STILL writing about london..two weeks later!

saturday jan 14: so i again woke up early (mostly from the rustling around going on in the room), but i wanted to get tickets for matilda at the cambridge theatre. they have 8  P5 tickets every day, but silly me should have known better than to wait till saturday to try and get tickets for the show. there was a line already when i got there at like 10:15 (damn getting lost again in the west end), but they had sold them out and all the regular tickets were gone too. and sunday tickets were expensive, and  no show on monday. so that was a bummer. but i then decided i spent a lot of time in the city of westminster, that i hadnt really seen the city of london. so i rode there (5 mi, longer than i thought) to the museum of london. I HATE RIDING IN LONDON! every vehicle on the road (esp the cabbies) think they own the whole road and dont give a shit about anyone else! and winding in and out of those buses was annoying! but I got there about 10:40 am and went to the bathroom right when i got there, and when i got out, i realized i left my phone in the damn bathroom!! i wasnt too nervous cause it was mainly kids with old women in there, so i thought no one is going to steal it. and sure enough, there it was on the counter above the sink. good thing i realized immediately though, or else that could have been a very different story. so at 10:55 there is an announcement of a free gallery tour, so i signed up for that. i ended up being the only one on the tour, so that was quite nice! it was more personable with me and my guide laurence. he showed me london in like the 18th century (i think!!), some fashion items, merchant items, part of a prison, a painting about sailors going off to the indian mutiny war (which he quizzed me on, but i had no idea about), and old paintings and excavations of london. moving on in years they had a model of the crystal palace and some stats on the great exhibition. so after that gallery they had a mock 19th century london street scene, like the one at kirkstall abbey museum. so the pawnbroker, barber, toy shop, baker, you know, the usual in those days. they were all real store fronts though. and the urinal was too!! public urinals were especially introduced in london for the great exhibition! one guy who was walking around saw i had the paper that explained the original locations of these stores, so he asked me where the urinal was from, and when i answered he said "oh youre from America!?" so i was glad to have someone be able to recognize my accent =) and well pretty soon after that the museum was closing!! so i didnt get to see much more. there was a charles dickens temp exhibit you had to pay for, but i didnt bother cause i had gone to this house the day before, so you cant beat that! after the museum i sat outside and ate some dinner and called the cambridge theatre to see if they had any return tickets but they didnt so i decided to go on a jack the ripper tour. so i went to the tower of london where it met (straight forward so didnt get lost, just slightly off track) and did that. it was very interesting, i never knew anything about jack the ripper, so i found out that his victims were all east end prostitutes and he cut out their sex organs and intestines and slashed their throats. and he was never caught!! no CSI: East End in those days! and i also learnt about the east end and what a lousy neighborhood it is (laurence made a joke about it on my tour but i told him i dont know anything about the east end and he said it is a poor area). and apparently these ladies werent exactly lookers, they were all drunkards with yellow skin and missing teeth and bloated faces (how we are able to know that is beyond me). so we walked around to the sights of the murders, saw some of the city wall the divided the city of london with the east side. my guide was real funny too. he also pointed out some expensive flats that go for thousands of P a week! (not in the east end, as you might imagine). why does anyone live in london!!? oh and he showed us the tallest student accommodation building in the world! and I thought West H had a good view! so anyway after the tour I headed back to the hostel. the guide pointed me in the right direction to where the tower of london was so i could pick up lance. I then looked up how to get back to the hostel, but i got it all wrong and went in circles for a bit before realizing nothing looked familiar, so i had to head back in the direction i came. then i finally found the thames and tried to follow it but the path kept turning away from the water and that confused me. i eventually found a bridge so i went to it, but i had to carry lance down the steps to get to the path along the water. and that happened twice!! in the end i saw the london eye and my buddy big ben so i knew i was heading in the right direction. but then i started to get these abdominal pains. they just came out of nowhere! it felt like my ribs were being squished! that never happened to me before. and the path along the thames is not exactly a smooth surface, so with every little bump, it made the pain worse. i eventually couldnt take it anymore and had to sit down! but it was cold and i just wanted to get back to the hostel so that didnt last for too long. once i came to big ben i turned off the thames and tried to follow the map but i again took a wrong turn and that just made me more frustrated. after i found the correct street i just booked it and i finally made it to the hostel. i went straight to bed, didnt try and mingle downstairs, didnt shower, didnt say anything to anyone really. and when i woke up the pain was gone, halleluiah!! so sunday jan 15: the day i had been waiting for!! i finally went to the bike exhibition! another early start for me, the exhibition opened at 10 and it was a far journey, 10 miles, so i took the underground. i had to get on the DLR at tower hill, which i never did before so i got a little lost at first, but figured it out quickly. lots of people got off at the same stop! and it was pretty packed the whole day! it was the last day of the convention. there were also the outdoors, adventure travelling and boat exhibitions going on and your ticket was valid for all 4 shows, so i wanted to see as much as i could. so i started with walking around the stalls. got offered a coupon for a she-wee and checked out discounted bike clothes. then i got a goody bag that had cycling caps, a water bottle and other stuff in it. the first talk i listened to was about maintence checks on your bike. it was a good refresher from the course i took at leeds. and he taught me some new things - for instance, keep your chain at its loosest when you lock it up, that way it reduces tension and doesnt stretch as much. and he talked about keeping good visibility - yellow tape on handlebars, bright stickers, multiple lights (he said a blinking tail light it best because it makes you stand out as a cyclist) and a white frame, this way you are seen from all sides (very important!) - but yeah thats something i need to work on. and he said lube all your gears, not just your chain, so i started doing that. and that was pretty much the most important ones. then he gave another talk about gears. that kind of went over my head a bit, i thought it would be nice to learn some things about the mechanics of the bike, but turns out ill need a private tutor. then i spoke to a few reps at the stands about cleaning your bike and bike touring, signed up for CTC and london cyclists. then i saw another talk from a guy who wrote a book about cycle touring in ireland. i went just to make sure i wasnt doing anything wrong or leaving out anything important, and he told me pretty much everything i wanted to hear. he said you dont have to be particularly fit to do a tour, and all the gear he mentioned to bring, i have (minus the camping stuff). my one vice is that i dont "fuel the engine" as much as i should!! after that i walked around the stands a bit more. got an outdoor photography mag and some brochures for interesting places to visit in the UK. spoke to an RSPB rep, some ladies for luxembourg tourism, germany tourism, tried lots of free samples of drinks and cliff bars, bought another inner tube, talked to an american tour company about possibly working with them, and got lots of offers for things ill never use (although the phone holder on the handlebars might come in handy). there was also some games going on, like bike polo and some bmx stunts. ok i unfortunately will call it quits tonight, tomorrow should hopefully be a more productive day!