We woke up relatively early and headed out to our favorite breakfast place in Tower Hill, White Mulberries. It’s just a coffee shop with typical coffee shop options (I always choose the yoghurt and granola), but the basics are beautiful, and it’s on St. Katherine Dock. Yesterday, we sat outside and enjoyed looking at the flowers and boats.

We had not done much research on what there was to do in London this weekend before we got to the airport, but while at O’Hare, I looked a bit and saw that there were a number of events around London associated with the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival. Last year we happened to be in town for the festival and enjoyed it a lot. Mostly acrobatic performance art, or at least that is my recollection. This year’s theme was “Acts of Hope.” Anyway, we selected a few things that looked interesting to attend and, after breakfast, headed over to Greenwich on the very fast (and, it turned out, a bit splashy) Uber boat.

That was a tactical error, because it turned out that, while there were many events around town this weekend that are part of the International Festival, the festival at Greenwich was, in fact, last weekend. This was readily apparent when the boat (which held very few people for a Festival weekend), pulled up to a subdued and relatively empty dock. We regrouped a bit and visited the Greenwich market before planning how to get to a play called Sliding Slope which was over at the Royal Victoria Dock, no place close. After a long bus ride over to the O2 center, we walked over to the cable car entrance where I first understood that we were actually going to take a cable cars to get across the river. I am desperately afraid of heights, but I was more afraid of missing the performance, so cable cars it was.

Sliding Slope was interesting. Marginally based on the North Sea Flood in 1953, it depicted a group of people gathered on a submerged rooftop living out their final days as seas rose due to climate change. Dark content for a (mostly) sunny day, but thought provoking and interesting.

After a brief respite back at the Doubletree, we took a bus over near St. Paul’s where we found a cute pub built by Sir Christopher Wren, The Old Bell. It was supposedly built as living quarters for the stone masons completing reconstruction after the Great Fire.

We had a quick pint before heading out to Sir Christopher Wren’s possibly more famous project, St. Paul’s Cathedral. This was to be the site of another Greenwich + Docklands International Festival event, Resurgam. We had attempted to see this the day before, but with the train delays we experienced, we arrived only as the performers were taking a bow at the end. Resurgam is a vertical dance performance by an American company called Bandaloop, starting high on the South side of the cathedral and ending at the bottom. The performance, Resurgam, was named for the inscription that appears on that same wall, meaning “I shall rise.”

What can be said about this? It was beyond magical. Beautiful dancing, beautiful music, on a beautiful building. It was not lost on me what a coward I am for being afraid of the cable cars, when these dancers were doing this. My hands were wet with sweat in some form of solidarity. Solidarity, that is, if they felt any form of nervousness. They did not appear to.

We walked over the Millennium bridge afterward with throngs of happy people who had enjoyed the performance toward our first stint, at Shakespeare’s Globe, as groundlings. The play was As You Like It. And what can I say but I will never try to experience a play at the Globe any other way. We were standing on the left edge of the stage with our arms resting on it. Yes, we stood for about 2 hours, but there was nothing tiring about it. We were in that play, seeing every twitch on the faces of the actors. Loved the play, loved the music, loved the experience. I even collected an apple from one of the actors, shown below.

And though it had been a big day and quite late when we returned to the hotel, I couldn’t begin to settle down to sleep. Maybe the plane ride back to Chicago?