Tag Archives: London

Shiny Shoes and Street Food

On Friday, Matthew and I took a semi-spontaneous trip into London, having been in Luton in the morning for a job interview. We caught the train from Luton Airport Parkway into St Pancras, and after going to see Platform 9 3/4 in Kings Cross – rookie mistake during school summer holidays cos it was pretty crazy! – hopped on the tube to one of my favourite places in London: Covent Garden.

It was gone 2:30pm by the time we actually got there, so lunch was really first on the agenda, and we decided to forgo our usual go-to restaurants and instead we went to Wahaca – Matthew had been before and raved about it, and I was up for seeing if it was as good as he said it was. The Covent Garden branch is actually just a few roads outside of the main square, but the restaurant was easy to find and as soon as I stepped inside I was pretty excited by everything going on. The decor was fun, the whole place smelled amazing and the staff were super friendly from the offset which is always a huge plus for me.

The menu consists primarily of ‘street food’ options, which are smaller dishes designed for sharing around the table, and although there are some dishes which are supposed to be more like a main course, I wanted the proper experience. We ordered 6 dishes between the two of us:

  • Frijoles and tortilla chips – a creamy bean dip with crumbled cheese and a bucket of chips for dipping
  • Four cheese empanadas – two crispy, crunchy pastry parcels filled with the creamiest and stringiest cheeses
  • British steak tacos – three small tortilla tacos filled with chunks of steak and salsa
  • Buttermilk chicken baja tacos – two larger soft tortilla tacos filled with crispy fried chicken and salsa
  • Mexican style chorizo and potato quesadillas – two grilled tortilla ‘sandwiches’ filled with chorizo and crushed potato with cheese
  • Chicken club quesadillas – quesadillas filled with grilled chicken, lettuce and spicy salsa

All of the dishes are brought out as soon as they’re ready, so you can just dive into whatever comes first, and it was really fun to be able to pick and choose and share. My absolute favourite dish was the cheese empanadas, which I haven’t stopped thinking about since, but also the buttermilk chicken tacos and the chicken club quesadillas are both dishes that I would order again.

While we tried our best to finish, we didn’t quite clear our plates, partly because we wanted room for dessert. Again, we decided to share two options, ordering the churros and chocolate dip, and the salted caramel ice-cream, both of which were absolutely to die for! Fully fuelled for the rest of the day, we went back to Covent Garden and wandered around the shops, including the Moomin Shop where I met Moomin himself!

When we left Covent Garden, we headed for the Natural History Museum to fill a little bit of time, then walked down to another of our London must-dos, Ben’s Cookies, to pick up a selection box of our favourite cookies, then got the tube back to Victoria as that morning we had booked tickets to see Wicked at the Apollo Victoria.

It was Matthew’s first time seeing the show, having only heard Defying Gravity before, and while I had seen it once before, it has been probably about 8 years since I last saw the show. In fact, the first time I saw Wicked in London was when Idina Menzel was still playing Elphaba, and nothing will ever top that for me! That said, the show was amazing, and of course had me in tears on more than one occasion. Wicked was the first musical that I fell in love with, and Defying Gravity and For Good are two of my all time favourite songs from any musical, and back in the days where I was confident enough to sing on stage in front of an audience, I once performed I’m Not That Girl.

I don’t know if it was just the progression and development of the show over time, but I felt that watching it after so many years I found it funnier, but that could just be down to me being a little older and understanding more of the jokes. Honestly though, despite a love of all things musical theatre, Wicked will always have a special place in my heart and I was so happy to see it again after all this time.

While I might not have ruby slippers, my feet were pretty damn comfy in my gorgeous new rose gold trainers from Truffle on Asos. Would you believe I only paid £11 for them?! I took a risk wearing them for the first time ever for a day walking around London but I am blister free and there was not a single complaint all day! I don’t normally go for this sort of style of trainer – I’m a strictly Converses kinda gal – but I’m so glad I bought these, and let’s face it, they’re the ultimate blogger shoe – even Matthew keeps referring to them as my shiny blogger shoes haha! I think they’ve got back up to £14 on Asos now but I still think that’s a bargain for such comfy and pretty shoes!

Twitter / Bloglovin / Instagram
Leave a comment

Tale As Old As Time Afternoon Tea at The Kensington Hotel

I might be a little late to the party, but on Sunday I finally had my opportunity to go to the Beauty and the Beast themed afternoon tea at The Kensington Hotel in London, having had it booked for months.

We arrived at the hotel about half an hour early, but due to a few cancellations they managed to get a table ready for us well before our set time – although a little miscommunication meant we were sat at our table for quite a while before someone actually came to take our drink orders. I’m not really a tea drinker, so despite a big selection of teas to choose from, I chose one that I knew would be a safe bet: Wild Rooibos.

The tea came out pretty quickly, and was followed with a plate of little appetisers – a mini cheese souffle, a little pie and little breaded ball of beef ragu – all three of which were delicious and I was a little sad to only get one of each because I could have eaten them 10 times over. Once our plates were cleared, the main event was brought out..

The tea stand was accompanied by Lumiere and Mrs Potts (who was filled with cream), and consisted of finger sandwiches, sweet baguettes and the gorgeous themed desserts on top. The sweet baguettes weren’t really my thing, but the sandwiches were good and I was primarily there for the desserts!

Inside the adorable little Chip teacups was the famous Grey Stuff, which was indeed delicious and my favourite of all the desserts. The Cogsworth tart was also incredibly cute but very very rich and had marzipan in it which I’m not a fan of, and having eaten both of the portions of Grey Stuff, I couldn’t quite finish him! There was also a little coconut macaron ‘snowball’, which was a nice light option, and finally a clear jelly containing the last rose petal.

After finishing the tea, we were brought a wrapped biscuit – which was iced to look like Belle’s ballgown – to take home, but with the tea room being fairly quiet, we ended up staying at least an hour after we’d finished eating. We were there for at least 3 hours, so definitely made an effort to get our money’s worth out of it!

9 Comments

Aladdin the Musical

Aladdin the Musical West End review

I might be late to the party, but I’ve finally seen Aladdin on West End! I was a little heartbroken when Disney replaced the show at the Hyperion in DCA, so when it was announced that it was coming to London, I knew it would be worth seeing. Matthew bought the tickets for my birthday months ago, and I’ve been patiently waiting and avoiding spoilers like no tomorrow in preparation for last weekend when I stepped foot into the Prince Edward Theatre!

‘Come for the houmous, stay for the floor show’

Something that made me really happy from the outset was the theatre itself. While I do love a big theatre, the Prince Edward seemed a lot more intimate, and the view from our seats was brilliant.

I’m a huge musical theatre fan, so there’s nothing I love more than that moment when the bands starts playing the opening number, and the compilation of classic Aladdin songs got me so excited for what was coming, and then the Genie appeared and the show began!

I should have known that the show would contain more songs than what’s in the animated classic, but they took me a little by surprise! If I’m being totally honest, I found them a bit hit and miss – I loved Babkak, Omar, Aladdin and Kassim and High Adventure, while Proud of Your Boy and These Palace Walls were a little bit meh, although that may be just due to not being able to hear the words particularly well!

That being said, I tend to measure how good the music is based on my goosebumps, and I had them right from the get go! Of course, the whole Friend Like Me scene was without a doubt the best number of the whole show, with Trevor Dion Nicholas absolutely blowing the whole audience away! I loved all the inside jokes, the Disney parodies and amazing dance numbers, and it had me in stitches at the same time as my jaw being on the floor.

‘Even the poor people look fabulous’

From the outset, the staging and the costumes blew me away. There was so much detail and everything was so sparkly and bright without being overwhelming, and the Cave of Wonders.. WOW. Also, can we talk about that magic carpet? Literally all I’ve done since seeing it is come up with theories for how that thing worked because OH MY GOSH.

Really, I just can’t stop raving about how good this show was, it was well worth the wait! It was witty and full of magic and everything hoped it would be and more, and I cannot recommend going to see it enough!

Twitter / Bloglovin / Instagram
Leave a comment

A Disney Day in London

If you read my New Years Resolutions post, you would have seen that this year I really want to spend more time going on adventures, and meeting more of my lovely Disney friends, and a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to do both in one day!

After a massive amount of Twitter discussion, the lovely Eleanor managed to set a date for a trip to London for a get-together, and being that London is only a £20 return away by coach, it seemed like a day off well spent!

After an early morning start and a coach journey that I pretty much slept through, I arrived at Victoria slightly earlier than predicted, giving me plenty of time to get to the underground station and work my way to Oxford Street; I’d done the same trip back in December luckily so I knew where I was going! Our meeting place? The Disney Store, of course!

I arrived pretty much bang on 11am, and was soon found my Ellie and Jade, and soon enough the group grew to include Sophie, and as we migrated into the warmth of the store, the whole gang appeared: Lizi, Amy, Charlotte, Milly and Gracie. Obviously we all needed a good look around the two story shop, which is way bigger than my nearest Disney Store, and if you don’t get a photo in Cinderella’s carriage then it didn’t happen, right?

By the time we left the store – probably to the relief of the cast members – we were all kinda starving, so we made our way to Piccadilly and ended up in a Pizza Hut (that didn’t look particularly pleased to see a group of our size) for the lunchtime buffet, and ended up staying for well over an hour, just talking about Disney and life and Disney.. It was so nice to be able to discuss the magic with people who think the same as you!

After lunch, we headed back towards Oxford Street for some window shopping in Lush and h&m, then good little fangirls we are, got the tube to Kings Cross to visit Platform 9 3/4 and the Harry Potter shop there. The platform looks a little out of place in the modern new station building, and I had no idea there would be such a queue just for a photo, but we were all quite content looking at the merchandise and discussing what house we’d be in.

Somehow, we all seemed magnetically drawn to St Pancras, but we all claimed it was 100% to do with Starbucks and not at all to see when the next Eurostar to Disneyland Paris was.. The station was totally rammed with people due to two hours worth of train delays (YIKES), but there was just about enough space for the remaining members of our group and our hot chocolates! For me, this was the last stop of the day, as being totally terrified of missing my coach, or a repeat of the last time I got a coach from Victoria station (hello pickpockets), I said my goodbyes to all my lovely new friends, and Gracie and I caught the Victoria line back to the coach station for me, and Gracie went on to her station.

The coach trip home was a little longer due to traffic, but I had a blueberry muffin to munch on and I’d just had such a lovely day that I wasn’t too bothered! All the girls were so nice, and we had so much to talk about and it was just so great to have a day with people who share my intense love of all things Disney! Please go and check out all of their blogs/Youtube channels because they’re great!

I can’t wait for more adventures!

Leave a comment