London - There is Never Enough Time! (Part 2)

Fourth Day…

Now, if you remember, we left off “London - Part 1” at the end of Day 3 at Hampton Court Palace. How can you top Hampton Court Palace? On day 4, we finally got to the crux of why we started our journey in London - Harry Potter! A very dressed-up bus (dressed up in Harry Potter ads) picked us up in the morning and took us to the land of wonders - the studios where the Harry Potter movies were filmed. It is now designed as a very impressive tour experience. You can walk through the great hall, fly with dragons, see all the costumes, watch a dragon destroy Gringotts while you stand in it, visit Privet drive, drink butterbeer, visit the Hogsmead candy-shop, and learn all about the various magic of making movies come alive.

And of course, get terrorized by the Aragog and his progeny in the forbidden forest…(queue eerie sounds)

Finally, at the end, feast your eyes on a giant, movie theater size model of Hogwarts — used for all the flyovers in the movies!!

The tour takes most of the day as it’s about 2hrs on the road round-trip, and about 3-4 hours at the studios. Your time spent there depends on how quickly or slowly you explore, how long the kids want to talk to the prosthetics expert (about 25 min apparently), whether you stand in line for the virtual broom riding (yes, it turns out we do), how long the line is for the delicious hot dogs and ButterBeer (luckily not too long in our case) and whether you want to play HP trivia to win a marble for your “house” (are you even questioning if we did this?).

Tip: Come as early as you can to avoid crowds. Wear comfortable shoes and bring water! P.s. The virtual broom ride is a rip-off as you have to pay $40 for the little video after the line. Try to avoid it…if you can. Do this little free broom raise instead :)

Following the amazing tour, we made our way to Mayfair and feasted at The Ivy (again recommended by Judith). The food was delicious, and they generally treat kids like kings and queens. The waiters are lovely to them, sitting down to their level to take their order, and bringing them opulent sundae bars for dessert! Oh and how could I forget the nice lady in the bathroom that told us “Oh my, where are you from? You’ve got such a cute accent in English!” She was referring to our American accent, not the Russian one. This promptly led to an explanation to the girls of why WE are the ones with the cute accent :). It was a lovely day.

Tip: There is an “Ivy” in most London neighborhoods and it’s delicious every time.

Fifth Day…

On day 5, Misha and I got to have some “adult time”. No…you dirty minds…not that kind of adult time! The kind where we got to spend a few hours sorting all our stuff to decide what we could send back home, of course. Check out Misha’s post on shipping boxes if you are interested :). And after we were done, we rewarded ourselves by hitting the town. We started with a beautiful old-fashioned High Tea at Brown’s in lieu of lunch.

Stuffed and happy, we ambled off to find The Connaught, ranked as the #1 Bar in the world by someone important, two years running. We managed to walk in the completely opposite direction - but not in vain, cause we got to experience the enormity and energy of London’s pride parade on the main Regent street. It was pretty cool! But, as we realized we were going in the wrong direction, we had to turn back. The Connaught, in a hotel of the same name, was FANTASTIC. See Mike’s post on that for more details. Highly recommend!

Sixth Day…

On day 6 we completed the second part of why we originally came to London! Alya and I went to a sitting marathon, aka. the 5+ hour performance of Harry Potter And The Cursed Child at the beautiful Palace Theater. It was a brilliantly performed and well-designed play with many breaks, including a 2 hr lunch break between the two halves. We really loved it! It just got better with every part, so that instead of getting bored we just got more engrossed. A month later, Alya still says it was her favorite thing about London! If you’ve seen it, who is your favorite character? Guess ours :)

As a bonus, we wanted desperately to walk a bit after sitting so long. We roamed about Camden market, stumbled into an outdoor concert, and hopped on a quick bike carriage ride to…well nowhere..just a ride around town :). Oh and why not stop by an outlet of Din Tai Fung (hello San Jose!)?

And lest you consider us one-show ponies, we also managed to squeeze in a Horrible Histories-created Terrible Thames tour in the morning! It is a lovely boat ride designed just for kids and play-acted and sung by two hosts as you get to see London from the water. One of a kind. You can check out all sorts of Horrible Histories on Youtube for some British humor.

Tip: Do not decide to walk from the Palace Theater through what appears to be London’s way more adult version of Castro street with a 10 yr old. If you do, be prepared to answer some questions about the window displays. Also, bring jackets to London boat tours… in general, bring jackets to London.

Seventh Day…

These aren’t mirrors, the train just goes off into infinity!

On our last, 7th, full day in London, we rested. Ha! Just kidding! We decided to ride the tube a few more times, and wander around some places we haven’t properly explored. We finally had a bit of time to just be and enjoy the moments!

We roamed Mayfair and Notting Hill, doing all sorts of chores like finding a box, having sushi for lunch, and making our way to the Natural History Museum.

There are SO MANY impressive things about the museum, not even including its original building. So so beautiful, and grandiose. It fit a real size blue whale, a titanosaurus (not making this up) and many other animals. The amount of information in there was worth several days of exploring. At some point though (probably the point where we naively stumbled into the “preserved body part and small animal section) Alya realized she was surrounded by dead (taxidermy and such) animals all around…and it was just not fun anymore. We made our way back home in some lovely drizzle, and got on with the tasks of packing our things up for the journey ahead.