Sightseeing in London

18/05/2009

We were so glad that we decided to have this extra day in London before continuing our travels. The last few days we slept very little, to make sure we use our time to sight-see, and as the saying goes “sleep when you’re dead”. We didn’t mind in the least when Jaco asked us to stay at his place till 10h00, to open for the electrician to reconnect the neighbors power. This gave us time to sleep a bit later, repack our bags for the next week and a half and make some back-ups of the photos we’ve take so far. At 10h30 when the electrician still had not shown up, we decided to do a bit of sight seeing.

We went to Tower Hill station and fount a gorgeous Italian restaurant and had the most delicious pasta we had in a long time! Best part was we could choose 2 types of Pasta in one plate! They call it the “half and half” so we had four different pastas to share!

Since we have so little time in London we had to decide what we would really like to

Inside Tower of London

see and settled on The Tower of London. The place is huge and looks like an old castle. We got our first full view of the London Bridge! It’s amazing how it lifts your spirits to see places that you thought you’d only ever see on postcards & television.

The Towers has loads of history and we just started our tour when Stefan phoned to hear what we are doing! This is awesome and we are super excited to see our friend. We decide to only pick a few parts of the Tower to see, since it’s really huge. We saw The Crown Jewels, The Ravens, The Bloody Tower, Torture instruments in the Lower Wakefield Tower, The rich colors and comfortable furnishings of the Medieval Palace, but the highlight is definably the display of King Hendry VIII’s Amour: Dressed to Kill. We were not aloud to take any photos, but the collection’s amazing. Even the armor the horses wore was fully decorated with small pictures and engravings, we were stunned by the detailed of the decorative amour, and how it “evolved” from simple shields to advanced weaponry. The amount of armor is amazing, there are more than 3 full

Tour guide giving the lowdown

floors of shiny goodies that kept Leon busy for hours. He was taken by the detail and enjoyed the information overload! We had to rush through the last floor as Leon made arrangements to meet Stefan at 15h00 and we were already an hour late, lucky he was too.

It was great to see our friend again, Stefan took us on a bus tour of the places in London we have not yet seen (Hyde Park & Globe Theater to name but a few). We stopped at another station and waited around for a couple of minutes and out of the blue appear the infamous Caroline! Yes everyone, she is not just a fiction of Stefans imagination, she is a beautiful real life lady! We’ve heard so much about her and were delighted to finally meet her. Caroline if you read this, we can’t wait to see you again! Well done Stef!

We were treated to lunch/dinner at a charming place called The Old Ship; we can recommend this to anyone and everyone. We started with scallops in beetroot & grape chutney, after that Melinda had duck for the first time in her life, it has crispy skin

On the Tower wall

and was delicious, if she’ll ever eat it again is yet to be decided, especially since we saw some ducks swim by on or way home. For desert we shared a cheese platter! To die for! We simply love cheese, it went down exceptionally well with the second bottle of wine (we can’t remember if it was Spanish or Italian, but it was great).

We had a great time but arrived back at home only at 01h00 the next morning and we still had to pack, sleep and get up at 04h00 for our taxi.

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