The Library and The Globe

This is Kevin. Friday was a pretty good day. We slept in a little bit, and that always feels good, but we were still one of the first tourists to arrive at the British Library. It is fairly close to our hotel and on the way there we found a Starbucks! The coffee at the hotel was nice, but I really needed that 20 oz. that only Starbucks can provide. Anyway, we both really enjoyed the library, it brought out the dorky teacher side in us as we looked over original notebooks from Da Vinci, a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, a ton of info on Magna Carta, an original handwritten and illustrated copy of "Alice in Wonderland", and even some handwritten notes and lyrics by John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles. Very cool indeed. We bought a book called "Shakespeare Cats", which is utterly ridiculous. Seriously, words cannot do it justice. We were both laughing in the LIbrary gift shop. Also, the BL has some of the nicest and cleanest public restrooms, or water closets, we've seen. After awhile, you really start to appreciate stuff like that.

On the way to The GLobe, we had a stop at King's Cross Station, which meant we were at the same train station that Harry Potter uses to go to Hogwart's! In fact, Amber and I had our picture taken at the 9 3/4 station where Harry catches the train. Seriously, I know it sounds a little nuts, but it was kind of cool. I just wish I had brought some props or something, like the people holding copies of the book. Actually, that might have been a bit too much.

We went to the Globe Theatre, actually a recreation of the Globe Theatre built in 1997, that is on the Thames river. We stopped for some fruit, our hotel English breakfast usually doesn't include any, and enjoyed some bananas and a pear for Amber. The GLobe is very cool, once again dorky English teacher side coming out, and the play "Corialenius" (spelling may be off) was performed very nicely. Which is one way of saying the play itself wasn't all that great, but the acting was good. Hey, even Shakes can throw a clunker in there. The strange part was, I believe one of the characters in the play was "Geoffrey" was "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air". I wasn't the only one, since everytime he appeared on stage, a group of teenage girls sitting down the row from us would squeal "Geoffrey!". When we planned a trip to see a Shakes production in the original style and setting, I don't think we planned on seeing any stars of "The Fresh Prince". But hey, if you're British, then I guess you can do some theatre.

A visit through the Tate Modern gave us the chance to look at some Picasso's, Monet's, and Pollack's, but also featured some extremely STRANGE pieces of "art". Remind me to tell you about the "Double No", something I still cannot get out of my head.

DInner at an Italtian on The Cut near Waterloo station was nice and relatively inexpensive. Today we are heading out for a day trip to Stratford to see some more dorky Shakespeare stuff. What can I say, we are English dorks. Tonight, for us, will feature the US squaring off against Italy. Hopefully, they can pull out a win.

I won't even get started on our hotel. Still, no hot water, and last night some loud guests next door kept us up past one. We are exploring our options.

Anyway, I would say 95% of it is a good time, and although we could use some hot water, we are having fun. Talk to you all later.