The Harry Potter Studio Tour

I'm absolutely terrible at keeping surprises to myself, so it was everything I could do to not blurt out where we were going on Tuesday to J. He's a major Harry Potter fan, and I secretly booked us tickets on the Warner Bros tour of the Harry Potter studio and backlot.

J gamely followed me on to the train without any clue of where we were going, but he finally figured it out when he spotted the shuttle bus waiting outside of the train station with the Harry Potter logo emblazoned all over it. Needless to say, he was pretty stoked. I was busy noticing that we were one of the very few people there without any kids. Oops.

The ticket warns you to come at least half an hour early, and we were there with ample time to kill so we grabbed some coffee and wandered around the gift shop, which had pretty much everything from the movie for sale. For reals, I saw small children running around with full-on broomsticks in their little paws. And I wonder if Voldemort knew that you can get the Sorcerer's Stone for the low, low price of 79.95.

Rather than broomsticks or stones, I was much more interested in the candy...

Too bad for me, I didn't get a chance to buy a chocolate frog before it was time for us to queue to enter the studio. The tour started out with a short film, and then the screen rose up to reveal the entrance to the Great Hall. J was nearly squealing with excitement at this point.

After the Great Hall, we wandered around with our audio guides in tow. Some familiar sets were on display...

Dumbledore's study...

 Harry and Ron's dorm room...

Potions classroom...

Umbridge's office...

And they had lots of costumes and props on display as well.

The clock from the Weasley's house...

The door leading to the basilisk...

After oohing and aahing over everything, we wandered around the outdoors bit with a butterbeer (which turned out to be cream soda with whipped cream on top) in hand and got to see the house on Privet Drive before the cold, wet weather drove us back inside.

Once inside, we did a quick tour of the Creatures room and then wandered down Diagon Alley. We saw all the familiar shops such as Ollivander's and Fortescue's and Weasley's Wheezes. I wouldn't have minded doing some shopping in these stores, but sadly, they were cordoned off.

 J was quite taken by the model of Hogwarts that closes the tour. I think he was a bit dismayed when I shut down his suggestion that we move to a flat where we could have an empty room to build our own Hogwarts model. Um, yeah, not going to happen.

I think that was the best two hours J had spent in quite some time, and I was pretty pleased with myself for having thought of it. I hope he remembers this when my birthday rolls around...

Harry Potter Night

It's been pretty quiet for a while, hence the lack of posts recently. It was one of those spells where nothing much is going on except for lot of work interspersed with some grocery shopping.

The quiet spell was finally broken last night with a Harry Potter movie night organized by J's office. In an effort to drum up some business, J's firm organized a night where their clients and family members could get together for some drinks and food at the Kua Bar at the Cumberland Hotel and then walk over to the ODEON cinema to watch the final Harry Potter movie in 3D.

I had work all day, so I met J a bit late at the Cumberland Hotel, which is right by Marble Arch station. The hotel itself is very modern with some very strange sculptures scattered about its immense lobby. The sculptures are of large men in various postures - they look a lot like those men who cover themselves in paint and stand very still in the street as passersby wonder if they're actually statues or people. Except these "men" in the lobby looked like they were floating courtesy of the steel rods drilled into their sides, so hopefully not human.

In any case, the set-up at the bar was pretty nice. There were lots of waitstaff walking around with a variety of drinks and bar food such as chicken satay and hamburger sliders. We hung about and chatted with one of J's colleague's fiance and cousin, who was visiting from Arizona. It was a bit surreal talking to a university level girl thinking of going to law school - it was all I could do to not shake her and yell "don't do it!"

After a short while, we were all herded by the hostesses towards the exit and toward the cinema, but not before J grabbed two little bags filled with Harry Potter themed candy to munch on during the movie. It was a very short walk, and we had a screen reserved for our group so we just walked right in and plopped down on the best seats we could find. Each seat had a pair of 3D glasses, a bottle of water and a bag of popcorn - yay! Each screen has much less capacity than in the US, where it's common to have stadium size seating for each screen. This room could've filled 200 people tops, and it didn't have seating right up to the ends of the room and up to the screen, which meant there were a lot fewer "bad' seats.

We had no problem finding great seats, and we thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I plowed my way through both bags of popcorn and candy, and I probably would've enjoyed the movie whether it was any good or not. Luckily, we both thought that the final movie was the best of the series, and we're both sad to see it end but it was a good end to a good series.

Now, we're off to my friend's house to play with her new German Shepherd puppy and eat authentic, home-made Indian food. Yay!