A Street Festival and Les Miserables

We ventured out this morning to attend a Caribbean folk festival held in the vicinity of Notting Hill. Not exactly a mistake but we were ovewhelmed by the crowds and were only to happy to leave. However, that took some walking.

Our first clue was reading that it was Europe's largest street festival. That covers a lot of ground. Our second clue was the experience of being disgorged from the underground stop with what felt like thousands of other people. Our third clue was the literally hundreds of police officers we saw throughout.

Many blocks of streets were closed off and stalls with jerk chicken, beer, and wine lined a lot of the streets. There was recorded music at intervals, all of it breathtakingly loud. A lot of happy people wandered around, many of them swigging beer or other varieties of booze.

We then realized that the area underground stations were closed so we ended up hiking a couple of miles past a parade or two to finally get to one.

We'd stopped first at Leicester Square to pick up discount tickets to London's longest running musical, Les Miserables, and we're looking forward to attending it at the Queen's Theatre in a couple of hours.

We stopped off at the Victoria and Albert Museum, our first visit there. So many wonderful museums in London and so little time.

We're hanging out in the Hilton Lounge for an hour to enjoy afternoon tea in the meantime. Nothing like roughing it on the road...