Plucky Survivors See Europe Day 32: London

Things continue to improve with my health issues, or what we will henceforth call the Great European Unpleasantness, but I’m not back to 100% yet.  Instead of loading myself down with too much, I planned what I thought would be a less stressful day in London as I work my way back.

I spent the morning working and actually made more progress than I have.  I’m still behind but I got stuff done and I think I deserve some credit for that.

Then it was off to do some exploring, starting with a wander down Cecil Court, a small street near Leicester Square known as Bookseller’s Alley.  There are indeed several bookstores along the way but also collectibles, art, and other ephemera.  There was even a store that sold swords.  I really, really wanted a sword.

I also thought of buying books but then I remembered a Plucky Survivors See America road trip with Mary where she insisted on buying a metric crap ton of tomes from a local seller on the same day we dug up rocks at an attraction where you are searching for gold.  My mantra for that trip was this: “Girl wants rocks and books, girl has to carry rocks and books.”   I took that to heart and remembered how heavy my suitcases already are and moved on.

Covent Garden was next, an indoor/outdoor market of sorts that did have a few handcrafted artisan stalls but most of it was name brand high-end mall type stuff and I quickly lost interest, especially since there was very little food.  Did I mention I was hungry?

So, I decided to go to Borough Market on the others side of the Thames, which had much more promise for food vendors and the like.

Along the walking part I finally snapped a picture of the iconic red phone booths.  They are much more common than I expected they would be.  I haven’t seen a single soul in any of them, but they are there, which is a comfort, I guess.

I also passed Trafalgar Square, which will be the epicenter of the end of the Pride Parade and celebration on Saturday.  I’m sure it’s more important than that but I don’t feel like looking it up right now.

The station empties out in the shadow of The Shard, a 95-story, pyramid shaped building that people take lots of pictures of.  Apparently, it’s the tallest building in the UK and the seventh tallest in Europe.  I obliged as well.

Borough Market dates all the way back to the 12th century and is now filled with food and produce vendors in buildings from the 1850s and open spaces under the rail platforms.  It would be charming and exactly the kind of place I’d love to spend time in except that I was not the only person who thought the Borough Market was a good idea.

It was wall-to-wall people, so crowded that at times I literally could not move.  From what I understand now it is always busy, but today there was some sort of Harry Styles pop-up store in the vicinity and so every single teenage girl in London was there.  All of them.  And they were very excited with their Harry merch.  Apparently, he’s very “peng.”  I had to look it up.  It means cute.

There were dozens of food options, but every single stall had people 10 deep and there was no place to sit down and eat it once you got it.  Everyone was standing around shoveling down their purchases, which only helped add to the congestion.

I worked my way out of the area and stumbled upon a Spanish galleon, The Golden Hinde, which was captained by Sir Francis Drake as he sailed round the world in 1577.  This one is a full-size replica now turned tourist attraction.

I also passed by the ruins of Winchester Place, a 13th century bishop’s complex that had a prison and a brewhouse, which seems like a bad combination.

I finally found a street of proper, sit-down restaurants and picked the first one that had tables available, the Black and Blue Steakhouse.  Yet another Chicken Caesar Salad only this time I added “chunky crisps,” or fat fries as we like to call them.  It was decent and gave me the sustenance to keep going.

One of the things I noticed on my way through the market the first time was a stand selling chocolate covered strawberries.  Still dreaming of the ones I had in Prague, I braved the crowds again and stood in line to get some.  These were covered in milk chocolate and were very good, but the Prague version with dark chocolate was better.

The London Bridge was nearby, so I walked over there.  The history of bridges in this particular place is long, but the most famous one was the stone bridge that spanned the Thames from 1831-1967.  It was eventually dismantled and much of it was shipped to Arizona where it was reconstructed and reinforced for automobile traffic.

The bridge today is a bridge.  Boring.  But the next bridge down is the Tower Bridge, so I grabbed a picture of that.

I took a subway (with more success finding it and not getting delayed on it) to the Marylebone neighborhood, an impossibly charming and very British neighborhood with lots of narrow streets lined with shops and restaurants.

After a bit of wandering, I went to the Gallery of Everything, a small facility dedicated to outsider art.  As I’ve said, fine art either confounds or bores me, but I am fascinated by art created by people on the fringes, often dismissed as crackpots or criminals. 

Their exhibit today was Currency Exchange, a series of drawings and paintings of money, medallions, and coins done by various people decidedly on the fringe.  Much of it is by Emile Josome Hodinos, who trained as an engraver in France, apparently went nuts at 23, and was committed to psychiatric hospital where he spent much of the rest of his life drawing medallions and coins on scraps of paper and food wrappers.  Now that’s what I call a dedication to art.

Part of the exhibit is in the basement and when I saw the stairs I had to descend, my thought was: “This is how I die.”

I made my way back to the hotel and rested a bit, then decided to have dinner at a Chinatown restaurant since it is basically right outside my hotel’s front door.

The one I picked was Joy King Lau and placed my order with the VERY intense Chinese woman, who had absolutely no patience for chatting or stupid questions.  My choices were chicken gyoza, beef and spring onions in a ginger sauce, and chicken fried rice.  It was all fantastic, even the very bland-looking rice, which wound up being strangely delicious.

Then it was on to the theatre to see the musical “The Devil Wears Prada.”  As I walked to theatre I snapped a couple of additional pics.  First is of a British Pub in SoHo that represents very single pub in the area around this time of day, with people standing around outside drinking.  They are all like that.

The other is of a square that had the same Oglethorpe Plan layout as Savannah’s do. 

The musical is based on the movie of course, and if you don’t know it the short version is a plucky wannabe journalist with no sense of fashion, Andi, gets hired to work at the leading fashion magazine, Runway.  She works for Miranda Priestly, the titular devil, who is patterned after Vogue editor Anna Wintour and has a quietly caustic take on everything including Andi.  Andi becomes a fashionista, loses her way and her salt-of-the-earth boyfriend, goes to Paris, and then sees the error of her ways and everything is fixed in the last ten minutes.

The musical follows the plot of the movie faithfully and uses a lot of dialogue from it.  I can attest to this since I just rewatched a few weeks ago and they are basically the same thing, only this one has music and Vanessa Williams playing Miranda instead of Meryl Streep.

I am a Vanessa Williams devotee and here she was saddled with a challenge.  She clearly didn’t want to ape Meryl’s version of the character, so its bigger and more Broadway-musical worthy here, but she also didn’t want to go full Wilhemena Slater, the over-the-top, campy devil of a fashion magazine editor that she played in “Ugly Betty.”  It’s somewhere in between but more Meryl than Wilhemena and at times that didn’t play as well on the big stage as it did on the smaller screen.  Still, she’s a delight and nobody can toss off a caustic barb like she can.

The rest of the cast is very good to great.  Stevie Doc plays Andi (Anne Hathaway in the movie).  She has great coming timing and plays plucky quite well but didn’t inhabit the more serious/emotional parts as I would’ve liked.  Matt Henry plays Nigel, the right-hand-gay to Miranda that was played by Stanley Tucci in the film.  He does it with flair and emotion, especially on his song “Seen,” which explains how Miranda saved a gay teen with a fashion magazine.

The scene-stealer actor and the standout role is, of course, Emily, Miranda’s British assistant played by Emily Blunt in the movie.  Taila Halford brings a bit more sass and musical-theatre power to the role and it’s hard not to wish it was a bigger role so she could have more stage time.

The music is by Elton John and to be completely honest, other than the power of his name on the marquee, I can’t figure out why people keep asking him to right music for musicals.  It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t memorable or terribly interesting most of the time.  And the lyrics by Shaina Taub and Mark Sonnelblick don’t help things, much.  I mean, I understand you have to have a song called “The Devil Wears Prada,” but it felt a little lazy that the only rhyme they could come up with is “nada.”  Armada.  Enchilada.  Sierra Nevada.  Come on.  There isn’t a single stand-out song I can point to that would make me want to rush out and download the soundtrack.

Despite its flaws, I still enjoyed it.  It’s a perfect story for a musical and there are lots of laughs, so I’d give this one a B+ overall mainly for the performances and the script.

I have some more work to do tomorrow morning, but If the General European Unpleasantness continues to improve, I plan on getting out to explore more of London.  Fingers crossed.