The Breakfast of Champions

I've found it! The perfect breakfast is... Wonder Waffles with hazelnut icecream on top. (No Mom, I do not eat this every day.) Here's a nice picture of Amanda very excited about her Wonder Waffle, which they serve at Covent Garden. The waffle batter has hardened pearls of surgar in it that carmelize when the waffle is cooked, and you can order it with different flavors of ice cream or with jam or chocolate or maple syrup. We all went for waffles yesterday morning and started our day with some shopping and some pretty good street entertainment.

After Covent Garden we all piled back on the tube and went over to St. Paul's Cathedral, but we didn't go in right then. Instead we walked across the Millenium Bridge, the footbridge over the River Thames between St. Paul's and the Tate Modern musuem. I think we stopped to take more pictures on the bridge than any of us have taken almost the entire trip. And as we were all talking about how we hate to ask people to take a picture for us, this nice couple walked up and offered to take one for us.
So here is a picture of all five of us on the Millennium Brige with St. Paul's in the background. It was really a great view, even with the cloudy skies. We spent a couple of hours at Tate Modern and only did one of the two floors that are open right now. They have this huge slide exhibit in the turbine room, which is he main open area of the museum. There are three or four enclosed swirly slides that start on all different floors, and they look like a ton of fun. But we didn't slide down any of them because the lines were crazy long; the slide from the fifth floor was booked about two hours in advance.

After our healthy dose of modern art, in cluding some really interesting pieces, we went back over the Thames and at lunch at this really cute sushi resaurant called Yo!. It was one of the places that has the sushi riding around the restaurant on a conveyor belt, but they also had still and fizzy water taps on the table, and endless green tea and miso for a pretty good price. It was a very fun and colorful restaurant, and I really think I need to go back.

Then a few of us wandered into St. Paul's, which was right across the street. Visiting hours were officialy over already, but that meant that we got to wander the back part of the church without paying admission. And then we stayed for their 5 p.m. Evensong service, so we got to go into the rest of the church too. But the big surprise was that there was some extra seating in the choir area, so several people, including the four of us, got to sit in the choir lofts on either side of the church, and we were right up close to the altar and under the amazingly gorgeous mosaic ceilings. St. Paul's is unlike any cathedral I've ever been in because it's Baroque, not Gothic, so it doesn't have the round stained glass windows or twenty chapels in the sides. But the high ceilings are gilded and mosaic-ed so they sparkle like crazy. I wish I could show you some pictures, but photography isn't allowed in the church, for obvious reasons. So we sat through the service, which was 80 percent music sung by the amazing boys choir, and spent much of the time looking up at the ceiling.

And that, plus an unbelievable Tube experience in which I played the part of a sardine, pretty much wrapped up a very long, and very fun Saturday. I don't yet know what's on the schedule for this week, but I have booked tickets to Rome for next weekend, so I'm very much looking forward to that. Cheers!