Covent Garden

On my last day wandering around London on my own, (before Matt was free for the weekend,) I took the Tube to Covent Garden. It was a weird morning...

For one thing, when I got to the market area, I got this weird deja-vu feeling, like I had been there before - which I hadn't of course. But it looked familiar. Then it hit me! My Fair Lady was a family favorite movie when I was a kid - I probably still have the whole thing memorized. The opening scene where Eliza Doolittle meets Professor Higgins for the first time takes place right in this market square. So nerdy, but I thought it was the coolest thing ever!

There was a Shake Shack of all things in Covent Garden, and as I hadn't had breakfast that morning, I decided to eat there. I'm 100% positive the people working there knew thought I was insane eating a burger and custard at 11:30am. I was definitely the only one!

While I was eating there alone someone started singing opera in the lower court yard near my table and it started to rain outside, and as I was sitting there looking out towards St. Paul's church, I had the strangest feeling wash over me - what the heck was I doing here, thousands of miles from my kids, in a foreign country, eating Shake Shack at the scene of one of my favorite childhood movies, all by myself? 

While it felt so weird, it also felt kind of wistfully, achingly wonderful, and I'll definitely never forget that morning.