How was our holiday? Not long enough

The first few days of our mid-term break were spent in Hastings being completely lazy and not being old and teacherish as planned. Now that we’re back and starting school again tomorrow we are beginning to regret spending a few lazy days in London having a grand ol’ time (well not really but I’ll pretend that we feel bad to make us at least look old and teacherish).

Our time in London was partly spent looking at the markets and we saw Portobello Road (3/4 Closed), Spitalfields Markets (closed), Petticoat Lane Market (closed) and the Brick Lane Markets (yep, you guessed it… CLOSED). The last three we visited on Saturday so I was shocked and disappointed to find they were all locked up shut. But all was not lost as I was really excited to see a real Banksy artwork in Brick Lane. Those of you who don’t know who Banksy is (I won’t go into it here but for information on Banksy click on the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy) but as Mark and I are complete Art Geeks we were really impressed and just a little bit star struck. I’ve now accomplished another of my things off my list of things to see and do in England (No. 17- find Banksy street art).

But I guess the most disappointing market of all was the Portobello Road Markets, I wanted to see this:

Click the link for the full effect:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8804170168873214362&q=portobello+road

And all we saw was this:

Many of you may be thinking “get over it crazy lady” but you just don’t understand how sad and let down I am. When I was growing up one of my favourite movies was ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ and my sisters and I watched this incessantly and knew all the songs. Portobello Road really seemed like this truly magical place and the overpriced, over-hyped reality really made me wish I’d left it in the fantasy world in my head. *singing* Portobello Road, Portobello Road street where the riches of ages are sold, anything and everything a chap could unload is sold by the barrel on Portobello Road… *cry, cry, cry*.

Something I was pleasantly surprised by was the Jack the Ripper tour. This is not actually something I would have voluntarily chosen to subject myself to but it turned out to be really interesting and entertaining (except the bit where a member of the tour fell over and had a seizure on the street). Our guide was this completely insane out of work actor and we saw places in London that we would have never visited (or even thought to prowl through at night). I admit that the highly graphic photos we were shown (just google “Mary Kelly”+ “Jack the Ripper”- ewwwwww) were really completely unnecessary and gross but overall it was one of the best things I’ve done in England so far.

We also met up with Mark’s cousin Roger and his girlfriend Anna and it was so great to catch up with family and speak to some non-scary Australians (our experiences in Edinburgh have scarred me for life). I’m going to tangent badly here now but speaking of scary Australians we met this couple recently from Adelaide who were surprised that Mark and I were from Sydney. The reason why? Well apparently we don’t speak like Sydneysiders, Sydneysiders say things in a Sydney accent like “getting kewl by the pewl”. Uh, hello?

Anyway, all is good as from tomorrow there are only 100 school days left before we leave. Hurrah.

It's a Musical Life

This trip wasn't our idea at all, in fact it was our friend and fellow teacher Steph who thought it would be good to go into London to see the performance of the musical 'Blood Brothers' (Steph and I were about to start teaching Blood Brothers to our Year 11 classes). I suggested this to Mark and he was happy to trail along after us, go to the theatre and hold our bags of shopping.

So after booking our tickets, we only had a whole school week to wait until our weekend in London. It was a great trip and we visited Covent Garden markets (which were far less markety than it was made out to be). We also saw St. Pauls Church which was the church that Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle sold flowers outside in the movie My Fair Lady. In the afternoon we watched the performance in The Phoenix theatre in the famous West End theatre district of London. I had already read the play so I knew how it was going to end but Mark and Steph didn't and in some ways I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I didn't know what was going to happen.

Everytime we go into London we stay for the weekend to justify the cost of the train tickets and the travel time (don't ask, honestly it makes you weep) so after we dropped Steph off at the train station we checked into our hotel. The next day we visited the British Museum which was one of the most amazing places I've ever visited. The Rosetta stone, the beard of the Sphinx and the Parthenon statues were some of the highlights but it was all very overwhelming that we didn't get to see as much as we had originally planned.

Anyway, it is our very first day of school holidays now. We'd planned to hire a car and drive up to Luton, the Cotwolds, Stonehenge and Bath but that plan has had to be scrapped due to the snow. It's not currently snowing in Hastings but most of the country is covered in a lovely, thick blanket (I'm sooo jealous), and you'd be hard pressed to get me driving around in snow, fog and black ice- No thankyou! So what are we doing? Well it turns out we'll be going into London again. After our self drive England touring trip was scrapped, we had no plans until yesterday morning...

It's actually quite sad because we are taking the trip Steph was meant to have. These holidays Steph was having two of her friends come over from Canada and they were going to spend several days in London. Unfortunately, the grandmother of one of her friends passed away on Friday morning. Naturally, they were no longer coming over and Steph booked a flight back to Canada and left straight after school ended yesterday. She was so kind to give us her tickets to Phantom of the Opera and the Jack the Ripper walking tour (I'm actually wetting myself with fear about the walking tour, I'm a real chicken) which are non-refundable. So Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights we will be spending in London where we will have to lodge our overseas vote for the upcoming State elections in Australia House (A.K.A. Gringotts Bank in the movie version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) and hopefully catch up with Mark's cousin, Roger. Other than that we're going to be old and teacherish and catch up on our marking and lesson prep. Yay!