The flight from Barcelona was relatively hassle free, but stinky customs in London more than made up for that! Upon exiting the plane, I found myself at the end of a queue of more than 300 Americans for about an hour. It wouldn’t have been so bad if… well, if they weren’t Americans. We love to complain about anything and everything! But the best part is that we’re not afraid to enlist anyone within a 10-foot radius into our whining session – we’re a social people. And I had never noticed how strange Americans look before. As a group, that is. I can usually spot a group of French or Germans or Italians a mile off. They look like they belong together. But since we’re such a beautiful “melting pot”, we exhibit the little quirks and anomalies of every nation on Earth. Jewish noses, Dutch jaws, French cheeks, German brows, Italian eyes. A real smorgosboard of freaks. But I digress.

Steve was in “Luhndin-Taun” for the week on business and we had agreed to meet at the convention center where he was working. It only took me an hour and a half to track him down after he had given me the name of the wrong convention center (in another part of town) and registered under another name at his hotel. He didn’t make it easy. But I’m resourceful and so I showed up at the Camp America fair about 30 minutes before it ended – just enough time to wander around and apply for summer camp counselor positions to kill the time until Steve was free to go. 30 minutes and three job offers later we were out of there.

The plan: buy theatre tickets, eat dinner, see a show. We got the last two tickets to The Woman In Black (at half price!), ate dinner at a French-run Italian restaurant where the waiter’s name sounded inexplicably like “Can I have my coat?”, and then we saw the show. I thought it was great (in spite of the annoying Americans sitting in front of and beside us). You don’t see many ghost stories on Broadway or the West End nowadays. They did a wonderful job with a deceptively minimal set and scared the shit out of us with some blood-curdling screams. Steve actually jumped and grabbed my arm.

Later that night we went to the Escape Dance Club in Soho – apparently named after the only thing you can think about doing after you enter. We had much more fun challenging each other to various rounds of Dance Dance Revolution in a nearby arcade.

I could probably dedicate an entire paragraph to all the merriment one can have in the toy department at Harrod’s. Just watch: You can race remote controlled cars and have them crash violently into a) each other b) mechanical walking pigs, and c) passing toddlers. You can rearrange the hairstyle of any life-size Lego Harry Potter you may find. You can play an enormous game of speed chess – Steve won, then he didn’t, then I won. You can wrestle seriously visious looking bears. And you can even ogle a 40,000 “toy” Lamborghini.

Other highlights of the weekend included getting lost walking the town, getting lost on the subway, the woman with way-too-funky teeth who wanted to make sure we “enjoyed the show”, getting lost walking the town, and the truly unbelievable incident at the We Will Rock You theatre – but that’s a blog entry for another day.