Advertisement
Published: October 4th 2010
Edit Blog Post
At Heathrow we're met by our friend Elizabeth who's putting us up and has a cab waiting for us. Its great to see her and so good to have the transport organised already as we are pretty fried after flying through the night from New York. The London summer temperature on this grey day is our first taste of what seems like the cold for a couple of months.
It's the first time in London for Tessa and me, so there are some compulsory sights to see. We get the tube to Westminster ("mind the gap") and emerge to the peals of Big Ben. We jostle through the crowds outside the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. I've become a celebrity and am grabbed for an impromptu TV interview. All in a days work.
We walk down Pall Mall to St James Palace and eat a sandwich with the pigeons under Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square. There are heaps of people and good buskers and lots of place names we recognise - we're collecting all sorts of monopoly names here. Then its over to Picadilly Circus - not a trapeze artist to be seen, but plenty of
Frog interview
Buckingham Palace lights and billboards advertising musicals. We grab the tube to Tower Hill and a take a quick look at the Tower of London and the London Bridge. Back on the tube to Liz's and we finish the day with a compulsory Indian curry. Yum!
In the night there are unusual screams outside in the gardens, luckily instead of calling the police we realise they are the haunting cries of wild foxes scavenging around the suburbs.
Back in the city centre we wander beside the Thames to St Katherine's dock filled with yachts and river and power boats. They have a lock system and a bridge which retracts, and we watch the system in action as a small motor boat comes in. We walk along Brick Lane with its vintage clothing shops and multitudes of curry joints, then Spitalfields market with lots of well organised stalls under cover. Its definately a multicultural city with obvious ethnic variety in the people and the food. Traffic seems quicker and more wreckless than New York, and people seem to be in more of a hurry, but we see a great transport idea for home - hire bicycles in the central city that
you can check out at one rack and check back at another. Brilliant!
We head to South Kensington to stay with friends Janet and Chad, and have a pub meal and a great catch up, with over 10 years to cover. Spending a morning with them, we check out the Albert Memorial and Hyde Park, go to the Serpentine Gallery and grab a drink at a really unique 'pop-up' cafe. A different one is designed and erected every year and this year's one is bright red, with all sorts of cool seating areas and the red effect inside making us all look pretty weird.
We cross the Thames by footbridge and walk along the South bank with plenty going on including art galleries, theatre, bands performing, shops, pubs, book markets and buskers including string quartets, kettle drums and bongos and even a sand sculptor working on a small beach of the Thames. There is so much to see and do. When we head back to Liz's there's maintenance on the last section of the tube, so we get a bonus free transfer on a red double-decker bus to finish the journey, then its a relaxing home-cooked dinner and
Catching the tube
Piccadilly Circus catch up with Liz and Sri, another friend from home.
Its great to be in London and to spend time with friends and to see so many famous places and the impressive architecture and history.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.198s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 11; qc: 48; dbt: 0.1234s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb