

Our first experience this trip was Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice at the rebuilt Globe Theater.  We knew that the Iambic Pentameter coupled with the hard bench seats would be difficult for the kids to endure, so we watched a short YouTube synopsis video made for kids before we went and rented seat cushions once we arrived.  The verdict?  We all really enjoyed it!  (And getting to see the High Septon do Shakespeare was pretty awesome.)

Groundling (standing) tickets are only £5, but I wasn't up for standing for three hours.  This is the view from Josh and Kinley's seats. 

Knox and I were seated farther up, but our seats had the bonus of built-in backs whereas Josh and Kinley were just on a bench.  We were all grateful that we had  paid the extra £1 each for seat cushion rental.

Next, we decided to check War Horse off our list.  One of the best-kept secrets in London (or any theater city, really) is that many shows offer cheap tickets the day of the show to the first people who show up to get them.  These are called Day Seats, and not all shows offer them.  I'm not talking about the Half Price Ticket Booth or returned tickets.  Day Seats are often front row seats that the theater sets aside for people willing to wait in line early in the morning to get them. There is even a website that lets you know which shows have Day Seats and what time you probably need to get in line to get them.

We got up early so that we could arrive at the New London Theater by 9:00 since the box office opens at 10:00.  We each took a book to read since we knew we'd be waiting at least an hour.

The girl on the left got there earlier and was first in line.  It was just the four of us in line until about 9:40 when several other people showed up to wait.

We ended up getting second row seats for £15 each instead of the published rate of £65 each.  War Horse didn't disappoint, and both kids loved it.  Knox especially enjoyed it since a recent visit to the Imperial War Museum has sparked his interest in World War I.

Next on the list was Matilda at the Cambridge Theater.  This show doesn't offer Day Seats, so we had to suck it up and pay full price.  We decided to take seats in the very back row to lessen the financial blow, and those were £25 each.  That ended up probably not being the best choice since we had to lean down to see some parts of the show and completely couldn't see a few things.  We wouldn't make that choice again.

The next show we planned to see was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  This is another show that doesn't offer Day Seats.  When we went to the theater to buy tickets a weeks ago, the nice lady there told us that they DO, however, change ticket prices at some point during the week.  For example, if sales are lagging, a ticket that might normally cost £69.50 might be just £49.50.  So we checked back on a Saturday just after they had changed ticket prices.  After our Matilda experience, we knew we didn't want the nosebleed section again, so we sprung for front row.  And they had been marked down to £49.50! 

And what a great experience we had!  At the beginning of the second act, Willy Wonka himself climbed out of the orchestra pit and practically into our laps as he stepped over our feet to walk across the front row!  He even spoke to Knox and me!  Such fun and worth every penny.

Next came three grown-ups-only shows - The Audience with Kristen Scott Thomas, American Buffalo with John Goodman, and The Elephant Man with Bradley Cooper.

The doctor from Downton Abbey played one of the Prime Ministers in The Audience.

John Goodman was who we came to see, but that guy from Homeland and Band of Brothers was in it, too.

The verdict?  The Audience was fabulous!  I know that Helen Mirren just won a a Tony for her performance in this show, but I truly can't imagine how she is better than Kristin Scott Thomas.  This was my favorite performance of the summer so far.  Love. Love. Love.

American Buffalo was not awesome.  There was a prodigious amount of cussing (not surprising since it was a David Mamet play), and nothing really happened other than a lot of talk about a robbery that never actually occurs.  Being on the front row was exciting, but not exciting enough to make the play worth seeing.

The Elephant Man was entertaining and enlightening.  (And, of course, shirtless Bradley Cooper is always a good thing.). The only negative part was that the ending is kind of an anticlimactic downer.  (Plus, Cooper starts wearing clothes in the second act.  Major bummer.)

We only have two weeks left to see anything else we can squeeze in, so Josh and Kinley are going to get in line Tuesday morning for Day Seats for Wicked leaving only Les Mis from our top picks.  On with the show!

Muggles at the Ministry of Magic: Our Day at Warner Brothers StudiosLeavesden

Are you a Harry Potter fan?  Did you stand in line to buy the books the day they came out and buy your movie tickets in advance?  If so (or even if you're too young to have been a fan before the last movie came out in 2011), you would love the tour of the actual place where most of the Harry Potter movies were filmed - Warner Brothers Studios Leavesden and The Making of Harry Potter.

We took two other fun Harry Potter tours when we were here in 2011 since the studio tour wasn't yet available.  The first was a guided day trip on a bus that took us to locations used in the filming of the first two movies.  We enjoyed that very much and saw places we would never have found on our own without a car since several were in Oxford and the tiny village of Lacock.

This room in Lacock Abbey was used to film Snape's class in the first two films, before filming moved to Leavesden Studios.

This poster at Lacock Abbey shows still shots of scenes filmed there

This is the cottage in Lacock that served as Harry's parents' home.

This is the real house outside London that served as Number 4 Privet Drive.  I snapped this picture just moments before a resident of another home on this street came out and yelled at our tour bus driver for bringing hoards of tourists to their peaceful neighborhood.

When we went in 2011, there was much more demand for this tour since The Making of Harry Potter wasn't open yet.  This meant that the tour operated more often and was therefore cheaper.  These days, you have to book a private van so it costs a lot.

The second was a walking tour of London sites used in filming.  It was a different kind of fun, and it had the bonus of getting us to other standard London sites - the Monument, Tower Bridge, the Millennium Bridge, etc.

Our tour guide tests Kinley's Harry Potter knowledge.

Our tour guide shows us the site of filming for the Leaky Cauldron scenes in the first two movies.

Our walking tour took us past a tower built to commemorate the Great Fire, commonly know as The Monument.  The Goblet of Fire was modeled after the sculpture at the top.

But today's adventure bested them both.  We spent several hours at Warner Brothers Studios Leavesden to tour The Making of Harry Potter.  It even outdid The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Orlando, in Josh's opinion.  And here's why.  It was REAL.  Well, as real as a fictional world can be.  Real in that the sets we saw were the actual ones used to film the movies.  We walked through the actual Great Hall.  (Did you know that they used real rock for the floors in there?). We gawked at the multiple levels and shocking detail of Dumbledore's actual office.  And we were blown away by the scale and intricacy of the Ministry of Magic set.  But before we could enjoy our day, we had to do some planning in advance.

First, we booked our tickets online about a month ahead.  This.  Is.  Essential.  Do not come to London thinking you'll just book once you get here.  We bought the Family ticket which is for 2 adults and 2 children and costs £101.  We had to book a specific arrival time, and then we had a half-hour window to enter.  

To get there, we took the Tube to Watford Junction and from there followed the signs in the station to the bus stop for Harry Potter tours.  It costs £2 per person each way, and we had to stand the whole way since so many people crammed on there.  The good thing about this was that we were the first people off the bus once we got to the studios.  Josh and Kinley zipped over to pick up our tickets with our voucher, while I took pictures of Knox in front of the chess pieces used in filming.

Josh and Kinley pick up our tickets.

And Knox poses with the chess pieces.

Once inside, we presented our tickets since we'd arrived just in time for our 12:30 time slot.

We waited for at least a half an hour in the queue to get into the tour even though our tickets were time stamped.

We joined the queue to enter a large room where a brief video was shown and we were given a little speech about what to expect (no food or drinks outside the cafe, there are two soundstages with a backlot in between, average time to see it all is 3 hours, etc.).  From there, we were routed into a theater where we sat to watch a montage of all 8 films before being ushered through the huge doors of Hogwarts.

Josh and Knox enter the doors of Hogwarts!

I don't want to spoil the whole thing for you in case you ever do it yourself, but here are a few pictures from inside.  And my top tip is this:  TRY THE BUTTERBEER.  We tried it and loved it at Universal Orlando Islands of Adventure, so we forked over the £2.95 each for it here.  We opted not to get the souvenir mug since we already have one at home.

The set for Harry Potter's room under the stairs on Privet Drive can be seen while you wait in line to start the tour.

Line up the butterbeers!

Compare the set for Number 4 Privet Drive  (seen on the backlot part of the tour) to the picture above of the London neighborhood home used in the first two movies.

Kinley and Knox hang on for dear life on the Knight Bus!

Two final tips: 

1). It took us 5 1/2 hours to do the tour, but that's because Josh and I wanted to read all of the exhibits and information signs in addition to watching the informative bonus feature videos at many exhibits.  The kids didn't want to read as much and probably would have finished faster without us.  But they also were able to waste a lot of time standing in line for the chance to make a green screen video of themselves riding a Nimbus 2000 while Josh and I read exhibits.  (You can buy the broom flying videos, but they're pricey.)

2). Each child is given a little passport when you pick up your tickets.  There is a spot on each page to get an embossed stamp at locations along the tour.  THE EMBOSSERS ARE NOT BROKEN!  There is not supposed to be ink.  It's a 3D embossed image, so don't freak out when it looks like it's not working.  To get the best image, fold back the covers of the passport and just insert one page to be embossed.  Push down HARD on the lever to get a deep impression.

Have a great time!

What's For Dinner?

Living in London is expensive.  Like super expensive.  I've already mentioned that our flat is $1000 per week, and today I ran out of the £55 that was on my pass for the bus, train, and Tube.  That means in ten days it has cost me $85 just to get around.

Now, no one would ever use the word frugal to describe Josh and me, but while we're here, we do have to find ways to economize.  One of those ways is by sharing meals when we eat out. Last night, we ate at a place called Tap on the Line at the Kew Gardens Tube stop.  They let Kinley and Knox each order a meal off of the kids' menu for £7.50 including drink and dessert.  (Kinley wasn't insulted since one if her favorite dishes, gnocchi, was only available on the kids' menu.). Josh and I shared a fish and chips for £13.50, bringing our total bill to just over $40.  That's about the cheapest we can eat out without doing fast food.

Our $40 lunch at Tap on the Lone.  Notice the plate that Josh and I are sharing.  It's definitely enough for two.

That's one reason we try to cook as often as we can.  But here's an observation : no one who lives in the city seems to shop for more than one meal at a time.  Our refrigerator is larger than dorm-sized but nowhere close to American-sized, so we can't store too much.  Even the checkout areas at the grocery store don't have space to rest more than one bag of groceries while you check out, and everyone looks super annoyed with you if you have more than about three things.  I've never seen more than two chicken breasts in a package at the grocery store, and the ready-to-eat individual servings of gourmet foods take up at least 60% of the store itself.

Which brings me to our our best tip for eating cheap in London - stalking the grocery store clearance areas at about 6:30 or 7:00 at night.  At about that time each evening, Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Marks & Spencer mark down sandwiches, salads, produce, and even cook-and-serve gourmet entrees for quick sale.  We've scored whole chickens for £2.80 instead of £4.50, cut up carrot sticks with dip for £0.15, and chicken wraps for £0.35.  You never know what's going to be there.  Josh once almost got caught in a stampede of Londoners trying to grab the best mark down deals for dinner!

So that's how we decide what we're having for dinner each night.  The night we got the whole chicken, I roasted it and served it with roasted potatoes, carrots, and onions.  One night we had a hodgepodge of sausage rolls, a steak and ale pie (which came in its own ceramic ramekin for baking!), and salads - all marked down but still yummy!

Tonight, Marks & Spencer had marked down pork meatballs from £2.50 to £1.25.  

So I used some canned tomatoes left in our flat by the last tenants to make a tomato-rosemary-cream sauce to serve with the meatballs and some pasta.  For about £7 (once we bought the pasta, some bread, the cream, and some Parmesan), we had a great dinner!

Tomorrow night will be Piri Piri Chicken nachos.  I think it's supposed to be filling for pita, but we thought we'd make it more Mexican-ish by putting it over tortilla chips and topping it with cheese.  Maybe Josh will make his guacamole, too, if avocados aren't too expensive.

And the meal after that?  Well, it depends on what we find in the clearance aisle.

Pick Up Some Rocket and Aubergines While You're Out!

You all no doubt know that the Brits have a slew of vocabulary terms that differ from their American counterparts despite the fact that we all speak the same language.  I remember my second grade teacher telling me that an American car's trunk is a British car's boot and that a bobby is a British police officer.  I am sure you have heard that a sweater is a jumper, an elevator is a lift, and you ring someone rather than calling them.  Cookies are biscuits, French fries are chips, and chips are crisps.

But it wasn't until I'd spent considerable time in Commonwealth countries that I realized that the produce aisle of the grocery store could be a conundrum.  Care to hazard a guess what ROCKET is?

                      Rocket=Arugula

(I particularly love the way it says WILD rocket.  It sounds so daring!)

How about COURGETTES?

             Courgettes=Zucchini

Could you understand a menu item containing AUBERGINE?

Aubergine=Eggplant

How about CHICORY?  (And no, my New Orleans loving friends, it's not that stuff in the coffee at Cafe du Monde.)

          Chicory=Endive

But the strangest one in my opinion is BEETROOT.

Yes, yes,  know it's almost the same as the word beet, but here's my beef with it.  Why add the root part?  Why not just beet?  I mean, they don't say onionroot or carrotroot or turniproot.  Just beetroot.  And they're crazy about the stuff.  I've frequently seen beetroot soup, beetroot salads, and beetroot juice.  I even saw beetroot as an ingredient on a burger at McDonald's in Australia once (the McOz - seriously).

And when I ask people why they add the root part only on to the word beet, I get the same reaction every time.  They look at me quizzically and admit that the inconsistency has never occurred to them.  They unanimously agree that it doesn't make any sense at all.  One lady even told me today that when they refer to sugar beets, they don't say sugar beetroot. Go figure.  So I guess while I'm here I'll adopt the British names for things.  Because if you can't BEET 'em, join 'em, right?

Welcome to Our Flat!

You may be wondering where we are living while we are in London, so I thought I'd share some pictures of our awesome flat.  Josh works with a partner organization here in London called CAPA while Purdue actually pays his salary for teaching Cross-cultural Communication to students in the study abroad program..  CAPA handles many of the logistics involved in our summer, and they used airbnb to find this place for us.

Four years ago, we had a flat in a very shi-shi part of town near South Kensington and Belgravia.  It was a 6-minute walk from two different Tube stops, and it was surrounded by cute little shops and cafes.  The downside was that the flat cost CAPA $1000 per week and was less than 200 square feet.  For four people.  And their luggage. For eight weeks.

                          

                             Knox stands in front of the entrance to the building containing our flat at Nell Gwynn House in 2011.

                         

   Kinley and Knox had to share a tiny pull-out couch in 2011.  I could reach out and touch it from the bed Josh and I shared since the flat was a studio.

Cramming four people into that flat for eight weeks was tough, so we were thrilled to have a flat in the Kensington Olympia area with separate bedrooms and even a living room this time!  It's still costs $1000 per week, but we have more than triple the space we had before.  It's not as convenient, and the neighborhood isn't as posh, but we think it's a good trade.

Knox stands in our living room this year.  Unlike 2011, we even have a table with more than enough chairs!

The master bedroom has not only more space but also much more storage.

The bedroom Kinley and Knox share even has drawers under the bed. 

The kitchen isn't as well-stocked as mine at home, but it's far better than 2011!

They Do Things Differently Here #4: Laundry

I don't do laundry.  Let me just put that out there up front.  Until Josh left for London in mid-May, I hadn't done a load of laundry in years.  

My husband accuses me of what he calls strategic incompetence.  Can you believe that?  The very idea that I would knowingly and willfully machine wash the hand-wash-only items or forget to treat a stain or (God forbid) wash my hi-tech-fabric LuluLemon workout pants with cotton socks thus causing said LuluLemon pants to pill just so that my dear husband would grow tired of my laundry laziness and insist on doing it himself is insulting.  (As insulting as it is effective.)

That said, I do have to deal with the difficulty of doing laundry in foreign countries.  Not, I admit, the actual doing of it.  But more the waiting for it to get done by Josh.  Don't judge. 

This may shock you, but most of the rest of the world does not use clothes dryers.  They may have washing machines, and in some cases they may even own a dryer.  But in my experience, dryers are far too energy inefficient and, therefore, too expensive to actually use.  And I'm not just talking about developing countries like Thailand, Brazil, Zambia, or Malaysia.  I'm talking about countries like Italy, the UK, and Japan.  The rest of the world hangs their laundry to dry, whether outside on a clothesline, on a balcony, or in the living room on a drying rack.

Now before you post a bevy of comments about how you lived in wherever and had a perfectly effective dryer, thank you very much, let me say that this is my experience and the experiences of others I've talked to.  I'm sure there are exceptions.  For example, missionaries to Thailand, Loren and Penny Hollingsworth did have a clothes dryer - which Penny received as a gift after 26 years of living in Thailand and raising five children without one.  Additionally, some American Department of Defense teachers in Okinawa who let us live in their off-base apartment one summer had a dryer that had been shipped in from the US.  And we did have a tiny little all-in-one machine in London that took three hours to wash and dry one pair of jeans and eight socks.

         Knox gives you some perspective on the size of our washer/dryer combo thingy.

                                 Don't be fooled by the Super Quick button.

But generally, in my experience, only Americans use a dryer for laundry on a regular basis.

And Brazil is no exception.  We did have a very nice full-sized washer in our kitchen, but everything had to be hung to dry on the balcony of our third floor apartment at the church.  Now remember, I don't do laundry, but my husband and father-in-law are champion launderers.  This happened to be a really good thing since the clothes line was hung so high on the porch that I couldn't reach it without standing on a chair perilously close to the balcony railing as you can see below!

Let me just say that it takes a very special father-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship to be comfortable letting your husband's dad hang up, take down, and fold your dirty skivvies.  Thus, the lengths to which I'll go to avoid laundry.  Especially when traveling.  So take a moment this week to appreciate your clothes dryer!  (And I'll take a moment to appreciate my husband and father-in-law.)

How to Keep Americans From Overeating at Buffets

My dad loved a buffet.  There is a restaurant called The Oak near my hometown which serves a Sunday lunch buffet that my dad loved to frequent.  And while he loved to make fun of the people he saw gorging themselves at Golden Corral, you could often find him in line there, too.

But Brazil has figured out how to offer a buffet that discourages patrons from gluttonous indulgence. You have to pay by weight.  It's similar to the salad bars at Whole Foods, but the entire restaurant is based on this concept.

We recently went to one of these places in Natal, Brazil, called Mangai - pronounced Mon-guy.

When you enter the restaurant, an employee greets you at the door and hands each person in your group a blue card.  You find a table and sit down.  Then another employee comes over to take your drink orders.

(Actually, it wasn't quite that fast.  We had to wait for ten minutes for someone to come over and acknowledge us after we'd sat down.  I'm not sure why it took so long, but here's what I imagine must have happened.  The employee assigned to our table overhears our group speaking English while we are deciding where to sit.  This guy doesn't have enough confidence in his English skills to serve us, so he runs to the back to tell his colleagues about the gringos who just waltzed in the front door.  A brief argument about whose turn it is to deal with non-Portuguese speakers ensues, followed by drawing straws since even the guy with the best English doesn't want to try to decode our American attempts at ordering in Portuguese .  Once the lots are cast, the poor guy who drew the short straw shyly approaches us.  Well, at least that's what I imagine happened in the ten minutes it took for someone to come over to us.  But I digress.)

As we order our drinks, the short-straw-drawing server enters them into a hand-held device and then uses the device to swipe a white card.  He keeps my blue card and hands me the white one with our drink charges loaded on it.  (Knox is holding that one in the picture above.)

Then it's off to the buffet.  Everyone takes their card (blue for everyone but me) with them, grabs a plate, and starts looking at the options. Of course, since it's Brazil, the options are far different from Golden Corral. There tends to be far more seafood than on American buffets, and there are side dish options that we don't have as well.  Starches such as manioc and cassava sit beside the ubiquitous rice and beans.

Another difference here is that you find yourself being much more choosy since you know you have to pay for it all by the kilogram.  Rather than taking a full piece of Chicken in Mystery Sauce, you use the serving spoon to cut off just a small piece.  You think, "Do I really need French fries?" or "Do I really want to pay for the weight of cantaloupe (no) or fresh Brazilian pineapple (always, always yes)?"  Or, in the case of the picture below of "Goat Guts, Liver, and Blood," you decide to just pass altogether.  I'm so glad there were English descriptions below the Portuguese ones!

Once you've made your selections, you take your plate over to the guy beside the scales.  They have an empty plate just like the ones used at the beginning of the buffet.  They weight the empty plate (largely, I think, to show you that you're not being cheated), and then calibrate the scale based on that measurement.  Then they weigh your plate with the food on it.  Once the computer has calculated the charge, you hand over your card to be swiped.

This is not the payment step; the card simply records and holds the amount that you owe so that you can swipe it again later for seconds or dessert.

This guy clearly thinks I'm a nut case for taking pictures of the process.  You can see that my plate full of food was nearly half a kilo.

After your group has finished eating and no one wants to go back for more, you collect the cards from the group and go to the cashier in a separate room.  The cashier swipes all of the cards and totals up the charges.  When you have paid, each person in your group is given yet another card.  This one is to prove that you paid.  As you exit the restaurant, you give your new card to the doorman so that he knows you've visited the cashier and aren't trying to skip out without forking over your Reals (Brazilian currency, pronounced hay-eyes).

While the concept of paying for food by weight certainly helped me to be more mindful of what I took, this still isn't the type of place we could afford to eat often on our mission budget.  It did make for a nice treat a few times during our project, though, and our readers must feel the same way since we almost always saw someone we knew having lunch there.  

But what would it be like to start one of these places in the US?  Can you imagine the fit your average American buffet customer would throw about paying by weight?  I'm not talking about Whole Foods type people.  I mean Golden Corral people.  The ones whose kids put their fingers in the chocolate fountain.  They would not be fans, I think.

But for those of you who need a little economic incentive to tame your inner buffet beast, this may be the way to go!