London, Day 5

Wacsimiles
Wednesday we slept in. The late evening Tuesday left us pretty tired, so we just let most of the morning go on without us. When we finished breakfast we headed out on the Circle Line tube to the Blackfriars station and up to ground level, with Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in our sights.


Some famous rich people (I heard a tour guide say a name, but I don't remember it) set out to build an exact replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and do it using the same tools and techniques used in the 17th century.







We walked along the river a ways, with intentions of seeing the play “Love’s Labours Lost,” however we had no interest in spending three hours doing it, nor in spending $110 on the tickets (£54)! So we walked back along the river for another few minutes, and crossed at the Millennium foot bridge. It was originally nicknamed by the locals as The Wibbly-Wobbly Bridge, but they fixed it.


































We hopped back on the train and got out at Baker Street, and we came upon some sort of excitement at one corner. We followed the crowd into a building and discovered that we had lucked into a party where celebrities were hanging out all over. And, though not very talkative at all, every one of them graciously stood still for photos with people hanging on them and touching them.


















































It took us a few minutes before we realized that the pasty smiles and refusal to speak were less pancake make-up and unfriendliness, but the fact that they were all made out of wax! Some brothel madam named Tussaud had apparently whipped up all these fakes on her own, and had been fooling people like this for years!

Seriously, though, some of the wax likenesses were incredibly life-like. True, there were some that looked nothing like their supposed namesake, but when they nailed it, they really nailed it!












The whole experience at Madam Tussaud’s, though not guided, is steered through a directional flow through room after room on several different floors. At the end, in a waiting area for the final event, a lame Aardman animated film in an Imax cinema, there is an interesting little attraction where you can make a wax form of your own hand…for a price, of course!
















A wanted to do it, so we let him pay for it with his own money. It came out pretty well. How many souvenir shops offer anything where you can make a cast of a body part that preserves what you were like at a certain age? It was fun.

We left, A’s three hands in our keep, and headed to Sea Shells restaurant, on the recommendation of the Pelham Hotel’s concierge, for authentic, traditional fish and chips. They were pretty good. We had two different kinds of fish (cod and haddock), and A had calamari…which, in my opinion, wasn’t very good.























From there we headed back to our hotel where we downloaded photographs and sent e-mails.