Everywhere we go you hear a lot of foreign accents, London is really a cross roads for lots of different nationalities. Well we are back in an English speaking county again, or are we? we are not hearing much English spoken, lots of German and eastern European, not quite what we expected to hear.
We catch a cab to the hotel and get stuck in traffic for 30mins, turns out to be a 35 pound (70 dollar) cab ride!!!! The hotel is in Earls Court; this place is full of hotels and was popular with Aussies back in the 70's.
Our hotel was chosen off the internet and was a typical 3 story London terrace house. When we booked I made sure it had an elevator because when we stayed in London 26 yrs ago we stayed in a 3 story place with no elevator and were put on the top floor, guess what we were once again put on the top floor, ha ha I thought this time we have an elevator. The elevator was the smallest lift I have ever seen, it was about 1m wide. Only 1 person and 1 suitcase at a time, or 2 skinny people at a time!!!!! it was still better than the stairs.
We did the the tour around London on an open top double decker bus and hopped on and off for most of the day, this is a great way to see the sights. We had a short river cruise included so we really got to experience a lot on the first day. The weather was pretty grey and overcast, not as nice as sunny France, but at least it wasn't raining and not as cold as when we did the same thing in Paris.
Dinner was exciting, there are a lot of restaurants in Earls Court with many different choices, France had many really nice restaurants but not much variety, here we had Asian, Indian, Mexican etc....Indian won out in the end (the aroma of curry is hard to ignore) we had a selection of curries, and beer, and of course ate way too much. Good curry was something we had been craving. We rolled out of the curry house with a full bellies and smiling faces.
The next few days were spent visiting museums or shopping and just generally soaking in the big city atmosphere, after rural France it was a big change, we decided we prefer France than London. London is too busy and too expensive. After one rainy afternoon we decided to go and see Robin Hood at the movies. 2 standard seat tickets, 1 popcorn and 2 drinks, total cost 30 pounds ($60 Australian), not including the bus fares there and back. The movie was great and we really enjoyed the night out.
We had to do the tourist thing and see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. It was really quite spectacular even for an Army musician; the colour, uniforms and pageantry are just captivating. There were 2 bands, the Scots Guards and I think the other was the Household Cavalry. This ceremony is very popular and the crowd was huge. Sadly we found out that the day we arrived in London was the Queens birthday and also the Trooping of the Colours, now that would have been spectacular to see.
We had a miss-hap on the tube train, the tube system is fantastic for getting around a big city, once you understand the map it's great. We were traveling home at peak time and after going down 2 or 3 levels in a station we saw the train waiting on the platform so quickly jumped on then we heard an announcement that sounded like this train was being diverted so we quickly jumped off again. Then the announcement was repeated and it turned out to be the right train so we jumped back on, however only Chris made it on before the doors closed and left me stranded on the platform. All this happened in about 20secs, and there was Chris wide eyed and startled looking back at me through the train window. I could only hope she got off at the right stop, I had the tickets!!!! I waited about 15mins and 3 trains later for the correct one to come along, I nearly missed out on boarding due to the peak hour crush of people; it all ended well and I caught up at the right station with Chris, we headed straight for the pub and a beer after that little journey. We enjoyed the few days in London it was a total change from rural France, but not somewhere we could stay for too long.
Off now on the fast train north to Runcorn to visit family, boy am I excited, it's been 26yrs since I last saw some of them.
