London Life, Six Months

It sounds cliched by time has passed by so quickly and we marked our 6 month anniversary in London town. So far the experience has been amazing - we have started to work our way through our 'to do list', booking weekend trips, absorbing ourselves in all aspects of culture - food, people, historic sites and having a ball of fun.
This blog is a reflection on some of the highlights from living six months as Londoners, taking into account our three favourite past-times: great architecture, travel and food



A) Great Architecture
Historic buildings -  churches, cathedrals, palaces, lane-ways and castles have all become subjects of past blog posts and no doubt with 6 months left of our English Heritage membership, we will be writing about many more in the future.

The two photos here represent complete opposites in architectural design and are several hundreds of years apart in age.

Norwich Cathedral 
This is a hauntingly beautiful building in the old medieval town centre. Mei was lucky to pass it almost every day whilst she was in Norwich for work

Norwich Cathedral

Lloyds Building

Fast forward several centuries and on the opposite end of the scale is the Lloyd's headquarters in central London. A place that Mei passed on the way to work in London.  This industrial looking 'inside-out' building is always visited by vast numbers of tripod carrying photographers each day and is completely amazing at night. Definitely worth a look.

Lloyd's Building, City of London

B) Travel
When you are passionate about travel, you make the effort and time to ensure it forms part of a routine. We found that a fortnight flight was about right, as it still gave us that weekend off to do the washing, catch up with friends and family in Australia and just relax instead of the hectic rush to the airport at 5am in the morning.

Our top 10 most memorable experiences in the UK and Europe within this 6 month milestone period in no particular order:

1) Paris, France
- walking along the Seine, during the day and night, eating at the cafes and restaurants and visiting the historic sites.

2) Copenhagen, Denmark
- taking a guided tour around the royal palaces and seeing the paintings of kings and queens that are related to almost every other royal family in Europe.

3) York, UK
- the Jorvik viking centre where we saw remains of a viking village and buried warriors.

4) Bath, UK
- the Roman bath-house / pump room and walking through the streets filled with Georgian architecture.

5) Dublin, Ireland
- Guinness factory led us to a new favourite beverage and we climbed up the pint-glass tower to enjoy a view of the city.

6) Oslo, Norway
- Sunset sailing cruise around the fjord with a shrimp buffet and hand-feeding seagulls.

7) Munich, Germany
- Oktoberfest - the beer, the atmosphere and eating pork knuckle, a variety of German sausages and potato dumplings.

8) Brighton, UK
- the seaside carnival atmosphere on a 28 degree day - the fresh seafood and the VW campervan exhibition.

9) Hampton Court Palace and Gardens, UK
 - taking a stroll through history and gaining an appreciation of English landscaping.

10) London, UK
- the excitement and lead-up to the Royal wedding including walking from Westminster's Abbey to Buckingham Palace the night before, and spending all day at Hyde Park with 100,000 passionate people.

C) Food
We may have noted some grievances about the quality of food in London when we first arrived. But there is one food that the English do well - Berries. Strawberries from Kent were a firm favourite during late Spring, Summer and now gradually disappearing from shelves throughout Autumn - large, juicy, naturally sweet and cheap - only £1.50 per 500g punnet. Something we know we will miss when it is time to go back to Australia.

High Tea at The Ritz London
Catching up with friends for a 'high tea' experience at the Ritz is just one of those London things Mei had to do. The tea room was elaborately decorated, the cake stand filled with scones, sandwiches and there was a choice from 17 different teas. Mei's favourites were theMoroccan Mint and the Orange Passionfruit teas.

The table setting for high tea

The little cakes

Princi Bakery, Soho

After a Saturday night out watching a show at the West-End (The Mousetrap, St Martin's Theatre), we were hit with a craving for dessert that couldn't be satisfied by our usual frozen yoghurt trip to Snog. Down Wardour St, the Princi Bakery always attracted a large crowd that had put us off visiting a number of times. However, this time we were both hungry and curious so we ventured through the doors and discovered their very recommendable passionfruit cheesecake.

Rich and buttery soft

Boost Juice, Westfield Stratford City
Saturday shopping at this newly opened shopping centre was as crazy as Chadstone (in Melbourne) on Christmas Eve when the shops open for more than 24 hours straight. After a previous weekend of beautiful sunny weather, the sun decided to hide and the temperature fell. The shopping centre was nice and warm and kept us out of the rain. Winter coats, scarfs and thermals were all the rage. As if to bring back to the taste of summer and home, we tried the Boost Juice stand that had the same menu as in Melbourne. However for £9 (approximately AUD $15) for two drinks - we won't be going back there anytime soon.

Better be worth the Boost

Other Foodie Bits

C&R Cafe is always a favourite Malaysian food destination when we are in Chinatown. Tasty assam laksa, sambal sotong and refreshing ice kachang are highlights of foods we miss from Melbourne. 

We also fell for the cheap Groupon voucher  - booking in the African themed restaurant, Shaka Zulu in Camden Town that had nice decorations, interesting food but was fairly over-priced for a night out. 

Kew Gardens

Spending a lazy Sunday at Kew Gardens is definitely something we would recommend to visitors. However, it does depend on getting lucky with the weather. Autumn was a great time for our visit, as the leaves were changing colour on the trees and it all looked very pretty.

During our day at the Gardens, we wandered around the Temperate House (one of the oldest glasshouses in the world), climbed the tree-top walk, circled around the Japanese garden and pagoda, saw carnivorous plants and the world's largest flower (not in bloom) at the Princess of Wales conservatory, photographed exotic flowers, took a introductory tour and saw trees planted from the 1700's. We also determined that chestnuts are highly dangerous projectiles - not the nut, but the prickly outer shell. 

   

Hastings

When there are too many consecutive sunny days in London, it is a certainty that the lucky streak will end soon - just when you have planned a day trip out of London and plan to do a bit of hiking. On this occasion we decided that a day trip outside of London was required and we swapped the high-rise buildings and compact conjoined townhouses for lush rolling green fields of farmland, flocks of sheep and woodlands of oak and beech. 

Our destination on this trip was Hastings, a township on the south-east coast that had views of the English Channel.  Our friend Roopa joined us as part of her training for a planned trek later on in the year. Armed with her SLR camera and Olie bringing along his, it was reasonable to assume that there would be plenty of photos to upload into this blog after the day was done.

However, we did not count on Mother Nature bringing in the 'English Summer rain' to dampen our day. Armed with rain coats and an assumption that after all it was just water, we proceeded with our rendezvous at London Bridge. That part of the trip went smoothly, we caught the National Rail to Charing Cross, ignored the fact that the train took us back via London Bridge and onward to Hastings. The single journey took approximately 1.5 hours and consisted of watching the grey clouds gather closer to our destination.

On arrival into Hastings, we found it to be a small town with a main High Street of shops, a cinema, an esplanade (very much like St Kilda) and lots of signs advertising the message 'William the Conqueror was here'. For the non-history buffs, Hastings is best know for the location of the Battle of Hastings (the tourist part is 2 stations before the town, at a place intuitively called Battle) when William the Conqueror landed in England from Normandy (France), defeated the Saxon rulers and made his way north building castles and trying to oust the Vikings (refer to our previous blog post about York).

Upon our first steps out of the train station and into the main square, the weather decided to turn a bit sour. Roopa, a veteran of many outdoor hikes was well equipped with waterproof clothing and shoes whilst Mei and Olie didn't fare as well with layers of soaked clothing. After enduring about 10 minutes of this treatment, we retreated to an Indian restaurant for lunch. The restaurant, perhaps not appealing to the traditionalists with its 'Indian Tapas' signage for a set menu course. The food was tasty, although it left Olie with some painful knock-on effects.

Our hike had been planned to start at the Tourist Information Centre. However, the pouring rain led us to ask the locals for any 'indoor activities'. A ship museum and an art-gallery were among the alternatives, but given the general feeling of discomfort in our water-logged clothing, we decided to call it a day and head back to London. All up, the round-trip on the train outlasted our actual time-spent in the town and not a single happy (or otherwise) snap was taken.

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