Blogs from Hammersmith, Greater London, England, United Kingdom, Europe - page 3

hello all we've had a wonderful time in london. our flat in hammersmith has been very comfortable and convenient. only a 5 minute walk to the tube and max 30 minutes to anywhere we wanted to go. and we have been to so many places. the natural history museum, the victoria and albert museum, the maritime museum in greenwich, the theatre in the west end, buckingham palace, the tower of london, the royal pavilion in brighton, st james 's park, hyde park, regents park, little venice, camden lock and markets and you wonder why theres no time to blog??? i dont know what sort of internet we'll get in paris so hopefully i'll load up some more pics soon gotta go and pack now!!! al ... read more

Sunday 10th May 2009 Sunday the day of rest! Well, sometimes anyway...it was kind of a rough night. Everyone came back into the room at about 4.30am which is to be expected on a Saturday night but they just kept talking really, really loudly and I think one of them was smoking in the room! Ewwww. An early morning start. Caught up with Bec and Vanessa for breakfast and then decided to do absolutely nothing at all. I mean literally nothing. I organised myself a bit better and that took the better part of the day. Karen has moved out to a place for 3 weeks. A friend of hers and her partner went away for three weeks so Karen gets to rent their place for a while fairly cheaply. Lucky her! Since its Bec's last ... read more

The Oxford Cambridge Boat Race, was held today. http://www.theboatrace.org/ It was the 155th race and Oxford won. We managed to get a spot by the river about 5 minutes before the race started, which surprised me - I thought that it would be about 8 people deep, even though we were about half way along the course. The idea for a rowing race between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge came from two friends - Charles Merivale, a student at Cambridge, and his Harrow schoolfriend Charles Wordsworth (nephew of the poet William Wordsworth), who was at Oxford. On 12 March 1829, Cambridge sent a challenge to Oxford and thus the tradition was born which has continued to the present day, where the loser of the previous year’s race challenges the opposition to a re-match. The Modern ... read more

It would be silly not to spend at least one festive season in London, so this year we decided to play hosts to a big Christmas pot-luck lunch at our flat for all our 'Kiwi orphan' friends. A couple of days before, Clements and I stocked the cupboards in preparation as we knew we'd be calling family back home and going out for a few pints on Xmas Eve. Turns out that prediction was bang on, as after Joel had stuffed the turkey and I had called Nana and Grandy in Feilding and Grandy in Christchurch, we headed down to meet our old flatmates in Fulham for a few. It wasn't a big night, but we still gave it a good nudge and came home armed with a few boxes of chicken at around midnight. Xmas ... read more

My last day in New York - Friday. Had to pack my stuff up, get organised, check out, pay the lovely bill. New York is proper expensive. I wanted to take the boat to the Statue of Liberty, but the weather wasn't really behaving. It was beautiful and sunny - totally clear - but a touch brisk and pretty windy. Several locals had said that if it’s windy in the city, don’t bother with the islands…….anyhow I thought I’d go see for myself. Thankfully I could leave my bag at the hotel, and my flight wasn’t till the evening. So I walked downtown. All the way down 6th, and hung a right somewhere, and wound up at the edge of the Hudson river. On my way there I stumbled upon a bar called Walkers, who had ... read more