After our jaunt around London on the double decker we found our way over to the other side of the Thames and Shakespeare's Globe theater....this was a high light for D.Jay, who is a theater technical director.
We took the tour and had a great guide. Even though the original Globe burned down and this is just a replica it was fun to be there and imagine what it must have been like to be there in the 1500's....noisy and stinky are two adjectives that come to mind.
D.Jay dreaming of being in charge...
After our tour we checked out the gift shop and brought home a pack of magnets of some of Shakespeare's best insults...such as....fiend of hell....get the to a nunnery....green eyed fool....thou smell of goat......
they are on our fridge and make me smile.
We headed back across millennium bridge, which is a foot bridge that spans the Thames.....on the other side we ran across this fellow...
Almost the entire walk across the bridge I could smell something that smelled delicious....turned out to be a candied nut cart on the other side.
They smelled so wonderful and I was starving......so I walked over to the cart and trying to be friendly made a statement that haunts me to this day......
"MMMMM, your nuts smell good".
I'll give you a second to picture that.....
Yes, I walked up to a man and told him that his nuts smelled good.
As I was spitting that sentence out my mind was screaming "shut up" but it was too late.
I could feel my face turning tomato red and my mind was spinning trying to think of a way to get out of the situation gracefully........I have no idea what the man thought because I couldn't look up from my shoes as I mumbled.....pulled out the correct change, because one doesn't simply tell a man his nuts smell good and then walk away without purchasing any.
We made it about 2 feet from the cart before D.Jay went into convulsions from holding his laughing in.......he did manage to get out one coherent sentence....."you never say that to me".....before laughing hysterically.
I just started walking as fast as I could to distance myself from the scene of my humiliation ......and eventually began to laugh so hard I thought I wouldn't be able to stop.
Our last stop for the day was Temple Church, which I new about from The DaVinci code.....here's a little history on the church...
The Temple Church is a late-12th-century church in London located between Fleet Street and the River Thames, built for and by the Knights Templar as their English headquarters. In modern times, two Inns of Court (Inner Temple and Middle Temple) both use the church. It is famous for its effigy tombs and for being a round church.
It was hard to find, you have to do a lot of walking through back streets , parking lots , it's definatly not something you would just come across with out looking and I imagine that most vacationers who visit learned about it in the book.
I was disappointed when we got there to learn that it had closed early because it was good Friday. So we didn't get to go inside but we walked around the court yard and rested a bit.
A tomb in the court yard
We spent about an hour resting and enjoying the view before hoping a bus over to Trafalgar square, where we found a restaurant . We were both super tired and just went to the first place we found......which ended up being a Belgian place that specialized in mussels. Wish we would have known that before .
D.Jay hates seafood and I like some of it but mussels aren't one. We found something non mussel on the menu and ordered.
I'm going to take a moment here to complain about how close they like to place the tables in Europe. I like a little privacy when I'm eating, so I can enjoy conversation and not worry that the person at the next table keeps bumping me with their elbow. We noticed it in all the restaurants there......the average seemed to be 1 foot between tables. This also cut into my food picture taking.
When the diners on either side of us got their steaming plates of mussels delivered the smell was so overwhelming, I felt like I was at the beach.
We made it back to our apartment around 9 that night, we were both starting to feel the jet lag setting in. We needed to rest up for our last day in London.
up next.....a dis meet