July 17th (England) - London

I am on a public connection at the youth hostel. How much can I cover in 15 minutes?....

Em and I have been in London for the past three days, and we leave tomorrow afternoon. In this time we have done a lot. Generally, we wake up in the morning, have breakfast at the hostel, and buy an underground (subway) day pass so that we can do whatever we want around town. We are staying in a room with four other girls -- one Argentinian named Lucia, who we've built up a friendly acquaintance with, and the others an assortment of nationalities who are mostly in-and-out and we haven't really talked to. The first day, there was a tiny Japanese woman living in the bed next to mine. We tried to have a conversation, but her English was so terrible that after three minutes we could understand only "neighbor" and "America."

Tuesday we arrived a little before noon, and explored the British Museum and Covent Garden for the afternoon. In Covent Garden, there were some various live performers, one being a slightly loony middle-aged woman singing opera. We arrived just in time to see her grab the staircase railing dramatically and launch into a rendition of Carabino's first aria from, coincidentally, "The Marriage of Figaro" -- the opera I'd just performed at the program in Italy.

Yesterday we saw Buckingham Palace in the morning, and stayed for the changing of the guard, complete with some tunes from the royal band and a parade of horses on their way to Whitehall. Then that afternoon (the highlight of my visit so far) we got cheap tickets to see "The Merry Wives of Windsor" at Shakespeare's Globe. The play was fantastic; although cheap tickets entailed standing room only, it was totally worth it. In the evening we took the tube to Trafalgar Square, and sat and had a snack while watching the end of the Royal Opera's live broadcast of, you guessed it, "The Marriage of Figaro." (I'm getting really sick of this show.) Hundreds of people had gathered to see it on the huge screen, resting on the steps of the art museum and around the fountain at the bottom.

Hurrying before my time runs out -- more later,
-Allie