London!

Before I get to London... I'll tell you something funny about trying to get to the airport in Scotland. We organised our friendly host at the hotel in Edinburgh to call us a taxi to take all five of us to the airport. Roy, Kate and I were off to London and Roy's parents were going to Paris for two nights.

We were all waiting patiently for our taxi to arrive in the morning and up drives a typical British black taxi and we all grab our bags and begin to pile into the poor car. Once we were all in - luggage included, the taxi driver has a stern look on his face and says "I think I need to call you a larger taxi". He was worried about his poor taxi being overloaded with all of us fatty's. We all sighed and began the tedious task of unloading ourselves back onto the footpath. It was rather annoying because when we asked the lady in the hotel to book us a taxi, we specifically asked her to order us a large one. Oh well, it wasn't too long before our new taxi arrived and we were on our merry way to the airport to depart the land of "tatties".

A rather short plane ride later, we arrived in the big city of London *queue the British national anthem*. We took a rather long and crowded tube ride to our hotel and chucked our bags into our rooms, freshened up and headed off into the big bright world to get some essential things done. One thing that Roy and I had to do was pick up our visa's for Switzerland whilst we were in London. It was brilliant timing with our Visa's being ready just a few days before we were to arrive in London. Before we could get our hands on our visa's, we had to do a series of rather annoying tasks. We had to find some internet access so we could to print out some application forms to fill in (the same forms we filled in when we first applied for it) Then we had to get some passport sized photographs to put on the front of the form. Then, the next day we caught the tube to the Swiss Embassy to lodge our application forms and surrendered our passports. It was a fairly quick and painless operation but we didn't get our visa's then, we had to go back there in two days to pick them up along with our passports. That's bureaucracy for you!

In the meantime, we did a bit of exploring around the big old city. I got a bit of advice from a friend living there on places to go and things to see. We did a LOT of walking... We caught a glimpse of Oxford Street and all of the fancy shopping complexes.

We saw Marble Arch.

 Walked on Park Lane.

Then we had a wander through Hyde Park which was dry and brown but still nice to walk through.

There was a cool temporary pavilion in Hyde Park near the Serpentine Gallery.

Albert Memorial.

That speck on the lawn is someone taking advantage of the sun. They love sun-baking in England!

We saw a few of the stereo-typical London sights, although I forgot to get a photo of a red telephone box...

After a nice wander through the park and the streets of London, we thought we might check out one of the many museums. We decided to check out the Science Museum which is a not as interactive as the Sciencecentre in Brisbane but it was HUGE! There were heaps of different levels with very comprehensive exhibits to look at.

There were some really cool miniatures in the medical exhibit. After staring at them for about an hour, I really wanted to learn how to make miniature models. Maybe one day, when I have lots of money to spend on the materials and a huge house to store it in.

So detailed and gruesome. They were awesome!

After wandering around the museum for a few hours, we continued walked along Brompton Rd, past Harrods then onto Knightsbridge Rd and walked down to Buckingham Palace to check out the Queens house. To our disappointment, the guards didn't invite us in for tea and scones with the old woman.

A GIANT fountain outside of Buckingham Palace.

After watching the tourists mill around for a photo of themselves standing in front on the giant black decorated gates, we walked down "The Mall" towards Trafalgar Square and the Strand.

This guy was pretending to be scary.

We stood with a crowd and watched two guards for a while to see if they would move. After a few minutes of silence and stillness, one of them stamped their foot (scaring the beejeebus out of a few nearby people) and marched back and forth a few times and then stopped and stood in silence some more.

Admiralty Arch at the end of The Mall.

Trafalgar Square.

A rather strange fountain with what looks like a vomiting merchild.

After checking out the famous square and dodging the huge crowd, we walked down Northumberland Avenue towards the Thames and walked over the footbridge to Southbank. This is where we caught our first close up view of the London Eye and iconic Big Ben and Parliament House. We stood on the bridge for a while taking in the views and watching the people walk past and the boats cruise underneath us.

Southbank was really crowded! There were HEAPS of street performers fighting for the attention of the crowds of tourists walking along the river towards the London Eye. We watched a few performers but there seemed like there was one particular group of performers that was a big crowd pleaser.. a dance group doing break dancing and Michael Jackson impersonations.

After watching for a while, we decided to see how long the line up to the London Eye was to see if it was worth lining up for. We quickly calculated an approximate waiting time and soon agreed that it probably wasn't worth the wait, so Roy and I opted for a cheaper thrill....

There was no line up for this one and it was about 10 times cheaper!

After a rather long and exhausting day, we headed back to the hotel for some pizza, beer and trashy TV.

The next morning we had our usual Tesco breakfast which consisted of some kind of croissant (my fav was almond), yoghurt, fruit and for Roy, a pint of milk. After our breaky we caught the bus to Piccidilly Circus to go to the cinemas to see Toy Story 3! Being a fan of the first two movies, I was seriously excited about going to see this movie and was not disappointed! They did it great justice, unlike most sequels. 

We walked to Leicester Square after the movie and bought our favourite lunch. A "posh cheddar and pickle artisan baguette". It seems that everyone else had the same idea of eating lunch in the park near Leicester Square because there wasn't much space for us to sit and eat so we sat on the side of the walkway next to a statue of Charlie Chaplin. While I was trying to eat my ever-so-tasty posh cheddar baguette, people stopped and admired the statue that I was leaning up against. I have a feeling that I made it into a fair few tourist holiday snaps, feeding my face.

One of the annoying things about travel is keeping track of funds. We only had my mobile phone to access the internet through the many hotspots around London and it turns out that it's not so good with internet banking. After trying to make a purchase with our credit card, we were declined.. Roy and I shared a puzzled look and got some cash from our wallet and made the payment. Concerned with our predicament, we tried to access our account on my mobile. Instead of the mobile just informing us that we can't access banking, it told us that we were entering the wrong password. Roy began to fret, thinking that maybe some scoundrel had hacked our account, stolen all our life's savings and changed the password. Deciding that it might just be the phone being stupid, we hunted down an internet cafe. Since they have so many wifi hotspots in London, the net cafe's are few and far between. After successfully finding one, we breathed a sigh of relief as we were able to access our account and realised that our primary account was just running a little low on funds. We topped it up and then headed to the pub nearby to calm the stress with a pint. aahh.. what a relief!

We were all a little tired after our big day of touring and decided it was time to head to Waterloo to meet up with Roy's parents who had just arrived after two days in Paris. When we were entering the tube station, Kate and I scanned our Oyster Cards and walked through the gates and waited for Roy. He couldn't get through the gate because his card was being declined so he tried a different gate. No luck, still declined. He asked the attendant who pointed him to the customer service window. The lady in the window took his card, scanned it and gave Roy a stern look and told him that the card had been 'disabled'. Disabled seemed to mean that if the card is stolen or lost, the owner can disable it so the person who stole it, can no longer use it. Roy kept trying to tell the lady that he was given the card by his sister but she didn't want to listen. She just took his card (along with the £16 balance) and told him to ring the hotline. Frustrated and tired after our earlier ordeal he just obliged and handed over more money to buy a new card. Ahhh.. what an adventure!

We checked out Roy's Parent's swanky hotel and admired all of the mod cons and the view that they had of London (our hotel was a little less fancy and the certainly wasn't the nice views). They had a mountain of laundry to do after their adventure and since we'd already done our laundry, Roy's Dad thought it would be easier to just go to the same laundrette that we went to. We told him the directions and he was off on his merry-way to get their clothes washed. About fifteen minutes later, Marty stumbles back in the hotel door with his dirty laundry. He said "I couldn't find a taxi and now it's too late" we all looked at each other with puzzled looks and said "it's not too late". He looked at his watch and realised that he hadn't changed his time back to London time. He sighed and picked up his laundry and headed back out the door to find a taxi. 

The next day was the day for us to pick up our visa's for Switzerland. We caught the tube over to Marylebone Station and walked to the Embassy. We handed the lady our receipts and she went in a room and came back with our passports. We thought we should give them a once-over before we headed off and we discovered that they had put the wrong dates on them. aaahh! We handed them back to the lady and told her they were wrong and she took them back into the room and came back and told us they would fix them. We thought maybe they would take another two days since it took that long the first time but after about fifteen minutes she went back in and got our passports with shiny new visa's with the correct dates. Smiling and happy that we had everything sorted for our entry into our new country, we headed back out into London City for a bit more touring. 

We went to Regents Park to have a relax on the grass where we watched some squirrels bouncing around through the gardens. There's an open air theatre in the gardens which you can hear the performance going on while you laze about on the grass.

Some of the crazy plants in the Queen Mary Gardens in Regent's Park.

The main reason we saw most of the sites we saw in London was to do with Monopoly. Walking through the famous roads and squares reminded us of playing the good ol' board game when were kids.

Relaxed and recharged after a nice sit down in the park, we set off to Brompton Road to go to Harrods to see what all the "fuss" was about. The building was MASSIVE! Once we walked in, we were overwhelmed by the shear size or the place and the amount of people busying themselves with shopping. I'm not really one for huge crowds (I'm not a very patient person) so we had a quick browse around, bought a few things (at an inflated price) and tried to get back outside before we were overcome by tourists and customers in designer clothing. Harrods used to be owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed (Dodi's Father) so there are two memorials in the shop dedicated to Dodi and Diana which were a big draw-card for tourists crowding around to snap a photo. It was an extremely pretty shopping centre but it was a little disappointing that everything they sell in there had Harrods plastered all over it. We were in the market to buy two nice mugs for a gift but couldn't find any without branding all over it. Anything with Harrods on it was bound to be about three times more expensive than something nicer without the branding. After a walk along Brompton Road we discovered a nice little boutique store that had what we were looking for.

After four days of lots of walking, eating, shopping and sightseeing around London we went to Paddington Station where we met up with Roy's Parents so we could all catch the train back to Oxford to spend our last week in the UK in the great little town of Witney.