A Big Day Out

Friday was a day for lots of walking. From my usual stop at Fenchurch Street station (near Tower Hill) I walked to the Bank of England. I took a slight detour through Leadenhall Market which is a beautiful old arcade, made up mostly of cafes, bars and restaurants. By the time I got there it was lunch time and chockers with suits on their lunch breaks.

Then it was time for St Paul's Cathedral.

Obviously there were no photos allowed inside so the exteriors will have to suffice. I spent hours inside - by the time I left it was getting dark outside. I'm far from a religious person but you can't help but feel the atmosphere once your inside. The interior is beautiful. I never realised the images on the ceilings were mosaics; I always assumed they were paintings. The uppermost dome is painted though because when it was being commissioned they felt mosiacs would have been too 'Catholic'. I also didn't know that the dome we see on the London skyline is not the dome we see from the inside. There are two structures on top of each other.

It completely baffles me as to how they managed to do all those mosaics and paintings, the carvings too. They are so intricate and delicate and beautiful.

I underestimated just how high the ceilings were until I got up to the Whispering Gallery. As cool as the novelty of being able to whisper against the wall and someone on the other side of the gallery hearing you is, the walkway is very narrow and looking through the narrow bars of the hand rail is very unnerving. Needless to say I didn't stay long. I then took some very narrow and very steep stairs up to the Stone Gallery. The view from the Stone Gallery looks something like this...

It's a shame there were renos happening.

Not the most exciting photo but this is the, rather famous, Millenium Bridge. The building behind it is the Tate Modern Gallery

Crazy uni kids protesting something or other (there are considerably fewer tents than when we walked past on New Years)

After finally dragging myself of way from the Cathedral I headed over to the Tate Modern which meant adventuring over the Millenium bridge, which has a view like this...

I had very good intentions of visiting the Tate Modern but by the time I got there I was starving so I decided to look for somewhere to eat and then I just kept walking. I walked all the way along the south bank, past the eye and all the theatres, across the bridge and past the Big Ben. This is what I saw...

I ended up walking all the way back down past Somerset House before hoping on the tube and heading home. It was a very long day with lots of walking but definitely worth it.

LDN

Last Thursday I ventured in to town by myself for the first time. It wasn't anywhere near as daunting as I expected. In spite of the fact that there are about 734 different train lines running into the city, it was suprisingly easy to navigate around, if not also rather expensive. I headed back to Tower Bridge since my camera battery died on me the first time I was there.

Sorry for the photo overload - I couldn't decide which ones to post. I took far too many. Also, please notice how quickly the sky changed. I put my camera away when the gale force winds and rain arrived about 10 minutes after that last photo.

From Tower Bridge I got the tube into Oxford Circus. I was hoping to finally get some shopping in but it was a bit disappointing to be honest. The end of the sales meant that there really wasn't much left worth looking at, and I don't like navigating through the hoards at the best of times. Instead I headed to Carnaby Street which is much more relaxed and much more my pace.

After I gave up on the tourist center that is Oxford Circus I went for a walk. I'm not exactly sure how long I walked for but it was long enough to get sufficiently lost in Soho. It was great. It's a pretty cool area, multitudes of sex shops aside haha. Eventually I found my way back to Oxford street and headed home.

It was too busy to constantly stop and take photos around Oxford and Piccadilly Circuses but I did manage a few instagram snaps which you can see here.

Observations

1. England should be called Fezland or at least Fordland. There are Fiestas and Focuses everywhere!!! It's no wonder when you see the size of the Dagenham factory - put a few suburbs together and your getting close. It is huge!!!!

2. The English drive like they all have death wishes, that or they have serious thrill issues. Case in point, our bright red double decker bus got hit by a car on Monday. The driver tried to change lanes into the bus, without his indicator, and then tried to blame the bus driver.

Pedestrians are crazy too, rarely do they look both ways when crossing a road and no one has time to wait for the little green man to tell them it's safe to cross. They like to live on the edge and cross whenever they see a gap between the cars them deem long enough for them to run through.

3. The amount of rubbish along the highways and in the streets is amazing. I never appreciated how clean Brisbane is until now.

4. You can't walk 5 minutes without seeing a starbucks.

5. The English constantly talk about the weather, like it's surprising that it's cold and rainy...?? It's only fitting then that the weather readers get really in to presenting the weather; it takes them about 15 minutes to do.

6. Everything at the supermarket is wrapped in plastic - even the fruit and veg.

7. I'll never get used to seeing the grog isle at the supermarket.

8. There doesn't seem to be a 'walk on the left' rule here.

9. Their traffic lights are upside down. And they use the orange light to tell you when the light is about to turn green, not red.

10. There is just as much rubbish reality tv here as there is at home. 'Desperate Scousewives'...need I say more??

...the beauty in our London skies

Ok so in my last post I think I left off at Somerset House, which was lovely. The mulled wine was definitely a new experience and not one I think I could repeat very often, unless in small doses. Since the event is sponsored by Tiffany's all the hot drinks are served in Tiffany's cups. Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of them buuut I have heard that the Tiffany's hot chocolate is rather amazing so a return trip is definitely in order.

From Somerset House we walked up to Convent Garden which has definitely been one of the my favourite places so far. To compare, it is kind of like two massive Brisbane arcades running parallel to each other. They open up on to a huge court yard which has, yet another, massive Christmas tree. The decorations inside are my favourite though.

After Covent Garden we headed to China Town for dinner before heading to the Embankment to begin the three hour wait for the fireworks which looked something like this...

The fireworks were absolutely amazing and a very fitting end to a very long and jam-packed day. My next post will cover New Years Day and Monday. Hopefully I'll manage to catch up with my posting some time soon.

Will you let me romanticize...

So the last few days have been rather busy. Saturday was one long and busy day. We headed in to town for the day for lots of sight-seeing.

I spent quite a while wandering aimlessly through the National Gallery, which thankfully is free. The building is amazing, and inside is equally so. I confess I lost my way more than once; there a just so many rooms. The paintings are exquisite, but that goes without saying really. The rooms are divided up by century and it was really interesting to see the difference in style between time periods. The 14th century work was often much more vibrant in colour but far less realistic in terms of dimension and proportion. The figures are almost cartoon like.

From the gallery we did lots of walking. Honestly, we've seen so much I can't remember what order everything came in. We did manage to fluke seeing the dismounting parade of the Queen's Horse Guard on Whitehall which was pretty cool. We initially thought it might have been the changing of the guard but I looked it up and that only happens in the morning. Still, it was pretty good timing. Unfortunately my photos aren't very good as there was a substantial crowd by the time we got there.

From there we continued up Whitehall and looped around, past Big Ben, and then back down along the Embankment. It was about 4 o'clock by this time and they were already closing off roads and bridges for the New Years fireworks. There were hundreds of people already lined up along the Embankment with blankets and chairs.

We walked all the way back down to Somerset House (somewhere I've wanted to go for a long time) to see the courtyard where an ice rink is set up. There is also a beautiful christmas tree (one of MANY around London) and a Tiffany's pop up shop. We left the ice skating to the experienced, opting instead for mulled wine and some sideline spectating.

I think this post has been long enough so I'll be back tomorrow with some more photos and details of the rest of the day. 

*ps. Dad, dorry I haven't edited these yet - I know most of them are crooked. I will get round to it, I promise.