Thursday, April 28, 2011

There's a wedding this Friday, have you heard?

Royal wedding fever has well and truly hit. Yesterday I had the privilege of helping the librarians with their bulletin board about the wedding. We nicked a white paper table cloth, printed out a bunch of pictures of Kate and Wills, found some red, white, and blue ribbon and set about making a truly ridiculous board complete with a frosted wedding cake and (my favourite part) 3D cake toppers of the royal couple made out of even more white table cloth.

I love the librarians, and we had a great time chatting in our haste to get this done before the library was being used for a meeting about how we were essentially in a Changing Rooms episode and how we could each take turns to play Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen. Also, I got to walk around on top of the bookshelves and wield the mighty staple gun. So I was pretty pleased with all of that. (I apologise for the lack of photographic evidence of the royal wedding themed board, we did *intend* to take pictures, but that didn't quite end up happening...)

Today was nursery assistanting day, which unfortunately coincided with the jet lag hitting me. So I woke up to a phone call from my boss 15 minutes after school had opened to the children asking me if I was going to be coming into work that day. (!) An hour and 15 minutes later I arrived just in time to help set up the nursery's English Tea Party. Which was both delightful and adorable. We set up tables outside and put flags on them as table cloths. Each of the nursery classrooms made different foods so we had cucumber sandwiches, flag bedecked fairy cakes, frosted biscuits, crisps, Victoria sponge cake, etc. The children were all wearing crowns and it was both very cute and very British.

The area around the Royal Parks is getting absurd. Yesterday I went to go check out the media circus outside Buckingham Palace. There's a whole structure that's been built there to house all of the television crews. Lots of fancy lighting, giant boom mics, and crowds of people trying to get into the background of things being filmed. My favourite part was watching a horse drawn carriage complete with two top hatted drivers that went up and down the arcade getting filmed again and again from different angles. Don't forget to run along the side of the carriage and record the horse's hooves! Oh, you got that already? Cool.

Hyde Park has some giant screens that they were testing this afternoon as well as beer gardens (Pimm's Gardens, really. This is England after all), sausage and burger stands, and whole fleets of port-a-loos. (Still England.)

I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. The wedding is at 11am, and given my late rising this morning and the potential for transport failure, meh. We'll see.

Anyhow, that's the news from these parts. I hope you enjoy the bunting! (Edit: bunting has been removed due to annoying music and the wedding being past. Pretty dress though, didn't you think? My favourite part was the little flower girl holding her ears during the flyover. I think all weddings need a slightly grumpy youngster involved.)