It's this gorgeous stone building with lights all along the sides. Doormen in top-hats let you in and then your jaw drops. It's literally the most ridiculous spread of items I have ever seen in my life. Handbags, perfume, shoes, headbands, hats, a champagne bar, ties, wedding gowns, suits, pens, watches, grocery stores, cafe's, Harrods has everything. It's the type of place where little girls would die to play dress-up in. It's 9 floors of pure awesome, and the crowning glory is the shoe department.
Oh. My. God. If I could die in any place, I'd like to die in the Harrods shoe department. Jimmy Choo, Dior, Chrisitan Louboutin, Chanel, Prada, Givency, the list goes on and on. Amanda and I saw a pair of heels that was entirely encrusted with Swarovoski crystals that cost some 800 pounds. Ridiculous. Gorgeous, but ridiculous.
We paroozed around the various floors and looked at all the things we could only dream of buying, but we came out there with one of their defining green shopping bags a piece: Amanda got a keychain, and I got a pair of shoes. Not as fancy as the bedazzled ones, but I'm a fan nonetheless. Also, it has the coolest bathrooms ever. Yes, I was that tourist that took a picture in the bathroom. You would have, too, so your judgements can stop here.
Before this excursion of extraordinary proportions, though, we went to some museums to fill the educational quota of this trip. We first went to the Victoria and Albert museum which was GORGEOUS. Its this building entirely made of white marble with huge sky lights and lots of glass domes. We saw a ton, as it's home to all sorts of things: paintings, sculptures, tapestries, precious metal works, cloths, and a whole lot of stuff I'm forgetting. We saw an exhibit on Grace Kelly which focused on the progression of fashion throughout the last two hundred years which was really cool, and another on glass and how it's been worked with throughout history. The building itself, however, was my favorite part. Seeing the large galleries reminded me of the scene in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth was looking through Pemberly's private gallery; it was a spitting image of that.
After the V&A, we went to the Natural History museum and that was a dud. It was cool, but it was definitely made for a crowd where the average age is 8. Lots of interactive things and dead animals. Wayyyyyy too many dead animals.
We're all just cooking dinner now before we go to a guitar quintet concert tonight at Her Majesties Theatre. Tonight is fancy, so we're breaking out the heels. We look gooooooood!
LATER:
The one night that we all decide to dress to the nines, it rains. Not just lightly misting, which is doable, but sheets and sheets of torrential rain beating down upon you and effectively rendering your umbrella useless. We got out of the flat and made it about a block before the heavens just opened up and God had a good laugh at us. We were all running in our heels and made it to the South Kensington Underground stop right before it let up... perfect timing, right? Right.
We had to cross the Thames in this, and let me tell you THAT was a treat. By now all of our feet are killing from sliding around in our heels and whatnot and we're more than a bit crabby that we look like wet sewer rats. We trucked along though and found Her Majesties Theatre along the banks of the Thames. We met up with Greg and Jeanine and then made our way inside the concert hall for the guitar quintet. The four men are actually from L.A. and are acclaimed for what they do, but this was really different from what I was expecting.
I grew up on Santana and Mellencamp, so I was thinking this was going to be an electric guitar sort of thing and that I was about to have my mind blown with how awesome they were. They came out on stage though to thundering applause and... acoustic guitars. Okay, no biggie, it's just going to be more quiet than I originally had anticipated. Eh... They were EXTREMELY talented, there's absolutely no question about that, but the music they played, a lot of selections from South America, was hard to connect with. It was pretty in its own way, but the concert lasted for about 2 1/2 hours and included 4, no I'm not kidding, 4 encores. By the third one we were all looking at each other just willing it to end, but everyone just kept clapping! Each time they came out to indulge us with another song, we clapped along because it's the socially acceptable thing to do, but you could tell we all had had our fill of them. Like I said, there's no mistaking that they were extremely good at guitar, but what they played was different than what we all expected, I think.
Although it wasn't quite what we were hoping for, it was good to see. We all enjoyed getting dressed up and afterwards the rain cleared enough for some of us to walk down towards the London Eye and get some pictures of that and Parliament at night. Surreal. It's still hard to think that I'm in London and oh look! There's Big Ben all lit up right next to me. How did I get so lucky?
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