Sunday morning we had a full English breakfast in the restaurant of our hotel. It was quite good, but not super-fabulous. We checked out (despite having very strong thoughts of staying another night), left our bags behind the counter, and set off for another day's exploring. Unfortunately, the blue sky and sunshine were no more, so the pictures aren't as pretty. But at least it didn't rain on us.
Our first general goal for the morning was the Natural History Museum, which is near the other two we visited on Saturday. It is absolutely huge and the building is beyond impressive. When we arrived, though, there was a long line of visitors coming out the door. We decided to come back later, but never did.
The museum had also been the venue for London Fashion Week, which had just ended. That was fun to see. There were temporary venues set up all around the museum, which were not your average tent - many were multi-story and one had big chandeliers! (These pics are from the night before.)
Instead we briefly revisited the V&A Museum, where we saw some more interesting things and got a few more photos.
Next we headed towards Kings Road in Chelsea, my favorite part of London. We had a good time window-shopping, fancy-car-drooling and rich-people-watching.
The cars were especially amazing. Everywhere we looked there were not just Mercedes and Land Rovers, but also Aston Martins, Bentleys, Jaguars, and even Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Here's just a couple - there are more in my Flickr set called "cars."
From there we walked up to Buckingham Palace, thinking maybe the state rooms might be open. They weren't, so we just had another peek through the fence at the palace before moving on.
Then we made the excellent decision to take a taxi to Leicester Square to see about a movie. The comfy seats were so delightful after all that walking. As we drove past Trafalgar Square, we realized it was Chinese New Year! The square was absolutely packed with people and there were red lanterns strung everywhere. So we had the driver let us off there and we dove into the swarms.
We had hoped for some authentic Chinese street food, but Trafalgar Square just had a big stage with a Chinese woman playing violin music and some stands selling paper dragons. So we decided to head for Chinatown, which is just north of there, on a quest for noodles. That was definitely the place to be, although it was also very, very crowded!
In the end we did manage to get ourselves in line for a food stand, but it turned out we were on the wrong side for noodles and the only options were spring rolls and chips. Darn! But the spring rolls and chips were pretty tasty, too.
We finally made our way out of the crowds and to Leicester Square, where there was a movie showing soon in the big Odeon cinema that hosts most of the premieres (including the Pirates of the Caribbean one I went to over the summer). We've both always wanted to see a movie here, and we finally accomplished it! We saw the 3:20 showing of Music and Lyrics, a romantic comedy with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore.
It was easily the best movie experience we've had here in the UK. There is just one auditorium, which is the very one where the movie stars watch the premiere with whoever manages to get tickets to such things. The auditorium was absolutely huge, with a balcony overhead and leopard-skin seats! The sound and image quality were noticeably superior to our Oxford screens. And we liked the movie, too. The only downside? Tickets were £12 (about $24) each for the cheap seats! Worth it, though.
Our last activity of the day was dinner at Wagamama, this time the Leicester Square branch. It was delicious as always. I had the "saien soba," which is shown below and was so very good. David had yaki soba and thoroughly enjoyed it. And we got dessert this time - white chocolate ginger cheesecake for me and coconut ice cream for David. YUM!
We planned to take the Tube from there back to our hotel, but tickets that far turned out to cost almost as much as a taxi so we hailed a cab instead. Our driver was a very pleasant Englishman who drove very efficiently. He waited for us to pick up our luggage at our hotel and then took us to Paddington, from where we had a smooth train ride home to Oxford. It was a very good weekend!