London Day 4 - Olympic Park Fail

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Our neighborhood S-bucks

It’s become our morning routine in London. Get up, have breakfast at the apartment and then pack up our laptop, iPad and cellphones and head down the block to Starbucks for some coffee and free wireless.

Today was no different.  Jorge takes out the iPad to check on his fantasy football team. Ally takes out the laptop to post the blog and photos from the day before. Gail takes out her iPhone to download all the Twitter tweets she’s missed.  Since she’s trying to limit her data roaming, she doesn’t get to look beyond the 140 character tweet…so today she was trying to piece together the Seahawks game story in short bits.

Tickets!

We were also researching possible shows to see tonight.  We’d talked about going to a play while in London, and we needed to see what the discount ticket place was offering for tonight. Les Miserables was our first choice, but there didn’t seem to be any tickets available.  Wicked was an option, along with several others.

We took the tube to the TKTS booth in Leicester Square, and decided on Chariots of Fire because we were intrigued to see how they’d handle all of the running on a stage. They did have 3 tickets available together, so we’ll be heading back later for the show.

Traditional Mexican favorites

Tickets in hand, we decided to have lunch at Chiquitos, the lone Mexican restaurant we’ve seen in London. They had an interesting take on Mexican food. One signature dish was the “Chilli Chicken and Chorizo Dog” which was your basic American hot dog made with skewered chicken and chorizo in a hot dog bun. We had the spicy chicken burrito, which wasn’t “hot spicy” but rather chicken that had some spices on it.  It was still good. The hot sauce that came with the chips was more like diced tomatoes from a can, but once mixed with a few liberal shakes of Tabasco sauce it was quite fine.

One other food note.  When you ask for mustard, they give you yellow English mustard…which we know better as hot Chinese mustard. A little goes a loooong way.

Meditating before the Tube directory

"Uh...duh.  It's closed, nimrods!"

After lunch, we were off to tour Olympic Park, after figuring out the many tube changes it would take to get there.  We arrived only to find out the park wasn’t open to tourists, and wouldn’t be until November.  Major fail, Rick Steves, who’s guidebook mentioned nothing about the park not being open…and major fail, City of London, for having all those directional signs in the tube stations to Olympic Park, yet not one sign saying “oh by the way, don’t waste your time…it’s closed.”  From the tube station, we were able to see the Olympic Stadium and the Aquatic Center…but Ally was not impressed.

"Not impressed."

So it was back on the train to central London, where we went to see St. Paul's Cathedral and then walked down to the Thames.  And what greeted us but a giant photo of the royal fam that stretched across the entire back of a building.  It was obviously taken many, many years ago by looking at the Queen and Prince Chuck.  Probably posted for the Golden Jubilee this past summer.

"Oh, hell-oooooooo"

St. Paul's

Decided to end our exploration and head back to the apartment for a little rest before tonight’s play.  Chilled out watching some TV, and got hooked on the Japanese game show “Ninja Warrior” (Ally says best gameshow ever).  It’s basically an obstacle course with strange and unique obstacles, like the “rolling escargot”. Most of the contestants were former gymnasts, so now we know what happens to all those gymnasts who don’t make the cut for the Olympics.  Why Ninja Warrior is not an Olympic sport, I do not know.