London baby :)
This past weekend, we celebrated my Dad's birthday early - his actual birthday is next month but my brother is home from abroad this month so hence why we're celebrating. We all met up in London to see a musical and have delicious meals and great times all round. The show we saw was Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: The Musical, which is based on the 1988 film starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin. The musical is amazing fun, really silly and over the top but brilliantly constructed and performed and the two leads were amazing - Robert Lindsay, veteran actor who I've loved for a long time so it was wickedly great to see him performing live, and Rufus Hound, a comedian performing in his first musical and managing to maintain a good American accent too. It was a really great show that we all enjoyed and that's not easy to do considering the varied tastes my family has. Anthony loved it too, and there's only a few musicals he truly enjoys so that tells you a lot. It's being performed at the Savoy Theatre, an amazingly decadent place, all gold leaf and gorgeousness, they even offer champagne by the bottle for punters to buy. When you go in the front doors, everything in downstairs, only the lobby is on street-level, it's an amazing old theatre. Also it's right next door to the super-posh Savoy Hotel, the best hotel in London which my Dad trained at when he was younger. Oh yes.
The rest of the time was awesome in London too. It was great to catch up with Little Sis who has become Front of House Manager at the theatre she works in. I'm so proud because she got the job over people much older with more experience. She's had to give up teaching singing and working as an extra though because of the hours of this new managerial position but she's doing so well and enjoying it, despite having to deal with some difficult subordinates and very difficult customers, some of her stories were terrifying! How can people behave so badly at the theatre?! Good to catch up with my Bro as well, who is dating a Thai girl who is currently in the country so Mum and Dad will get to meet her before Bro and her both fly back to Thailand at the end of the month. He's recently got himself a flat in Thailand, he's very excited because there's a coffee-maker in it. As it's his birthday next month, I bought him two bags of very nice coffee as a present. I rarely get to buy him Christmas or birthday presents anymore as he lives abroad so I hope he likes the coffee :)
Anthony and I had fun wandering around London on Saturday - the parents and siblings went to Harry Potter World, Anthony's not a fan and I wasn't bothered so we had the afternoon to ourselves. We dived into the huge London branch of Forbidden Planet, Anthony bought a reissued Fourth Doctor novel Corpse Marker and the first Scott Pilgrim graphic novel while I got myself the Fourth Doctor story The Face of Evil on DVD and the Watchmen graphic novel which I've never read and always meant to. I really should read the classic geek texts and I've heard so many good things about it. We then went for a traipse around the British Museum, I'd never been before and wow is it enormous. Obviously we didn't go into every room, it was very busy and very enormous but I did get to see the Rosetta Stone which I found very exciting and lots of Egyptian artifacts, even some still-wrapped mummies. I'd have loved to have gone into the Vikings exhibition but you had to pay to get in and there were only so many tickets available sadly. Altogether, it was a really exhausting, emotionally and physically, weekend. I had a great time catching up with my family, we laughed and laughed and enjoyed each other's company so very much. Really, you can't ask for more than that.
The rest of the time was awesome in London too. It was great to catch up with Little Sis who has become Front of House Manager at the theatre she works in. I'm so proud because she got the job over people much older with more experience. She's had to give up teaching singing and working as an extra though because of the hours of this new managerial position but she's doing so well and enjoying it, despite having to deal with some difficult subordinates and very difficult customers, some of her stories were terrifying! How can people behave so badly at the theatre?! Good to catch up with my Bro as well, who is dating a Thai girl who is currently in the country so Mum and Dad will get to meet her before Bro and her both fly back to Thailand at the end of the month. He's recently got himself a flat in Thailand, he's very excited because there's a coffee-maker in it. As it's his birthday next month, I bought him two bags of very nice coffee as a present. I rarely get to buy him Christmas or birthday presents anymore as he lives abroad so I hope he likes the coffee :)
Anthony and I had fun wandering around London on Saturday - the parents and siblings went to Harry Potter World, Anthony's not a fan and I wasn't bothered so we had the afternoon to ourselves. We dived into the huge London branch of Forbidden Planet, Anthony bought a reissued Fourth Doctor novel Corpse Marker and the first Scott Pilgrim graphic novel while I got myself the Fourth Doctor story The Face of Evil on DVD and the Watchmen graphic novel which I've never read and always meant to. I really should read the classic geek texts and I've heard so many good things about it. We then went for a traipse around the British Museum, I'd never been before and wow is it enormous. Obviously we didn't go into every room, it was very busy and very enormous but I did get to see the Rosetta Stone which I found very exciting and lots of Egyptian artifacts, even some still-wrapped mummies. I'd have loved to have gone into the Vikings exhibition but you had to pay to get in and there were only so many tickets available sadly. Altogether, it was a really exhausting, emotionally and physically, weekend. I had a great time catching up with my family, we laughed and laughed and enjoyed each other's company so very much. Really, you can't ask for more than that.