Honeymoon Journal

We woke up just in time for a shower before breakfast ended. The tickets from yesterday's tour-bus were good for 24 hours, so we got back on the bus and used it as our transportation to Piccadilly Circus. We shopped a bit and walked in the rain. Since Tom didn't have a coat -- and neither of us had remembered to unpack the umbrella -- we stopped in a store whose owner was advertising a half-off sale over a megaphone. We bought Tom a fuzzy blue coat and continued on to Leicester Square, where we intended to buy discount tickets for the theatre. We got there in good time, but couldn't decide whether or not we wanted to watch a musical or go for Shakespeare at the Globe (which wasn't discounted); since we'd seen most of the major musicals already, we decided to go for Shakespeare and instead moved on to a nearby internet café to write a quick E-mail to our families. We then hiked out to the British Museum, which was excellent. We saw the King's Library, as much of ancient Egypt as the British could carry away with them, the Rosetta stone, and some Roman ruins - including the entire portico of the Parthenon.

As evening set in, we decided to take advantage of the after-dark discount to see the Millennium Dome, an interesting (but highly tacky and touristy) attraction built on the outskirts of London. Divided into a series of stylized exhibits - like "Body," "Spirit," and "Learning" - the Dome was a decent diversion (but highly overpriced when undiscounted). It's also the most prominent of Britain's heavily-reported millennium building project scandals; the locals think the thing is so tasteless that they never visit, which is causing it to lose money hand-over-fist. That said, the in-dome show was spectacular (in a literal sense), the statues and British history exhibits were wonderful, and the "environmental beach" was kitschy fun -- intended, no doubt, to add a sarcastic element to its message.