Christmastime is here

(Photos, some stolen from laura ingwer since here camera is better: sir ian mckellan, andy serkis, fun outfit man who may possibly be important to london; sir and ian and andy being friendly ( a laura photo); laura and i being christmas-y; the lights, which are apparently the "greenest lights in london" and use much less energy; a laura fireworks photo; another fireworks photo)





Due to the lack of Thanksgiving, the Brits jump right on into Christmas. So on Tuesday, Laura and I attended the Regent Street Christmas Lighting. I think this may be like the equivalent of the tree lighting in New York. It was a pretty big deal: loads of people, free cookies, tv cameras and crew, and special guest celebrities doing the count down.

Apparently the theme to this years lights is the Wallace and Gromit-esque movie "Flushed Away". I am fairly certain it is about rats ,sewers, and the underground....not quite sure how that is christmas related at all....but thats ok, we'll let it slide. Only because the people doing the voices were the people lighting the streets from the balcony of some fancy shop. There is some British soap star i am unfamiliar with, Andy Serkis ( the man who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings), and the one and only Sir Ian McKellan. Don't get too excited, i didn't actually get to meet these people, but i did see them.

We listened to Christmas carols blaring through speakers as the stars talked to the tv cameras, and after a quick coutndown led by Sir Ian, the banners lit up across the street accompanied by loud cheerful cheers from the hundreds (thousands?) of people all along the street.

Then to my surprise, there is a loud bang , i look up and there are fireworks being shot off from the roofs of stores on either side of the street. It was beautiful. These Brits really like their fireworks... my kind of people :) I enjoyed watching Sir Ian leaning over the banister of the balcony watching the fireworks with a clear appreciative amazement. What a fun man.

The lighting was fabulous, but i had to leave right away to go to a play for class, called Township Stories. It was by far the absolute worst, probably most offensive thing i have ever seen. I am usually the person who always finds something good in a play and tells others to stop complaining since they just got to see a free show in london. My class has lots of complainers. But for the first time in my life i wanted to walk out. Nothing about it was even remotely good. I gave it the first act to try to show some sort of worth. But after an hour and 45 minutes of the first act, i decided then that it was terrible. I spent the entirety of the second act first thinking of words that were synonymous with 'hatred' starting from a to z. I then discovered that my vocabulary is not nearly as good as i had originally thought. So i promptly moved on to the same plan with song titles by The Smiths/ Morrissey. I did significantly better at this game.

That pretty much ruined the Christmas spirit, but let's forget about that once and for all. Lights , fireworks, cookies, Sir Ian McKellan, London, .... there we go. Life is back to being happy and fantastic :)