Harry Potter...again

In the final episode of what has been a pretty extensive Harry Potter experience here in London we went to the WB studio tour just outside of town.  

We had already gone on a tour of sites in London where filming had taken place (somehow the pictures disappeared, must have been magic), experienced the madness first hand with the Premieres here last year, and visited some of the other locations which inspired the movie.  Turns out that for the first film they did alot of the shooting on locations, as it wasn't clear yet just how popular the films were going to be and they didn't want to spend the money to build everything the first time around.  But this ended up being the home for the cast and crew for something like 10 years.

I am sure that I will get ridiculed for saying this, but may have been my favorite thing in all of Europe.  It has been a year and a half of seeing sights and thinking 'wow I wonder what happened here' but this time you knew exactly what happened there.  There is a quote from a movie that says something like, 'do you know why people look sad when they walk out of a movie theatre?  Its because all the magic is gone and they have to go back to reality.' (if anyone knows the movie let me know, because I have been racking my brain for like a week trying to figure it out.)  The entire place was like that for me....a journey out of reality and into a world where literally anything was possible.  I could have spent days just staring at stuff.  

I give all of the creative people and artists tons of credit, to see what they put together up close was just amazing.  Thinking about the movies, you would have guessed that they were like 90% CGI, but seeing how much stuff was actually real just made it even more impressive.  

I ended up taking like 500 pictures, so pretty much have the entire tour documented, but tried to scale it way down to share.  Even still it won't do it justice.  Here is a link to alot of the pics, but still nowhere near all of them.  Some of the most impressive stuff and a quick 2 minute tour is here.......

The cupboard under the stairs

The tour begins with the front doors of Hogwarts

And then the REAL full size great hall

From the Yule Ball

The boys dorm and Harry's bed

The gates to Hogwarts

From the Ministry

No. 4 Privet Drive, on the studio backlot

Diagone Alley

Strangely enough this was the part of the tour that I was most in awe of.  Not sure why.....something about people coming up with these crazy ideas and designs and then, making them absolutely flawless down to the last detail.   Would have loved to have one of these up on my wall.  

The other thing that was stuck out was at the very end of the tour they had a 1/24th scale model of the entirety of Hogwarts.  Supposedly took 8 people 40 days to build.  Was complete down to lights in windows that turned on when the 'sun' went down and movement to make it look like students were walking through the halls.  They used the model for the first 7 movies until the CGI got to a point where they had a good enough digital Hogwarts.  

Dog save the Queen: Corgis surge in popularity - London Life - Life & Style - Evening Standard

Dog save the Queen: Corgis surge in popularity - London Life - Life & Style - Evening Standard

World's fastest car

If all the Ferraris and Lambos weren't enough to let us know that we out of our league walking around the ritzy bits of London, there is always something that will make you remember real quickly.  We took Deb and Rocky to Da Mario's, it was supposed to be Princess Diana's favorite local place.  

Then as we left we were greeted by the world's fastest production car.  The Bugatti Veyron, just parked on the corner next to a Lexus, like they just needed to run to the store for some bread.  $2 million dollars worth of car, not your everyday occurrence. 

Furry Friday

I know what somebody is going to be for her birthday/Halloween.

Was really funny to google Corgi Bus.  Turns out there is a toy company over here called Corgi.  There were like a million Corgi Bus pictures.

Heat Wave!!

Break out your shorts!!!!!  I think this is the hottest its been since we have been here.  Temperature reached 78 today, and is forecasted to get to 82 tomorrow. I know most will think that is pretty cool, but without AC in most houses, and based on my trip home trains too, its pretty uncomfortable.  Add to that being crammed into a tube with zero ventilation and a couple hundred other people, and you have got yourself a downright horrible situation.  I guess I shouldn't complain though, it could be worse.  I could have been one of the 800 lucky people who got suck on the Jubilee line last night for something like 2 hours.  I guess they gave out £40 vouchers after making everyone walk through the tunnel like a mile to the closest station.  I wonder how they came up with that math.  Probably went like this...

2 hours X 90 degrees X 799 people smashed against you X 1 mile walk in the dark / please don't sue =£40

 Its funny how fast the people here make the switch from cool weather to full on summer.  If you would have walked around on Monday there would have been people walking around in winter coats and now its tank tops (they call them vests) and sun dresses.  Thinking about it I guess it makes sense that if you only get 20 days a year like this you gotta make the most of them, but I am still amazed how many people look like they live at the beach.

Speaking of the beach Kristen took Deb and Rocky to Brighton today.  I don't think the AC was on at work so I bet we had just about the same weather, but their scenery was better I am sure.

Bicycle Graveyard

I would say that cycling is very popular here in London.  Not like it was in Amsterdam but much more than it is in Tulsa.  The one thing I can't understand though is how people just give up on their bikes and leave them to to die chained up somewhere.  It is funny to watch a bike disappear over time as people steal the components off of it. This is the remains of a bike locked up right across the street from our new flat.

I wish that I had taken pictures before so that I would have documented its death but unfortunately only have the end product.   When we moved in to the new flat, this was pretty much a full bike.  The only thing missing was the front wheel.  Since then just about every time that I have seen it something else was missing.  If you have every worked on a bicycle you know that certain repairs take some pretty specialised tools.  Couldn't have been a very quick process stripping the cranks off,

Chelsea

The biggest news here over the weekend was Chelsea winning the Champions League over Bayern Munich.  I am sure it didn't even hit the radar of the news back in the states, but was about a 48 hour party going on just down the road.  We only live maybe a mile from Stamford Bridge, so we are definitely in Chelsea country.  It all started midday on Saturday.  I rode my bike around Fulham and by 3 the pubs were starting to spill out into the streets already.  There was a constant stream of blue shirts headed that direction between the stadium and our flat.  That was still about 3 hours before the game started, I can't imagine where everyone ended up actually watching the game.

Its probably a bit tough to put it in perspective to American's but let me give it a go.  The Champions League takes the best teams from throughout Europe and puts them into a huge tournament that has been going on since June.  There are play in games early on and then 32 teams square off for the actual League.  So it would be a bit like taking the best 4 teams from the NFL and (assuming all other countries had a similar football league) the best teams from the other countries and playing them against each other.  So once you get to the final you have all the normal fans, and then all of the fans that think their country is better than all the others.  It would be like a jacked up Super Bowl of soccer.  Ok, so moving on

You could pretty much tell what was going on in the game by listening to the screams up and down the street.  I didn't watch the game till later in the night, and pretty much knew what had happened for the first 90 minutes.  If you were a soccer fan the game was pretty much amazing.  Everyone was picking Bayern to win, and frankly had been picking Chelsea to lose for the last two months or so.  Some how some way they just kept winning.  I could see a movie getting made about the season.  Anything and everything was stacked against them all season, it was pretty amazing.  Long story short though, they finally won on the last penalty of the shoot-out, after 120 minutes of bunker defence.

Sunday at 4 there was supposed to be a victory parade in and around the Stadium and Fulham.  I went for a run, actually more of a breathing hard and shuffling my feet, at about 2 and headed that direction just to see what was going on.  They had already closed all the streets, and people were everywhere.  My guess is that a good 25% of them hadn't been home yet from the night before.  It was loud and rowdy then, must have been nuts once the parade actually got going.  They said that there were tens of thousands of people out for the Parade, but I think the # was WAY higher.  Imagine a couple of miles of streets just rammed with people.  Check out the pics................

This is the park where the parade stopped and the
team talked to fans.  Gotta be 50k people just here.

  

Victoria and Albert II

We had visited the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum, once before (Victoria and Albert I) but didn't get to see everything.  Since its been constantly raining, and we now life just walking distance from the museum, we stopped in on Saturday, to see what else was there.  I think everyone had the same idea for a rainy Saturday, because it was just packed.  We tried to go to the Science Museum when we got done, but the line was like 300 people long.

Anyway the Museum doesn't really have a theme to it, it has a bit of anything and everything.   Put some pictures of my favorite things in here.

These pillars are actually two
pieces of one tall monument.  Look
how small the people are!

This statue was probably 40 ft tall.

Bunch of different color diamonds.

Sweet dog statue

Elaborate stained glass

All of these instruments had been smashed flat,
looked pretty cool.