this store exists in an alternate universe.

Hello all!
Rainy day in London.  I feel like at this point I should be used to it and expect it, really, but it's hard to when the sunny days are so determinedly, downright gorgeously brilliant that I want every day to be like that.  With rain comes a complete lack of desire to go outside so I'm currently having a lazy Sunday morning...toast, tea, and a blog update.  Lovely.

Hmm, weekend.  Friday was low-key as everybody in the world (assuming the world=the Notre Dame London Undergraduate Program) seemed to have a million papers to do.  We spent the morning working, the afternoon watching "Austin Powers," and the evening having ridiculous misadventures on Marylebone High Street, home of The Golden Hind.  Here's the story:

Since we are Catholic college students, we all like to observe the no-meat-on-Fridays-in-Lent rule, but we also all like to eat as we are all starving in London.  Enter my brilliant idea to take a group of 8 to The Golden Hind, the best fish-and-chips place in London, for a Lent dinner.  Turns out we (shockingly, ha) weren't the only people in London who had that idea.  Got there after ages and ages, only to find that it was completely full-to-the-gills (no pun intended).  We stood outside bewildered for a bit until we saw the TAKEOUT MENU, so we ordered lots and lots of hot golden fish and hot golden chips to eat for takeout before realizing it was about 35 degrees outside and we had nowhere to eat said fish and chips.  So we wandered for a bit.  A long bit.  An eternity, really, when you're starving and can smell Golden Hind emanating from your giant takeout bags.  Finally we found a McDonald's (HA) and bought small pops there and parked ourselves determinedly and ate every last bit of our delicious fish and chips.  And enjoyed it!

Then our group split up and I went with Kayla and Felicia to the Everyman Theater on Baker Street to see "Valentine's Day" on a half-price student ticket.  Let me tell you the best thing about English movie theaters: they let you drink alcohol while watching the movies.  We each had a glass of chardonnay (really cheap chardonnay) while watching the film, and it was a downright lovely time.  We had been met by some more lovely ND girls, and after the film ended we all took the tube back to Farringdon.  Then it was City Pride karaoke night, then we went to another music pub called The Slaughtered Lamb (which was totally Jesus-y and odd, although it made me feel less bad about going to a bar on a Lenten Friday) for MOTOWN night.  We danced like fiends for two hours and had a total blast.  Isaac, Martin, Nicolle, Anmol and I ended up staying up super late just talking and playing Hot Seat and having a marvelous, friendly night.

Saturday: Victoria and Albert Museum!  This was another totally inspired idea on my part because this museum was SO fun.  Isaac, Nicolle and I walked from K-M to Kensington, which turned out to be a 3.5 mile, 1.5 hour walk through some amazing parts of London!  We took most of the normal route to the London Centre, then turned off through Piccadilly Circus (the English version of Times Square), cut past Hyde Park and went down Brompton Road, home of SO MANY AMAZING STORES.  We passed Harvey Nichols, Burberry, Dior, Dolce and Gabbana, French Connection, and bestbestbest of all, HARROD'S.  I immediately melted into a little pile of expensive-fancy-store loving goo and uttered some kind of nonsense like "There is a ridiculously happy feeling in my heart's heart" as we realized what we were looking at.  Nicolle and I immediately decided we had to stop in there on the way back!  The museum was just a bit down the road from Harrod's and we were so excited to finally arrive.

It was amazing!  So much of everything, it was truly one of the most diverse museums I've ever seen.  We all ended up splitting up, and I wandered through exhibits on the medieval Church and the Protestant Reformation, an AMAZING series of rooms devoted to Tudor England lifestyles, an exhibition of armor through the ages, a vast exhibit on the evolution of fashion (so cool!), and best of all, a room featuring eight original Raphael "cartoons," or draft-paintings, for tapestries to decorate St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.  It was SO cool.  After two hours, we rendezvoused in the main entry and headed out for a totally different "look but don't you dare touch" experience.

Harrod's is the most ridiculously over-the-top place I've ever been in my life.  Having visited it briefly senior year with the band trip, I knew moderately what to expect, though Nicolle and Isaac didn't.  We beelined straight to the Food Halls to look around and enjoyed smelling international coffee samples, marveling at designer chocolates and candies, and bemoaning the price of $800 chocolate Easter eggs and $40 (small) blocks of cheese.  Then we ventured upstairs to play "guess the price" in the women's designer section, and sat on some $3500 folding lawn chairs (that I could find doppelgangers for at Pottery Barn) in the home-and-garden section.  All Harrod's-ed out and feeling very poor, we caught the #38 bus home to Farringdon Road and cooked some dinner and did some Facebooking and homeworking.  Around 10 we took a break for cribbage and I was in bed by 11:30.  Mmm, sleep.

As it looks like the sun may be trying to come out, I'm going to wrap this post up with one little factoid for you:
In 2001, Harrod's had a pair of 66,000-pound designer shoes encrusted with rubies, diamonds and emeralds on display.  How did they choose to protect these designer beauties?  They imported a king cobra from Egypt, of course, and put it in the case with the shoes.  Because a snake is such an effective and classy protective device.  Why would anybody ever try anything else?  ;)