You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

At this point in my trip I'd given up the possibility of doing everything I wanted to do and trying to cram everything in before I have to leave. So I decided to just do what I felt like doing and go at my own pace.


I slept reeeeeeeally late on Sunday morning, and made it into central London just in time to get a bite to eat and head to St. Paul's Cathedral for Evensong.


I took a couple of closer shots, but you can't see the dome nearly as well.

I was a few minutes late for this and was sad to have missed the opening music, which the program told me was written by Thomas Tallis. There was a bit of a crowd just inside the entrance, but I noticed that people were being allowed to sit at the front - well, really it was just under the dome, but it was up near the choir and the pulpit.

Being a Protestant myself, this was obviously a different kind of service than I was used to, but I rather liked the ceremony of it, and especially the gorgeous music of the choir and the organ. The sermon was being delivered by a minister from Southwark, who reminded me forcibly (in appearance) of a woman from my own church named Martha Strode. That name will mean nothing to most of you reading this, but if you're reading and you go to my church, you probably know Martha, and I'm telling you ... separated at birth.

After the service, which ended with the Organ Voluntary, I tried to meander my way to the back and look a bit more closely at the cathedral, but I wasn't allowed, as everyone was being directed to a side exit, nearest our seats. Down the street from the cathedral, I found another photo op.


Okay, it might be funnier to see "apostle" and "bar" together on a sign if you're a Baptist. :P

After a bit of a walk through many underground tunnels (just a tip - the Bank tube stop doesn't really have that many train lines leaving from it; it just has a lot of catacombs and signs that lead to other stops that have those train lines) I caught a train out to where I was going to see a movie. I had a little time to kill and wandered around the community of Chelsea, soon coming (quite by accident) upon a place that, while not an actual church, is no less a place of worship for many in London...



I spent a few moments in Borders and bought a very cute pair of socks at an accessory shop before heading to the theater. And this brings us to the movie review portion of the update. :P


Hot Fuzz

Sergeant Nick Angel (Simon Pegg) is an excellent cop. An overachieving cop, really. He's so good at what he does that the department where he works in London want to transfer him because he makes the whole department look bad in comparison. Angel is transferred to Sandford, a small and apparently crime-free town, and partnered with the somewhat dim but ultimately good-guy-ish Danny (the son of the Chief Inspector). Nick finds the town fairly dull, apart from some underage drinkers he arrests when he first gets there. Until...

There are several strange and gruesome deaths that the town seems to think are accidents but that Angel is convinced are interconnected murders. He has a suspect that has red herring written all over him. But of course things are much more complicated than they seem.

This movie is a spoof the way its predecessor Shaun of the Dead was a spoof on zombie films, but with Hot Fuzz the joke's on cop flicks, especially buddy cop flicks like Point Break and Bad Boys. Danny (Nick Frost) is our means of setting up all the cliches of these movies, and when it gets to the climax, we see them all played out in the most hilarious fashion.

I think this film is actually better than Shaun of the Dead, although there's no one moment in it that's so classic as SotD's "Don't Stop Me Now" sequence. The entire last act is genius, but my biggest laugh came from a scene with David Bradley (a.k.a. Filch). After a hilarious scene in which Nick and Danny interrogate him through the use of an Old-Man-ese interpreter, they search his house for guns and find an arsenal that could equip a medium-sized army, which prompts Danny to exclaim in awe "By the power of Grayskull!" *DIES*

There are a couple of notable uncredited cameos in the film as well - Peter Jackson as "Santa" and Cate Blanchett as Nick's girlfriend in the beginning.

Okay, so I should have sensed, after my wanderings through the catacombs next to the Bank tube stop that that episode was foreshadowing something. I can't really explain the details without posting a copy of the Underground map. (If only we had Dumbledore's knee!) Long story short, I took a wrong train and ended up taking an extra hour to get back to the flat. I probably could have made a quicker job of it in the daylight, but as it was I ended up standing on an outdoor platform at night and wanted to get on the next train, even if was going to take me further in the wrong direction.

Eventually I made it back, though, and chatted for a few minutes with K8 and her flatmate before they called it a night (since they both had "real life" the next day).


Tune in next time when I'll be shopping, killing my feet, and ZOMG seeing Alan Rickman!