First Friday in London, I’ve got this world-class city at my fingertips and what do I do?  Umm, well . . .

At about 7:00pm, I pulled my head out of my work emails and realized that despite the glorious sunlight still streaming over the city (we’re farther north than Calgary, so the days are crazy long), the evening was getting on and it was time to find something to do.

Thus began a lesson in how nothing is the same as what I’m used to:

First attempt — plays! theatre! opera!

When I worked in midtown Manhattan, I could leave the office at 7pm with enough time to buy discount tickets to a Broadway play, grab a slice of pizza, and make it to my seat well before the 8pm curtain.  Not so here, where apparently everything starts at 7:30pm, and distances are much further than midtown.

Second attempt — movies!

Wait, Fandango doesn’t work in the UK?  How do Londoners find their movies?!  Forty-seven Google searches later, I found something that was not The Mummy within a 30-minute-walk radius.  Which would have worked fine if I had already eaten something.

Third attempt — Hulu!

No dice (and I forgot all about trying Netflix).

Final game plan — Cold cereal, blogging and laundry!  Also, feeling discriminated against for not having a date!

Yes, talk about fun.  But don’t worry, in between bowls of cereal and loads of laundry, I also purchased tickets to dance and theatre performances, so this weekend will definitely get better.

But even the process of purchasing tickets was not without its surprises — at Sadler’s Wells, which seems to be the premier venue for contemporary dance in London, they wouldn’t let me purchase a single ticket for myself if it meant that a single seat would sit empty next to me (i.e., if there were only two seats left in the best section and they were next to each other, I couldn’t buy just one of them).  This forced me to buy a ticket in a much worse (and much less expensive) section that I wanted.  Outside of church, I can’t think of a time when I’ve felt so sidelined for being single.