Day 87,88 Mama Mia!

We are very fortunate, as we draw this adventure to a close, to have lives that we love, waiting for us at home. As much as we are sad that this journey is coming to an end we are looking forward to going home and seeing our family, our friends, our church and our community and of course the dog.

We left our apartment in Paris early and travelled by metro to Gare Nord for our final train trip in Europe. The Eurostar to London did not let us down. Two hours and ten minutes later we had arrived at St Pancreas station in London – it was a perfect, fast, smooth train trip that reminded us yet again that there other fast ways to travel, apart from cars and aeroplanes. Train travel in Europe has been a smorgasbord of wonderful and challenging experiences. We have been on very fast trains and very slow trains, sleek modern trains and old rattlers, clean well-organised trains and Italian regional trains (enough said). What really surprised us is that 98% of these trains have been electric; the Europeans are in much better shape to endure a post ‘oil-reliant’ world than many other parts of the world.

Once in London we had about 9 hours to wait until our flight left for Hong Kong at 9.15pm. We had planned to put our packs into the luggage storage at the station and spend the afternoon looking at a few sights in London that we had missed on previous visits … but we had not counted on the rain. London is notorious for drizzle, but on this day we encountered a whole months worth of rain on one day – and not for the first time we had to resort to Plan B. With the help of the tube we found our way to Leicester Square and a cinema to watch a pre-release session of the new movie Mama Mia.

Having seen only one movie in 3 months it was great to sit in a theatre and watch a movie in English. With Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth as part of an all-star cast, and with the hits of Abba surely this movie couldn’t go wrong. Well the movie was bizarre, curious and also a delightful experience. Bizarre, because musicals are a strange genre, and also because none of the middle- aged leads could really sing – although they do try hard. Curious, because the story has been made up to try and tie together a group of very diverse songs. Delightful, because as teenagers of the 70s we laughed, and cried and sang along to a movie shot on location in a glorious part of Greece. We wondered what younger people would make of this strange musical that invites the audience to laugh at itself, but it did fill up our afternoon in a most enjoyable way. With a little more time to kill we found ourselves in a wonderful bookshop in Charing Cross Road where we were delighted to find a whole bookshop packed with titles in English (while in Europe we have often been restricted to one shelf). Of course we couldn’t resist the temptation and we bought a couple of books for the trip home.

We left Britain from the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow; which now seems to be working perfectly. British Airways looked after us for 11 hours and even provided a spare seat next to us, which made our trip not so ‘squeezy’. It was nice to hear English being spoken around us but we were puzzled about how the UK could be so close to Europe and still have such terrible food.

Some 24 hours after leaving Paris we arrived at the final three-day stopover on the Born to Run 2008 Tour, Hong Kong.