Steve's Birthday London Style

This past weekend we had the good fortune to celebrate Steve's 30th birthday in London. I of course reminded him how lucky he was because for my 30th birthday, I wrote a paper for school (no I'm not bitter, I just like to give my husband a hard time). We've done a good amount of traveling in the past few months but this trip has been one of my favorites. London has a such a great vibe about it. For me it seemed to have all the action of a huge city but the charm and general politeness of a small city. Some people say its like New York without the snarky edge. I think part of this love for London was just because it was so easy to get around. There was no language barrier for us, although I had a hard time remembering that although I was in a foreign country the language wasn't foreign to me.  A few times I would speak to somebody in one word English sentences ( train there? When I wanted to say is the train down this street or  "I sit here, you here" with over exaggerated hand gesters when I wanted to say I'll sit here so you can sit by your friend here) because I didn't expect the other person to understand me. When the other person responded in perfect English I always felt bad for forgetting where we were and speaking to them like a two year old. Getting around was easy as well. The tube (their metro system) is easy to figure out and everything is well marked. In Belgium they don't always have maps and the boards can be a bit tricky. While in London we saw two musicals. We had bought tickets for The Lion King prior to the trip. It was fantastic, I would highly recommend it. It was so much fun to see all of the costumes and the music and everything was great. The other show we watched was Back Beat which is based on the story of the Beatles before they were big. To get these tickets we headed down to one of the theatre districts the day we arrived and purchased half priced tickets from one of the half priced dealers. These dealers are completely legitimate and a great way to get tickets if you are open to the show that you see. We also saw the typical sites on London, the London eye, Big Ben and  Buckingham palace. We got to see the changing of the guard. Well we sort of saw it, there were so many people there I couldn't really see too much. I will say I don't get all the fuss, I mean do you really need a little band to change up the guards? We also took one of those double decker buses, a little cheesy but we got to see places that we wouldn't have made the effort to see and we got little tid bits of information like were MI5 is headquartered, were the royals do some of their  shopping, and that the Prince buys $3,000 pound shoes. We closed off the weekend having dinner with friends that are now living in London. Some were friends from Minnesota and others were friends from when Steve studied with in Sweden. I'm amazed at what a small world we live in, around the table we had friends from different parts of the world and different parts of our life. It was such a nice way to celebrate Steve's birthday.