Witness for the prosecution (and better food)

Sunday (Easter Sunday) we walked around Buckingham Palace in the morning.  I got a pretty good video of the changing of the guard as they marched from their staging area in the Mews.  (Sorry, I don't know how to edit videos in Google Photos so you may want to skip to about 30 secs into it, where you start to see the marchers)

We also walked by the tailor shop "The Kingsman" which was used in the second Kingsman movie (which Jay had seen) so we had to capture that.

They weren't open on Easter Sunday, so we couldn't go in and chat with Colin Firth :-)

That afternoon we went to a production of Agatha Christie's "Witness for the Prosecution", put on at the former County of London Courthouse.  We got to sit in the visitors stalls, and experience it as if it were a real trial.

Here is where the judge sits, with liberty above him (you may notice that she isn't blinded in this statue -- not sure what that means.)

The play was excellently done.  If you hadn't read the story (it's in a collection of short stories she wrote, but is also available online as a pdf at   http://www.juliojeha.pro.br/course39cmt_pgs/The%20Witness%20for%20the%20Prosecution.pdf )
there are two well done twists at the end, and if you have only read the short story and not the play, there's still one that will get you.  It's classic Christie -- very "intellectual", but it all hinges on the personality and believability of the main characters.  For (a lot of) extra money, you got to sit in the jury box, and one person in that group read the verdict toward the end.  We very much enjoyed it.

Dinner tonight was at J. Sheekey.  On the way there, crossing Trafalgar Square, we discovered some unusual traffic lights (well, pedestrian green lights).  They were various combinations of the gender symbols.  Startling, but cute.  Apparently, they were put in for Gay Pride Week in 2016, and were kept.  Here's an interesting article that shows the different lights (we didn't happen to cross at any of the intersections that have the people running pictured)   I love it that the Brits call these "Gay traffic lights".

J. Sheekey is a very upscale (owned by the same group that owns the Ivy) fish restaurant.  Definitely a much better class of British food.  We had local oysters (called natives), a crab souffle and a mixed seafood grill.  The oysters were quite different in flavor to the ones we get in the US, as was the crab.  The salmon was the best of the seafood, but we also had halibut, sea bream and john dory and maybe one other fish.  I also got a salad for the first time in England.