Windup, Including Power Failure

Monday: Off to a slow start, catching up on sleep. (Some of the neighbors in the building caroused noisily from 3 to 5 a.m. the night before, among other reasons.) Initial packing for our pre-dawn departure Wednesday. Success in getting lunch at that pub we couldn't get into the night before. 

Much of the afternoon was spent in reading and writing. Steve connected with a friend and former colleague on the phone. At five we departed for pretheatre dinner and saw Chicago, which we'd never seen on stage before (just the movie), and it was fun. We must be among the last people in the world to see it--since it opened in 1975 it has set records for longest runs in several categories (American-originated musical and musical revival on Broadway, and American musical in London's West End)--but it seems to be going strong and there were not a lot of empty seats even after all these years.

We got back to the flat around 10:30 and proceeded to check email, etc., and I completed my blog post on the previous day's events. Then began a crisis that colored the next day: the lights in the apartment flickered a number of times and then all power in the apartment went out, at 11:14 p.m. However, there were lights on (even at that late hour) in other apartments of our building and elsewhere around the garden, indicating that the power failure was limited to our apartment, so I put in a series of calls to the owner and the agent for the apartment, and of course nobody was answering their phone then.

You've probably had significant travel glitches in your own life, so I'll go light on the gory details. Our primary fear was that if the power were not restored by the following (Tuesday) afternoon, we could have problems with our departure for home early Wednesday morning: if our devices ran out of power, our phone alarms would not work, we'd have trouble finishing our packing in the dark, and the car service would not be able to buzz us when it arrived. If it hadn't been for that urgency, we could have taken it more in stride to be without lights, heat, hot water, internet, and ability to recharge devices, but as it was, we imagined that we might need to move to a hotel for that last night to ensure our departure at 4 a.m. on Wednesday.

Therefore Tuesday was stressful. There were many calls and texts between us and the agent, and the identity of the person who, it was promised, would come deal with the issue changed from hour to hour and still nobody came, and finally when someone did come, the circuit breaker box (in a locked location somewhere unknown and inaccessible to us, but thought to be the root of the problem) turned out not to be the problem, so an electrician was needed. We did not need to be there for the repair, so we went out for lunch. (It was imperative for us to go to Kitchen W8 a second time, and it was so worth it! A bottle of wine and lovely food helped a lot to take our minds off the nerve-racking situation.) After lunch we paid a brief visit to a longtime friend who is fighting cancer, and then we went back to the flat to see how things were: the rep was still there and the repair had been completed. It was something to do with the grid, nothing to do with the apartment, but the electrician had apparently been able to fix it fairly quickly.

Olivier Theatre

This was a huge relief to us. Of course, concerning as this ill-timed power failure was for us, it was trivial compared to the experience right now of a million and a half people without power in Florida and other southern states due to Hurricane Michael. It is shocking how dependent we all are on the availability of electricity.

Shortly thereafter we left again for our last play of this theatre-intensive trip. It was the National Theatre's production of Antony and Cleopatrawith Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo. Okonedo is beautiful and magnetic--queenly, seductive, winsome, enchanting--and the versatility of the Olivier Theatre's rotating hydraulic stage is extremely impressive. Although the play lasted three and a half hours it was so riveting it seemed like less (even though it did get us home rather late). 

Snow Dusting

Wednesday we therefore got up after very little sleep at 3:15 a.m.(GMT+1) and spent the next 26 hours traveling, arriving home at 10 p.m Mountain Time. The following morning we were greeted by an overnight dusting of snow. Good trip, good to be home.