London, Day Nine

Today has been one of my favorite days so far. I started the day by bringing out the geek in myself with a Harry Potter "Muggle" tour around London. This was a walking tour all around the city to some of the filming locations for the movies and other places that inspired J.K. Rowling while she was writing the books.

For example... Recognize this?

It's from the third movie after Harry has taken the night bus to the leaky cauldron. If you look at the third picture closely enough, you can tell it is the same wall, down to the white markings on the side. Obviously there was some CGI going on to turn it into the back entrance to the Leaky Cauldron

Here I am, hanging on every word of Harry Potter facts that our tour guide is giving us.

I even participated in a magic trick at the end of our tour.

A wand appeared out of thin air! If you want to know the secret, you will have to ask me to do the magic trick for you.

There was lots of Harry Potter trivia and we were even sorted into Hogwarts houses. I already knew I was a Ravenclaw, so there was no surprise when this was my result. Mom was sorted into Gryfindor. She knew this already as well. I found myself craving more Harry Potter at the end of our tour, which luckily I will be getting tomorrow, which you will read about when I post tomorrow's blog. In the meantime though, I didn't have much time to linger on my "magical" desires.

After our tour, we headed to Borough Market for lunch. There were lots of neat booths with international foods being prepared for lunch, but after a two hour walking tour, all we wanted to do was sit, so we picked a restaurant right on the edge of the market. I had an Irish beef brisket with "horseradish puffs" (still not exactly sure what else went into those besides horseradish) and golden beets. It was an entirely new meal to me, but everything was delicious.

We quickly peeked through the booths at Borough Market and sampled some delicious fudge, which we couldn't determine the exact flavor of. We didn't linger long though because we had other shopping destinations on our list for the afternoon. We snapped a quick picture and headed out to the next stop.

Our next stop was at Kings Cross Station. We wouldn't have stopped here but our Harry Potter tour guide was telling us that they had revamped the platform 9 3/4 picture stop since the last time we were in London and that they even had a gift shop. Naturally, we had to go back. I mean, gift shop, come on! Unfortunately, they now have a roped off line area next to the photo spot that looked to be at least 30 minutes long, so we headed straight to the shop, where I got some really neat stuff. First, I picked up a Ravenclaw scarf. I know we are just getting out of the cold, but it was so authentic looking and I had to show some house pride. Plus, it'll blend in well at school since the UK color and the Ravenclaw color is blue. The coolest purchase of the day was a poster in this shop though. It is a normal sized poster, yet the entire narrative of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's (aka, Philosopher's in the UK) Stone is printed on the poster. Literally the entire story. And you don't need a magnifying glass to read it in real life.

This is an image of my poster that I found online, so you have an idea what it looks like. I didn't want to unroll mine just yet.

After the Harry Potter store, we took the tube over to Oxford Street. There is a lot of really great shopping here. We even stumbled upon a little street off to the side called Carnaby Street that was cutely designed with cobblestone streets and pretty lights. We found a really eccentric shoe store on this street, where there were lots of heels with bright patterns and colors. We even saw some heels where the heel was a kitten. I wanted to take a picture, but the shop lady was looking at me and I didn't want to get yelled at if we weren't allowed to take pictures. I was tempted to buy them just because of my fondness for kitties, but my common sense persuaded me not to.

We poked around some of the other stores on Oxford Street for a while, but the real reason I was so determined to go there was because during my first experience in London on Oxford Street, we found a street vendor that had nutella waffles. This is the first and best nutella waffle I have ever had! Everybody doubted me in my search for this store this trip, despite the fact that I remembered exactly where the stand was located (directly across the street from Topshop on Oxford Street, right next to the Oxford Circus tube station). I was told that street vendors are constantly on the move and that it would almost certainly not still be there. Well it was. Lo and behold, the best nutella waffle in the world:

Once we were stuffed to the brim with delicious waffle (we each had to have our own), we quickly went through Harrods and picked up some chocolates to sample once our waffles digested (I know what you are thinking, but we can't help but be gluttonous sometimes) and headed back to the flat for the rest of the evening.

It felt like we were running all over the place all day, so we decided we wanted to have a relaxing night in, which began around 6 p.m. We ordered pizza from Zonzo for dinner (the same Italian restaurant that we ate at a few nights ago). I have enjoyed a nice night of catching up on my blog writing and looking up Harry Potter merchandise on multiple websites. Yes, the craze has begun again. It never really stopped, but it is especially revamped now. Luckily, I can continue to wallow in my obsession tomorrow because we are going to tour the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio, where we will see all sorts of set pieces and props from the movies. But more on that later.