Kate in the UK!: Candlelight Serenade

Greetings from London! I’ve got lots of goooooood stuff to share.

So i totally forgot in my last post to write about our tour of the Olympic park! We got to tour the Olympic Park! It was WAY cool. So the Olympics are going to be in the East side of London. (where I live is the west end just FYI.) The East End of London is…. Interesting. Well basically, it is not the prettiest, or cleanest, part of town! It is more the industrial part of London. Its kind of dirty, and stinky. Ha! There isn’t really much to do or see there… which is WHY they decided to do the Olympics there! They wanted to give this part of London a lil boost. They built a new mall, all the facilities for the games, a weird building thing for tourists, and housing for the Athletes! So they are hoping that having the Olympics here will help East London out a bit! And I’m sure it will. Because it all looks so awesome! I can’t wait to watch the Olmypics and be able to say “I was soooo there!” My favorite facility was the Aquatics building. The designer got super creative with it and tried to make it look like a swimmers back doing the butterfly stroke! To me it looked more like a stingray… but its still awesome. I SO wished could have gone swimming in that thing! How awesome would that have been. I’m so excited for the Olympics!

So I just get to do the cooooolest things here. For any of you musicians or classical music lovers, you would have loved what I got to do on Friday night! We went to St. Martins in the Field and watched the Orchestra of London! (note: St. Martins in the Fields isn’t actually in the fields… see picture below!) The show was called “Vivaldi Four Seasons By Candlelight.” The first half of the show it was still light outside, and they played some a variety of Bach. Specifically, Concerto for Two Violins AKA Bach Double! (Brianna: I wished you there so we could have joined in!) This orchestra was really cool sounding because it was a Chamber Orchestra and instead of having a Piano, they had a Harpsichord! It was really unique sounding, I LOVED it! The second half of the show was the real hit. By this point it was dark outside and they lit candles all over the hall, and played Vivaldi’s four seasons! Those four seasons never get old. I love em. So the concert was fantastic. To top it off we got some delicious gelato at a place called “Ciao!” Confession: I am developing quite the addiction to Gelato.

So yesterday, we got to do something super neat. We got to tour the houses of parliament! Ya know, that big place with BIG BEN attached to it? This seriously was so neat. Once again, we had a great blue badge tour guide and so I learned A TON. It was really interesting to learn about how they run their government here. And to see the inside of Parliament is even cooler than seeing the outside! Each room is really unique and is so detailed. And every detail has meaning, too. It was a lot to take in! When we were in the House of Commons, it reminded me of the trial rooms in Harry Potter! I felt like a member of the ministry of magic, for just a little bit. AWESOME.

So next we were off to Camden Market! This market is different from Borough because rather than a variety of food, it’s a variety of clothes, jewelry, trinkets, antique stuff, and artsy stuff! It’s really fun. It’s not really near the city of London, its in a more dirty part of London. Dirty as in, I got enough second hand smoke that it was as if I smoked my own cigarette! YUCK. But we had to go for the experience! And I bought some earrings, boo-yeah! And we got to practice our bargaining skills, which is always entertaining!