Starting at Trafalgar Square, a group of us worked our way through the West End, Soho, and Covent Garden, browsing the shops. Mainly browsing meant looking in windows, since it was Sunday and everything opened late, if it opened at all. After the Jubilee Market in Covent Garden and a scamper through Gabriel’s Wharf Market by the Thames, we made our way to the Globe.
We saw As You Like It. Matt and Jessica and Grace and Moly and I were groundlings. Everybody else was a weakling and got actual seats. The standing was actually not too bad, plus we got tomatoes to throw and drooled on the stage! :D Well, we didn’t really drool; we were too dehydrated.
The play was quite good, and very funny. The standing wasn’t too bad, and sometimes the actors came in to the audience, right beside us! Plus, the actors weren’t miked, and the space isn’t exactly conducive to acoustics, so being close to the stage was really nice. The actors did a nice job of clearly communicating the text, and many of them played multiple characters, which gave extra emphasis to the “all the world’s a stage” speech.
On our way home, we strolled through Kensington Gardens, seeing the Prince Albert Memorial and the delightful Peter Pan statue along the way.
I hadn’t really wanted to go back to Covent Garden; I saw it last year and felt that it was really one of those things that could be seen once. While I still sort of feel that way, I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed that area, finding new nooks and shops and getting inspired to live in an artist district. I’m returning to places I visited last year, and reinforcing them upon the brain, which is altogether quite nice.
