London Bound

So our whirlwind five day trip to the UK has been and gone. The kids are back in school for a few more days until the Chanukah break begins and everything is pretty much back to normal. We have lots of great memories though - we squeezed a lot into those precious few days!

After a little shopping for us, a theatre trip for the kids and the obligatory fish and chips meal out, one of our first stops was at Wembley National Stadium. My oldest son is a huge football fan and, while his younger brother and Dad hopped off to visit The Doctor Who Experience at Olympia (such is life when you have two boys!), we toured that special stadium and viewed some sacred shirts in the changing rooms.

The hubby and I treated ourselves to a show and saw the very wonderful Backbeat, the story of how the Beatles ‘became’ the Beatles – when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe embarked on their journey from the docks of Liverpool to search for success in the seedy red light district of Hamburg. It was one of the most incredible two hours of West End theatre I have ever sat (and danced) through, helped somewhat by the cocktails we had treated ourselves to before the performance began. The kids were at home having fun with their cousins. It's nice to be grown-up once in a while!

We toured 'Eccentric London' on a delightful walking tour, spotting some odd things and quite unexpected delights along the way. Our guide showed us the alleyway now made famous as Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter films. We learned the mystery of the lions' paws in Trafalgar Square and heard the rather gory history of a bookshop near Leicester Square. I am not a native Londoner myself but the hubby is and he declared that he had learnt a great deal in those two hours about places he had passed many, many times in his life.

The kids were complaining about the cold - it was very cold - but we had yet more to show them. Christmas completely passes us by here in Israel, and especially in the Jewish city that we live in, so we wanted to show them a little bit of what all the excitement is about. Crossing the Hungerford Bridge to the South Bank, we spent some time wandering around a traditional Christmas market along the side of the River Thames. Listening to the carols and eyeing up all the beautiful decorations in the German style wooden chalets was so much fun. We even purchased a small packet of hot roasted chestnuts which the hubby remembered his Dad roasting on a fire when he was a child. They were wonderful!

The weekend was spent celebrating my niece's Bat Mitzvah. I will show you her album in my next post. She performed brilliantly in the synagogue on the Sabbath and we all had a blast at the celebratory party on Sunday evening. And then it was time to come home. We were up early on Monday morning, ready for that flight back to Israel, all a little bleary eyed and sad to leave. It was such a great trip though and maybe, just maybe, everything worked out so well because we had to squeeze so much into a very short time. Even the rain held off until the very last evening. Did I tell you how cold it was though? Brrrrr!