Churchill War Rooms, Cafe in the Crypt, London Eye

Email for June 9:

It is Thursday, isn't it? Boy we're confused. After waking up to housekeeping at 10:30am, we pulled ourselves together, grabbed an apple from our dessert spread last night, and headed back to Westminster. We spent the afternoon at the Churchill War Rooms. They had added a whole Churchill museum since I had been there last. It took a few hours to get through it all, but it was all very well done.

We walked from there to the mall and then over to Trafalgar Square. We wandered into the National Gallery and got lost (both literally and figuratively) in 17th Century Italy (we also found a great image of tax-collectors... take note, Ted or you could end up like them!).

Around 4pm, we were actually kind of hungry (having only eaten an apple), so we went next door to St. Martin's in the Field Café in the Crypt. It was great. We had warm soup, rolls, Tom-sandwich Me-Danish, and then split hot apple crisp with custard and chocolate tart. We sat next to a lovely man who was 75 and has lived in London all his life. All the café workers knew him. He told us it was his birthday last week and he came in and they treated him to breakfast.

After the Crypt, we walked back over to Westminster and hopped on the London Eye and took loads of pictures.

From there we wandered around, hopped a bus back to Trafalgar Square, and then walked up to the Cambridge Theatre to see Matilda.

Review of Matilda: I think the show took a bit to warm up. 80% of our audience was made up of children from schools. This musical was clearly one that was made for children. The music is fun and clever, but not super memorable. The set was also clever. Ms. Trunchbull was a man dressed as a large woman (a great choice for a play made for children to take the scariness out of the character... and that character was quite scary). The book is simple. The musical did a great job of adding magical themes and meaningful add-ons to the story. I'm glad the audience was mostly children. It was a fabulous, sweet, and magical musical and the girls would have loved it.