London in 2025

On June 18, 2026 By StevenIn International Travel - The United Kingdom5 Comments

When I started this blog all the back in the long, long ago year 2011, the whole purpose was just to keep my friends and family updated on what I was up to – I was at the start of a multi-year assignment in Germany for my job, and I figured the blog format was the way to go. Through my time abroad, I fell into a travel blog format, because I was going all over the place and there was always something fascinating to see and to share. In more recent years, especially since 2020, I hadn’t been traveling as much. I did manage to squeeze in two international trips last year, and I want to talk about both of them. I’ll start with the second one, because it was just in November.

I realized as we approached the Thanksgiving holiday that I had the actual Thursday and Friday of the holiday off work, so if I took the Monday and Tuesday of the following week, I could have a solid five day visit to my favorite city in all the world – London!

I didn’t choose London as a destination just because I love the city- I chose it because there was a revival of Starlight Express running there in Wembley, and I desperately wanted to see it. Long time readers of this blog will recall that I’m a huge musical theater nerd, and that I went to Bochum to see the German version of Starlight that had been running there continuously since 1989. I never got to see the original 1984 version of the show, however, despite loving the crap out of it since I first heard it. It did run on Broadway for a while, but I was still a proto-Steven and could not travel on my own yet to see things.

Not so, now – I had the time off, and the money, and only needed the reason to go- and now I had it. I got myself some airfare, booked the Starlight ticket, reserved a hotel with points that was located in a convenient location, and set about populating my trip with Cool Shit To Do™. Then on the Wednesday night, I took Metro to the airport and hopped across the Atlantic Ocean.

Strap in, folks- this is going to be a long one. I’ll take it day by day.

Day One: Thursday the 27th of November –

My flight got into Heathrow around 10am, and getting through customs and passport control at the airport didn’t take all that long. The Heathrow Express took me from the airport straight to Paddington Station. My first order of business was finding the Paddington statue in Paddington Station. This might be my foggy recollection, but I’m pretty sure he’s been moved since I was last there about ten years prior.

From there, it was a short walk to my hotel to check in and drop off my bag. My original plan was to walk around a bit, perhaps over to Hyde Park, but I can’t sleep on airplanes and I was a bit shattered as a result, so I instead had a bite in the hotel restaurant while I waited for my room to be ready. This was the first of many great sandwiches on this trip – a delightful tuna and cucumber sandwich. England’s sandwich game is strong, and I still have dreams about the things I ate from the M&S Food store.

That didn’t take long, and I was able to have a brief nap in the hotel room before heading out for the evening’s plans. On my way to the Tube, I stumbled across public art – The Wild Table of Love. It turns out this (or a duplicate of this) is presently in New York as well, but I don’t think I’ll have a chance to go find it.

While this is not important to my story, it made me laugh and I would have failed my readers if I did not also give you a chance to laugh at this bus:

Onward to the Tube! I was delighted and surprised to learn that the Oyster Card I had purchased for my very first trip to London in 2012 still worked perfectly- it even had a remaining balance of a little over £10 to get me started.

This is my original 2012 Oyster Card from when London was hosting the Olympics

I rode the Tube to the Electric Ballroom on Camden High Street for Pop Will Eat Itself, an alt-rock band that started in the 1980s. It was an exceptionally good show, and I’m glad I was able to manage it.

Pop Will Eat Itself playing at Electric Ballroom

At no point on this entire day did I remember that it was Thanksgiving back in the States.

Day two: Friday the 28th of November –

I woke up, and hopped over to South Kensington for a behind the scenes tour of the Royal Albert Hall. I had been to the Royal Albert twice before for glorious performances, but a tour is a fascinating look behind the scenes.

The Royal Albert Hall is a pretty great place to see music. Lots of people gribe about the acoustics, but I like it.

I have a fondness for visiting what, to my mind, are the holy places of music and performance. The Ryman in Nashville. Chess Records in Chicago. You get the idea. The Royal Albert Hall tour was like that for me.

After the tour, I took the Tube over to Blackfriars to go to St Paul’s Cathedral. Longtime readers of this blog also know that I am a bit King-Kongy, in that whenever I’m in a new city, I like to find the tallest thing around and climb it. I had previously been to the Shard, which is obviously much taller, but St. Paul’s has a self guided tour which you can take, and which allows you to climb the Dome, up to the three Dome Galleries. The three galleries are basically levels at which you can stop climbing to look around, before going on to the next level. They’re called the Whispering Gallery, the Stone Gallery and the Golden Gallery, but honestly I missed how they go their names – I was too busy climbing and panting. All those steps were a lot easier when I was in my thirties.

Totally worth it, though. Check out the view from the top!

After St. Pauls, I went back to the hotel for a short break before the evening’s festivities, but not before a quick burger and beer at a really great local spot.

In the evening, before taking in a show at the West End, I decided to check out a little sculpture walk called the “Scenes in the Square Sculpture Trail” in Leicester Square. My goal of seeing most of the sculptures was complicated enormously by the GIANT FRICKING CHRISTMAS MARKET going on. Solid pun on the ice skating rink though:

Here’s the parts of the sculpture walk I did find – you can see a complete list of the sculptures on the official site.

After I was done there, I walked to the theater for the evening’s real entertainment: Disney’s Hercules. I’ve always liked the music from this one, and I was skeptical about translating it to the stage, but it actually worked really well.

Day three, Saturday the 29th of November –

On Saturday, I had a leisurely start because the first scheduled event of the day was the show that prompted this entire trip – a matinee of the new revival of Starlight Express!

It was so, so good. My inner twelve year old was delighted. This show is reportedly touring internationally in 2027, and I am here for it.

After Starlight Express rocked my socks off, I grabbed a quick dinner before starting a walking tour of London’s Historical Pubs. This tour was fascinating as hell, and I was well and truly buzzed by the end of it.

This next picture is not really important to the retelling, but I just liked how the tunnel between tube lines looked:

The tubes between Tubes could have been in any sci-fi movie.

Day four, Sunday the 30th of November –

Lunch at a pretty great place in Hammersmith called “Charlotte’s Cloud,” before walking over to Riverside Studios. Riverside Studios was founded in the 1930s as a film studio. It became a BBC television studio later, and some of Doctor Who’s earliest episodes were filmed there. The blue plaque pictured below is about Verity Lambert, the founding producer of Doctor Who.

Riverside Studios is a working studio and Doctor Who filmed here in the 1960s.

Nowadays, it’s an arts center with facilities capable of hosting fairly amazing shows. I was there for the immersive Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy experience/show. It was a fully interactive “play” rather than the kind where you sit in place and watch the story on a proscenium stage. The night started in a working bar, at a surprise party for one Arthur Dent.

Ford Prefect talked to me a bit before things started and as a result, I was referred to for the rest of the night as “David from Virginia.” I'”‘m still not sure whether he misheard me or simply chose to misname me for comedic effect, but I was David for the rest of the evening. At one point, Arthur Dent joked that “David rules the state of Virginia with an iron fist.” It was that kind of a night.

Day five, Monday, the 1st of December –

Met up with my dear friend Charlotte. When we first met, she she also lived in Germany and had a WordPress blog. We’ve kept in touch in the years since, and even met up when we were both in Tokyo. This makes the third country in which we’ve seen one another, which is kind of amazing. We had lunch and walked around a bit.

We also stopped at Liberty, a famous department store that’s been around for 150 years.

While we were walking around, we stumbled across this very funny reminder that the month of December had begun:

Lastly, we tried to go up the Fenchurch Building (the one that looks like a walkie-talkie), but it was closed that day, so we wound up finding another tall building called Horizon 22 with an observation deck instead.

In the foreground, The Fenchurch Building (walkie talkie) and in the background the Shard (big pointy)

In the evening, I went to see Hans Zimmer at the O2 Arena. In the days before this trip, I waffled between the Hans Zimmer show and Roxette playing across town, and in hindsight I wish I’d gone to see Roxette. The O2 was uncomfortable for me, and I was so far away from the stage that it was like watching an animated musical postage stamp. I think I would have had more fun at Roxette. Oh well, sometimes I make bad choices.

This was the line at the O2 to get into the Arena.

Day six, Tuesday, the 2nd of December –

It was time to head back to the airport to fly home. London is just like Disney in one regard: You exit through the gift shop.

Lots of London gift shop stuff at Heathrow airport.

I had wanted to wake up in London on my birthday, and in that I was successful. I was kind of hoping that the actual minute of my birth would occur in international airspace so that my birthday would be negated and I wouldn’t age another year. That plan was a bust though, because we were already over Canadian airspace by the time that minute rolled around.

This photo was taken at the exact minute of my birthday, US east coast time.

Still, the international travel made my birthday last 29 hours. That’s quite something, isn’t it?

3/52

Projections on the Washington Monument for America’s 250th

On January 5, 2026January 5, 2026 By StevenIn The U.S.1 Comment

They’ve been doing projections on the Washington Monument for America’s 250th (bi-quincentennial!) birthday- every hour for about twenty-five minutes. They started on New Year’s Eve and are doing it through tonight, so I popped over to have a look.

This kind of projection stuff is really neat to see live, and I hope they do more of it in the spring when the temperatures warm up a little. Here’s a sampling:

Pretty neat, eh?

2/52

Good riddance, 2025

On January 1, 2026January 2, 2026 By StevenIn Life At Home2 Comments

I feel this opossum’s mood in my very soul.

One of the downsides to not blogging for four and a half years is that I’ve kind of lost the rhythm of thing, and my perspective in the present is often wildly different than what it was over the last batch of posts. When I left off in early 2021, I wasn’t going out all that much, I hadn’t been traveling, and I didn’t know all that many people in my new adopted home city, because I moved up in the middle of a pandemic, and things weren’t consistently open everywhere.

Obviously all that’s changed, and life is wildly different than it was then. Which brings me back to my perspective from that time period- the last time I did an end of the year post was “Good Riddance, 2020.”

In the 2020 recap, I talked about the shattering of my 2020 goals by the pandemic, and resolved to not make new goals. Let’s recap-

One of my 2020 goals was to change apartments or escape Florida.

Obviously, I did that one successfully, because I was writing the 2020 post from my new apartment here in the DMV. I’ve changed apartments twice more since then, both times remaining in the same building. I spent my first year on the 14th floor, and when my lease for that one ended, I snagged a 20th floor apartment. Instead of my view being the building across the street, my view now looked over the top of that building, toward DC. I could see part of the National Mall, the Washington Monument, the Capitol Dome. I could see the National Cathedral and the Jefferson Memorial. The Fourth of July fireworks were spectacular across up the entire horizon. And on a clear night, I could see the floodlights that indicated the Commanders were having a home game.

After the first year, new construction two blocks away killed my view of the National Cathedral.

Being on the top floor meant I had a great view, but it also meant that I got direct sunlight year round. Since my apartment also had crappy insulation and seals, I absolutely baked in the summertime and I lost heat in the wintertime. After four years of being miserably uncomfortable despite the spectacular view, I resolved to change apartments again, and this time I got one about halfway up the building on the north face. My view is once again a building across the street, but I have significantly less direct sunlight and my electric bill dropped immediately. The newer apartment also has hard floors instead of carpet, which is better for allergy stuff, so that’s pretty cool.

One of my 2020 goals was to be healthier – eat better, sleep more, and get out of the house more/exercise a little.

Once we got further into 2021, things began to open up and I started going to stuff in DC. When I go into the city, I usually take the Metro instead of driving (unless it’s one of those places that you can’t easily access with public transit), and that means a lot more walking. On escalators, I usually climb. It’s not the same as a regular workout, but it’s something.

I also started to make new friends, and some of those friends encourage me to make healthier food choices. I still eat like a twelve year old who’s been left home alone most of the time, but I try to fit in a salad at least once a week, so that’s something I guess.

As for sleep, I get my required six hours a night. I could do better, but I tend to be more active at night than in the early hours and I find it difficult to get myself into bed before midnight. I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember, and I don’t think it’s likely to change any time soon.

One of my 2020 goals was to travel more, at least three out of state trips and one international trip per year.

In January of 2021, I noted the postponement of my cousin’s wedding on the West Coast – that trip finally happened in October of that year, and it was lovely.

I also noted my failure to make it to DragonCon in 2020 for obvious reasons. Because people were still skittish from the pandemic, I was actually able to get a room in one of the main DC hotels in 2021, so I went that year. I haven’t been back since, because the hotels are a huge pain in the butt, and I keep having conflicts that weekend anyway. Also, I’ve realized in the intervening years that I don’t enjoy conventions any more – I used to go to Megacon in Orlando each year, and I still try to pop out to Awesomecon here in DC, but neither of those required travel. I lived close enough to go to Megacon without needing a hotel, and now I live close enough to Awesomecon to need to fly anywhere. I have a difficult time justifying airfare and hotel costs for an event that I don’t really enjoy. The only thing that makes me consider going back to DragonCon is that so many of my friends go, but then I think I should just find easier ways to see my friends than at a giant expensive crowded convention.

I did finally get back to international travel, just this year. I spent a week in London around Thanksgiving, and a few days in Toronto this summer – I’ll talk about those in other posts in the near future, because I really do intend to write more here.

I still haven’t made it to the Waikiki Spamjam. Maybe 2027 is my year for that one.

One of my 2020 goals was to feed my inner introvert – to spend more time reading books and less time on little screens.

I still spend far too much time on screens, but I have been reading more overall – I have two library cards and a Kindle and I do a Goodreads challenge each year. I don’t read as much as some people I know, but reading for pleasure is still a marvelous thing.

One of my 2020 goals was to write at least 52 posts in the blog, one per week.

I made it in 2020, but then in 2021 I managed to post just nine times in 2021 before I just sort of drifted away. I came back in November of 2025, got six more done, and then lost steam again. It’s a new year, and I intend to do better. I’ve got some gaps to fill in.

One of my 2020 goals was to listen to more music, live or otherwise.

I checked my stats, and in the years before the pandemic, I was generally seeing 14-26 shows a year. In 2020, I managed only seven. In 2021, things began to reopen and I hit 43.

I snagged season tickets as soon as I was able to the Kennedy Center’s broadway and National Symphony seasons, the National Theatre’s broadway series, and the Shakespeare Theatre Company. I’ve been to dozens of different show venues in the intervening years.

And then I massively overcorrected from the leaner show years.

Some of that has to do with being in a place where there are simply more shows available, but in 2022 I saw 176 shows. In 2023, 179. In 2024 I hit 158 shows. And in 2025, I made a conscious effort to slow down a little and only saw 129 ticketed shows.

I’m trying to find a balance, to not have many times where there are four or five or six shows in a single week, but my instinct is to always go. I want to see all the things. I always have.

For 2021, I resolved to not set goals.

We all know that “New Year’s Resolutions” are terribly stupid- they always start with good intentions, but they rarely survive their first encounter with reality. As soon as I figured that out, I changed from “Resolutions” to “Goals” but I realize now that relabeling a stupid thing doesn’t automatically make it any less stupid.

With that in mind, I’m going to just start off 2025 with a few guidelines, not so much resolutions or goals as just good ideas that I’m going to try to stick with.

1) I’m going to do my best to keep writing in this blog. I enjoy writing it and I feel guilty and angry at myself when I don’t. This is an easy fix; I just have to DO it. I waste more than enough time on other mindless things, I can find the time.

Besides, talking about the last year, or the last four and a half years, is going to require a bit more than just this one end of the year wrap-up post. Especially since this post didn’t wrap up ANYTHING about the last year.

2) I’m going to try to push myself to eat healthier a little more often than I do. It doesn’t matter how good something tastes if I feel awful an hour after I eat it, right? I can do better. I just need to find a way to make salads more flavorful. Maybe chocolate chips?

3) While I’m not going to stop going out to concerts, I am going to try to slow it down a little bit, and to be more mindful of when I’m overscheduling a week or two. I’m also going to be a little more selective with my season subscriptions; sometimes there’s a few I can miss. (And right now, the Kennedy Center is hugely problematic- I’m not loving the idea of renewing those subscriptions until certain organizational issues are resolved.)

and lastly,

4) This was the last year I’m going to make that dumb “see you next year” joke before New Year’s Eve. I’ve been saying it for decades, and I’m finally tired of it.

Did you make any New Year’s resolutions?

1/52

I’ve got a nose for this sort of thing.

On November 20, 2025November 20, 2025 By StevenIn Life At Home, Miscellany4 Comments

This wooden nose and upper lip carved from rosewood is one of the best things I’ve purchased in the last year.

It cost me only about nine dollars, and it sits on my bathroom counter. It’s extremely useful, wonderfully space-saving, and – best of all – it appeals mightily to my sense of whimsy.

I nearly went for one shaped like a Moai, but this one won my heart.

The nose is actually a stand to hold my glasses when I’m wearing contact lenses. I am amused every single time I set my glasses down on the nose.

I should name it.

I’ve said before on numerous occasions that my resting state is whimsy, and that also applies to silly little purchases that I make for use around my home.

For example, if you’re looking for the next roll of toilet paper in my baa-aa-aathroom, you’ll have to count sheep. He was ewe-nly eight dollars, and that price can’t be bleat.

Heh, sheep puns.

He's not sheepish, he protects the roll.

What’s the silliest thing you’ve purchased recently?

Do you see what I see?

On November 18, 2025 By StevenIn Miscellany1 Comment

I stopped today for a sandwich at a local shop today. I’ve been there countless times, and I’ve ordered food from this man often, but this is the first time he ever said anything to me other than the transaction at hand.

The gentleman behind the counter, whose name I should really know given how often I get lunch there, asks, “Didn’t they go out of business?”

It took me a moment to realize he was referring to my t-shirt – I always forget what shirt I’m wearing, and so I’m always momentarily confused when it sparks a conversation. Today, I was wearing a shirt with the logo of the 9:30 Club, a venerable DC concert venue that has concerts nearly every night.

“Didn’t they go out of business?” I was briefly baffled- Since I moved to the DMV five years ago, I’ve seen more than fifty shows there. It’s a fundamental anchor point for me in this city. I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have ever imagined that someone who lives around here wouldn’t know the 9:30 Club was there.

He continued, “I haven’t seen any commercials for it in a while.” I tried to explain about the giant billboard ads that show up in the Metro with upcoming shows, but maybe he just doesn’t take the Metro into the District very often.

I guess it still confuses me when someone has a reality so different than mine. I have a tendency to think that stuff that I know is just common knowledge to everyone, and I’m frequently completely poleaxed when I find this not to be true.

I suppose this applies to me as well, though. A dear friend of mine likes to say, when I’m cursing at an awful, terrible, very bad, no good driver in gnarly traffic that perhaps the reason they’re driving like that is because they have terrible diarrhea and they’re just trying to get home to a toilet really fast. Basically, it’s just like the old saying, “you never know what someone else is going through,” only with more poop.

My point, I guess, is that as often as I’m surprised when someone doesn’t know things that I know, I really shouldn’t be surprised at my own lack of knowing what other people know.

Or something. The original thread for this post has kind of gotten lost in the weeds, and I don’t remember quite where I was going with this one.

You know?

# For Nanopoblano 2025.

Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV.

Author: Steven