I remembered some more things I did during my 3-month blog blackout:
Wimbledon
Eating strawberries and cream at Wimbledon is, for some reason I haven't bothered to research, a quintessential London experience. Despite knowing pretty much nothing about tennis, I decided it would be worth checking out. I left work a little early on the 23rd of June (Day One) and caught a Tube to Southfields where I met up with a friend before following the throng of people to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
It seemed to me that queueing to get into Wimbledon is just as much a tradition as the tennis. Every queuer was given a brochure on queueing etiquette as well as a sticker that said "I Queued For Wimbledon 2008", which made me think there must be people whose whole experience of Wimbeldon is the queue. The line moved quickly, however, and after about 45 minutes we walked through the turnstiles and into the ground. The atmosphere was fantastic. People were milling around, eating, drinking and being merry. The sound of cheering and clapping drew us to Court Three where we watched Mario Ancic (hot Croatian) beat Michael Llodra (left-handed French dude).
Things got even better once we acquired free tickets to Centre Court. A friend who was meeting us inside had accidentally lined up in the taxi queue instead of the ticket queue and was rewarded with free tickets from the amused Australians in front of her. We went in and watched the women's singles: first Bartoli beating Lisicki then Radwanska beating Benesova. Even though I'm not a huge tennis fan, the enormity of sitting on Centre Court during Wimbledon still had me giggling like a girl - it was seriously cool.
It was an awesome evening, so good in fact that when two of my work colleagues said they were skipping out of work early on Thursday to go to Wimbledon I decided to join them. The Day Four queue was a whole different experience. Four days of sunny London weather had brought the crowd out in droves. The queue that had stretched about 50 metres back from the gate on Monday now snaked all the way around the car park and back into a field. It was so long that the crowd marshalls had us form 3 additional lines to the left of the main queue at the end: essentially queues to get into the queue. As you can imagine, this was not a 45 minute wait. Two (strangely not entirely unpleasant) hours later we finally entered the ground.
I wasn't optimistic about topping the amazing experience of free Centre Court tickets from Monday, but I think I actually pulled it off. Due to the fortuitous timing of a toilet break, we were directly outside Court 7 just after it was announced that Venus and Serena's doubles game had been moved to that court. We were able to get some really good seats and watched the Williams sisters beat Radwanska (who I had watched on Centre Court on Monday) and Domachawska after a valiant attempt by the Polish girls in the second set.
All-in-all it was a great experience and I'll definitely be going back next year.
The Proms"Promming" is another essential English experience. It involves (not surprisingly) queueing outside Albert Hall to buy five quid standing-room tickets to one of the concerts. The Proms are eight weeks of (primarily) classical music concerts each summer that attract a wide range of people and not just the usual classical music crowd. Some friends were visiting from the north of England so we went along to Prom 5 on 20th of July. We saw Bella Hardy sing, Martin Simpson play guitar, and a band called Bellowhead rock my world. They're an 11-piece band that plays traditional music in a contemporary, funky style. When they walked on stage I was expecting a jazzy/Cat Empire-type experience but their sound was much deeper and there were some great theatrics from the singer. There was moshing involved, and not just by me. If you're ever around when they're touring you should seriously watch them play. Dates
here.
