Dec 24th: We arrived, got settled in. Walked around the neighborhood a bit. Took a lot of jet-lag naps.

Dec 25th: Almost adjusted to new time zone. Had a delicious Turkey dinner at a local restaurant, which was totally ruined by incredibly rude waitstaff. I did not get my Christmas Pudding :(.

Settled in for evening of BBC, including Blackadder's Christmas Carol, Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf & Death (new!!!), and an amusing Black Adder documentary. Missed the new Doctor Who Christmas special due to a tragic misreading of the BBC website, so have been watching it fits & starts on the awful BBC iPlayer service, which goes to great lengths to be hostile to my efforts to let the damn thing queue up over my slow Internet connection.

Overall, a very nice, relaxed Christmas, despite minor annoyances.

Dec 26th: We set out!

First we went to the London Eye, which is a bizarrely large millennial ferris wheel situated in downtown London:

We obtained tickets, and saw London from a bird's eye view as part of a 30 minute single rotation around the wheel. Between the lateness of the year and the northernness of London, the light was already fading, but I got some bizarrely Blade Runner-esque vistas:

Next, we took a cab over to the rebuild Globe Theatre, which is pretty freaking awesome:

The original Globe burnt down, so this one was rebuilt in the late 20th century to be as close to the original conditions as possible. We took the tour, which was awesome. Our crusty, feisty guide had all kinds of awesome stories about the place:

We now totally want to come back in the summer when they're actually doing a play.

Finally, we booked it over to the West End, where we had tickets for Avenue Q tonight. Sadly, the Noel Coward Theatre is designed for very small people with very short legs, but we still had a blast actually finally seeing the musical, as opposed to just hearing the soundtrack as much as we can stand.