Harry Potter(!!!!) Festivities

One of my friends said it best: the Harry Potter series bookends our adolescence.  

When Harry was 11, and the owl arrived at Number 4 Privet drive from Hogwarts, inviting him to join the next years' class, I was about the same age.  Our journey together was just starting out.  And, like so many other children my age, I quickly became obsessed with Harry Potter.  

When Harry and his friends got a little older, and the complications of the opposite sex entered the picture, I began experiencing a similar thing.  By the time page I arrived, teary eyed, on page 759 of the seventh book, I felt that my adolescence had concluded.  I'm literally a member of a Facebook group titled "my childhood ended on page 759".  

But, with the huge success of the film series, my adolescence has been drawn out a little longer than it  probably should have been.   And this weekend, I got to be in London for the premiere of the first installment of the seventh Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Three of my friends from school flew in from Spain to see the movie in London with me.  They arrive late Thursday night/Friday morning.  I spent Friday happily playing tour guide to my friends, wandering around Westminster and the Thames path.  We hit all the usual suspects: Big Ben/Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, London Eye, Buckingham Palace, and the Imperial War Museum.  Then, we wandered to the Imperial War Museum.  What I saw was fascinating, but I need to go back before I can dedicate a whole post to it.  By the time we wandered down the Thames path and had dinner on the bank just across from St. Paul's, night had fallen.

And what a night it was!  Determined to see it on its first night, but not able to get tickets for any sort of reasonable hour, we went to the IMAX theater (the biggest screen in Britain!) at 3:30 am.  That's right, three thirty in the morning.  It was magical.  Pun intended.

We stumbled back to my room at 7:30 am and slept until about eleven-thirty.  By the time we all finally dragged ourselves out of bed, showered, and ate, we only had an hour or so before our pre-booked Harry Potter film location sight-seeing tour.  So we wandered around Hyde Park for a bit before heading to the tour.

The tour was informative, but had two flaws from my perspective.  First, I had already been to literally every place that the tour stopped.  I just didn't happen to be aware that parts of Harry Potter were filmed at those locations.  For example, parts of Borough Market were used as Diagon Alley and the Leaky Cauldron.  The Australia House inspired Gringotts Bank.  The second flaw was that the tour cost 25 pounds! That's about $40! The tour was, however, the perfect opportunity for my visitors to see a lot of London and have a Harry Potter experience. 

In terms of the film itself, I think it's definitely worth seeing.  It is, as every critic to review it thus far has inevitably pointed out, darker still than the last film.  Well duh.  It also is a bit more sexual than the first six.  Despite growing up, the film retains its trademark incredible scenery and the cast still expertly conjures it signature, awkward yet hilarious form of humor.