I know I say “no rest for the wicked” a lot, but, no rest for the wicked! Up at 8 for an early-ish appointment this morning.

Our destination? Battersea Power Station. The amusing (to me) thing is, when it comes to public transport, you get to Battersea Power Station by taking a train to Battersea Power Station Station. Yep for reals!

Even if you don’t know the building well, you’ve probably seen it before. For a time it provided about one fifth of all of London’s power during its peak years, featured in a Pink Floyd album cover, one or more James Bond movies and goodness knows how many TV shows. Closed in 1983, there were proposals for what to do with the site floating around for the best part of forty years, as the place itself slowly but surely started falling apart. No doubt tons of developers were just waiting for it to fall down so they could build tons and tons of flats. (That’s not just a Sydney thing, right?)

Eventually, a plan was reached that enough people agreed with and we have the very-refurbished Battersea Power Station (plus the new Battersea Power Station Station), now designed to generate a prodigious amount of cash, rather than power.

We were there to visit Lift 109 – a Lift (uh-huh) that travels to 109 metres (oh now I get it) above ground for a look at London from one of the big smokestacks. It was inevitably a bit tourist-trappy, silly tourist green-screen photo included (of course we went for it, we’re tourists after all!). There was a bunch of stuff to stand and watch before taking a small lift, so we could climb a set of stairs to, uh, get to the big lift. It’s as inexplicable as it sounds. But the proper lift, the big one, is pretty cool. It goes up one of the (reconstructed) smokestacks and then pops out of the top. Perry took a much better video than I did:

Once the lift is 109 metres above ground, it hovers there for around 8 minutes while we all run around frantically taking photos, then it pops back down again and you exit through the gift shop. The view was great – it’s a brief but interesting experience – the lift doesn’t open to the outside so sorry about the reflections from the glass.

Then it was time to exit through the goft shop and get really annoyed at the crappy ‘get your silly tourist photo’ experience from the digital kiosk. If I hadn’t already prepaid when booking I would have given up. As a final insult, when the picture came out of the machine it flung it on to the floor rather than present it in such a way that you might be able to grab it in time. It was super frustrating and really doesn’t put one in a mood for buying anything else in the shop, it was kinda the opposite of the Brian May appearance last night – this time it was the final part of the experience that kinda left a sour taste.

We walked off my acute case of Aggrieved Tourist Syndrome by wandering the halls of this ginormous place, full of luxury shops but empty of customers. The whole place felt a bit dead which was a little surprising. Still, made it easier to get photos that weren’t chock full of people.

One thing that seemed very appropriate for a (former) electric power station, is Polestar, an electric car company. I have a very good friend who owns one of these cars, so these photos are for you 🙂

After a refreshing drink it was time for the next bit of today’s adventure, visiting the Portobello Road markets. (More nerdy facts – despite the tube existing for 160 years, south-of-the-river is still quite tube-deprived, so it’s a bit of a roundabout journey, taking almost an hour.). But as a bonus (for me at least) we found a surprisingly non-busy corridor, and also we needed to change trains at the hardly-changed-since-1863 platforms at Baker Street.

So after the Northern line, Bakerloo line, and Circle line we made it to Ladbroke Grove without getting lost. Also, it’s pronounced Lad-Brooke, not Broke, so that’s a thing to note should you be visiting.

After a bit of a walk through the deserted “Pod-obello Road” (a bunch of demountable little shops that never seem to have found their shopkeepers or their customers), we were at the Portobello Road Market proper.

I don’t know if it has some days that are more ‘on’ than others. But if so, this would have been one of the ‘off’ days. It wasn’t exactly teeming with life, but there were enough stalls and shops to have a bit of look around, and a place seeking cinnamon/caramel pretzels, so Get In Mah Belly with that lot. Also, I know nothing about football but what a cool mural!

This sign was sitting there happily nestled in a hedge/fence on a street corner. I didn’t, but for some reason, despite being a bit grim it’s just brilliant. Love it.

When we ran out of stalls and shops we found a nice pub to have lunch, I had a somewhat dry chicken schnitzel (here’s a question – it tasted very heavily of chicken, like the chickeniest chicken who ever chooked. Does that mean it was close to being off, or just a proper organically raise bird?). Perry had delicious fish and chips.

From there it was a short walk to Notting Hill Gate tube and back to hotel. I took a short detour via Earl’s Court, (a) because I knew what was out the front of the station and (b) because Nerrrrd!

Back at the hotel Perry was snoozing, and I had a chance to do some catching up on writing the blog so I’m not up til 1am again. I’ll need a holiday! 🙂

Soon it was time to head off to Wicked, at the Apollo Victoria theatre. This theatre is awesome – because it’s only 15 minutes away :). We had time to duck in to the trendy (is it still actually trendy though) Shake Shack because we saw they had vanilla custard soft serve. Time to put in my whiny tourist hat because in what world does it take nearly 15 minutes to make two cups of soft serve? Still, gotta laugh, the place was a wonderful exercise in glorious incompetence – all speed and zero haste, and a major bottleneck getting food from the ‘ready’ shelf over to the customer (less than a metre away). Mercifully the frozen custard soft serve itself was absolutely delicious, just glad we had tons of time to spare because at that place, Shake may well have been short for Shakespeare because it certainly was a comedy of errors. In its honour, next time I serve somebody ice cream I will act surprised when they ask for a spoon.

The theatre was nearby, still the same place where we saw Wicked when we were here in 2015. I think Wicked is the only show we;be seen multiple times where it hasn’t really changed at all – still just as good as the first time we saw it together back in Broadway in 2013. It was great to see this time that the cast was much more diverse, and as always the actors playing Glinda and Elphaba had phen-om-en-al voices and played their parts very well. Elphaba was looking downright scary toward the end of it, as witches are wont to do. Defying Gravity is always a highlight, and again it didn’t disappoint. There was one idiot who thought it was OK to be checking their phone for a good 10 minutes in act one, alas they were close enough to be distracting but too far away to hiss at. Happily someone else did me a favour eventually, whatever they said must have been good because the phone didn’t make an appearance in Act 2 at all so we all got to enjoy the show.

Since we were last here they’ve built a tube station entrance to Victoria station almost directly across the road from the theatre, so we were off our seats and back to Gloucester Road in maybe even less than 15 minutes. Brilliant.

Sadly we’re nearly done with London, tomorrow is our last full day. And boy are we going to make it full!