The last couple of days have been great.
Firstly, I've decided to order my bike from the US. It was another day and a half of ringing around customs officials and filling out paper work, but I think it'll be worth it. It's a long story and I won't bore you with the details. Thanks Rymill for your help in my decision.
So since I last wrote we've finally got around to looking around London.
On Friday Jen went for a run from Brixton into the middle of London and she saw lots of cool stuff. I was still at home sorting out the friggin' bike. But that afternoon I finally got myself out the door and we tubed it into London and checked out Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, Big Ben and the houses of parliament, and we also went to a service at Westminster Abbey.
The National Gallery was amazing; we're not big art buffs, but the works of da Vinci, Raphael, Van Gogh, Monet, and Renoir as well as heaps of others we hadn't heard, of blew us away. And yes, we bought some cool souvenirs.
I was hoping to hear some great traditional choral music at Westminster Abbey. We were pleasantly surprised however to find that it was a 40 year memorial service to the death of Martin Luther King Jr. So there were some awesome black gospel choirs, as well as representatives from many religions including buddhists, sikhs, and jews. I'm sure there were others but we're just ignorant plebs. Anyway the service was actually really uplifting and we felt all warm and fuzzy afterwards.
On Saturday we slept in and had a slow start to the morning. Then we headed into town. On the way, there was a building on fire. It was opposite the Brixton Underground station so we couldn't get in. So we sat and gawked at the fire for a little while. It was pretty huge; biggest fire we'd seen in real life (we didn't get to see the Mire Fyer).
We went for a walk along South Bank and there were heaps of buskers and those funny statue-people (you know the ones who paint themselves all silver/bronze/gold and stand really still... good fun.
Checked out the Tate Modern. Modern art is still a mystery to me. I loved Picasso and Bacon's work, but there was some really random shit there with blurbs that were full of quite long words that didn't really make much sense. We had fun laughing at them though.
Headed over the Millenium bridge which was cool cos it was raining so you could run and then slide along the slippery surface... then headed to Covent Gardens to check out the shops and pubs.
We met up with Lou McGruther who was a friend of ours in Cairns; she's a pharmacist who's on a working holiday and had just moved to London. Good times. It was bloody cold standing outside and waiting to meet her outside the tube station, and the warmth of the pubs and restaurants we visited was welcomed.
We didn't know whether we were being soft or not with the cold, but our feelings were certainly justified when we awoke this morning, a blanket of snow covering the ground and trees; we could hear kids throwing snow-balls at each other and when we looked out the window they were doing the rolling a giant snowball thing along the ground. It was tres cool.
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