Sunday, January 6, 2013

London Fun in the New Year

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2013 in all its newness. I have to say that I started the year pretty well and had an awful lot of fun so far.

On the 31st, while my roommates made their way back from Munich, I went over to Christa's. I took the Tube and met her at the station at her end, then walked to her place which was just up and around, more or less, from the station. We made a pit stop at the grocery store for supplies and, once I'd settled in and been given a tour of the apartment (flat) Christa shares with two other women, we had breakfast...or, rather, we had scrambled eggs, sausage and home fries at two in the afternoon. Make of that what you will.




What followed was a movie marathon - I'd brought my DVDs and laptop (Christa has set her laptop to play UK DVD) with me. We paused for supper and, of course, there was lots of chatting. It was lots of fun. For the first day of 2013, we went over the Horniman Museum which was, literally, around the corner from Christa's. Way back in the nineteenth century, Horniman was a man with a thing for collecting - his main obsessions being musical instruments and insects - and when he died he donated his collections and his house to some historical society or other. Said historical then elaborated on the collections - adding in more natural history exhibits and an aquarium depicting various British water-based habitats. It was great! Then, on Wednesday, we went over to Hyde Park and checked out Winter Wonderland. There were bunches of artisan and souvenir stalls, a great big ferris wheel (which would have been even better if not for the fog, LOL), and loads more to see and do. On the way there, we even got lost and found Buckingham Palace.

I finally returned to the house on Thursday afternoon. Fast forward a few days and on Saturday I found myself spending the day with my pen pal over by London Bridge. We walked down to Borough Market and sampled its fares - it had oodles of stalls offering various sorts of homemade sausage, cheese, tea, preserves and more. Afterward, we walked down past the Globe Theatre (of in SHAKESPEARE fame) and took a tour of the Tate Modern where we made snide remarks about the non-art.

After wandering about Bank Street and finding absolutely no food options available, we grabbed the tube over to Leicester Square and had pizzas at Pizza Hut where we chatted loads, of course. We then walked over to Buckingham Palace because Jeeves wanted to show me these two particular statues that were part of the Queen Victoria monument, one of which holds a sickle, the other holds a hammer. Took us quite a while to find them too, although they were huge and out in plain sight as it turns out. We then went to see Big Ben and over to 10 Downing Street. It was a phenomenal day...even if Jeeves did take every opportunity to tease me about my having not having explored London nearly as thoroughly as he would have expected.

GPS void again next week - so loving the stress these weeks bring with them but, hey, I've decided to let it go and try no to worry as much. Cue sigh here.

Happy New Year!

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