London - 4 days here until 22 May and we have a list of everything we want to visit. A couple of quick observations:
- 7.5million people is a lot! (some say at least a million more)
- every second vehicle on the roads seems to be a London cab
- there are soooo many smokers
- there is an incredible diversity of languages spoken in London, many more than we expected, it seems at times more often than English. And lots and lots of French. Or maybe it's just that we are only seeing the tourist areas with lots of French speakers at the rugby?
- interestingly the Olympics is fairly low key although this may change with the arrival of the Olympic flame today being 18 May. The big focus at present is the Queen's Jubilee celebrations and there's lots of preparations for this in early June
- the underground or 'Tube' is incredibly efficient at moving huge numbers of people
- we've lost count of the Rolls Royces we have seen in two days. I'm not joking.
Places visited include:
- Windsor Castle - the sense of history was quite impacting. There's no inside photos as these were prohibited. Took a free guided tour and this was worthwhile
- Wellington Arch including a nearby Australian War Memorial
- Buckingham Palace (only outside obviously)
- Harrods - twice in the one afternoon. We went in but it was so busy and so overwhelming, we had to go out, have a breather and then make another assault.
- Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens - absolutely beautiful green area in the centre of the city (where we had our Harrods breather)
- Tower of London - absolutely fascinating but sooooooo many people. Prior to coming away we purchased a London Pass which enables fast track and free entry to many of London's sights and we were thankful we had the passes!
- Thames river cruise
- Churchill's War Rooms - this was a real gem and highly recommended. History doesn't get any more real than this.
- St Paul's Cathedral - not enough time there but a beautiful living church (even saw a wedding taking place there in one of the associated chapels). It is a simply stunning building, but not over the top like some of the European Abbeys; more classical and occupying the site in one form or another for over 1400 years.
- rugby at Twickenham. The final of the Heinekin Cup between two Irish teams and an 81,000 vocal but well behaved crowd who were absolutely silent when a kick at goal was being taken. You could have heard a pin drop but in full song at other times. Great experience.
- walk past of Westminster Abbey (not open on Sundays for other than worship & we thought this was appropriate), Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, theatres in the West End (where we saw a film being made with Simon Baker - they were standing around doing nothing for a long while), No 10 Downing St (really heavy security), Whitehall
- we visited Shakespeare's Globe theatre and while we couldn't undertake a theatre tour as a play of Romeo & Juliet was being shown, we were able to tour the museum which was almost as good. The theatre has been built as a faithful reproduction using practices and materials where possible of those used to build the original in the 1500s.
One thing we didn't see much of was the sun! And it was quite chilly!