London Day 3

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We missed our tour this morning… Again. I seriously have to find a way to get to bed earlier or wake up, because today’s 10:30 am tour was a walk around the royal palace area. It would have been an amazing experience, but it’s alright because luckily for us the same tour will be given later this weekend.



Joon and I decided to be productive in the morning and get an “early morning workout” in at 11:30 am. We somehow scored a 7 day free trial pass to a mosque/gym, because Joon asked politely for one in his best British accent, convinced that if he came off as an American our treatment would have been subpar. It’s a small gym with used and cheap equipment, but we will take what we can get to save some extra money.



When we got back to the hostel, I was extremely excited to find that our friend Will had just arrived! I saw him two weeks beforehand, but it was so nice to have someone other than Joon to hang out with. We tried to make another walking tour at 2:30 pm, but unfortunately we missed our bus, so we decided to settle on a museum instead.



We took one of the trains downtown to the Victoria and Albert museum, located near central London. Inside we saw an impressive amount of works; I will upload some pictures of them that I took later. We took the introductory walking tour that they were offering for free, and we really did try to stay awake through most of it, but we struggled. The most interesting part in my opinion were the Christian paintings, which were mostly oil on GIANT canvas. For some reason I really resonate with grand, almost over-the-top paintings. The details are always so clearly displayed, and the characters and the landscape are consequently more realistic. The one work that I liked was named something along the lines of “Jesus and the miracle of the fish”, which paints the story of Peter, one of the disciples of Jesus, as he casts his net out into the sea and reels in a copious amount of fish, all thanks to Jesus’s miraculous powers. I’ll post more cool pictures of some of the many works that were in the museum, but unfortunately I don’t have a picture of the painting with Jesus and Peter in it because photography wasn’t allowed in the exhibit.



Afterwards, we went to our first pub, called the Opera Bar near Picadilly Square in London. It had a classy environment, much to my surprise (Dublin’s pubs were way more rowdier by comparison). I ordered some Oatmeal Stout and meat lasagna, which was superb and delicious. We sat and talked for awhile, but only for about an hour because the comedy show we had bought tickets for was about to start.





Joon found an excellent deal on Group-On to see the Comedy Store Players, a professional improv group that was going to play at 8:00 pm at the Comedy Store. I found a picture of Robin Williams on the wall, so I guess he did a show there when he was starting his career. They had happy hour beforehand, so we bought a couple of drinks (I won’t disclose how many) and got ready for them to perform. I’ve never seen improv comedy before, so I was really curious and excited.

To do improve, you have to be extremely witty and good on your feet. These guys blew me away; I mean if I was up there, the crowd would have booed me off in half a second. They took any wild recommendation from the crowd and they created storylines which literally could have been made into on-screen movies. They could all sing and dance, so some of their acts had a musical part to them as well. The venue was perfect and the act was amazing, I had an awesome time.



To finish the night we sought out a cheap place to eat in the local Chinatown area (every big city has to have one right). We found a reasonable restaurant (all were pretty much the same, except this one priced a red bottle of wine for 13.50 pounds) and spent some time there. Full and happy, we started back on the one hour walk that would take us back to our hostel. It was a day full of excitement, It couldn’t have gone any better.

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