London Calling

I mentioned in our last blog that I would be travelling to Ireland for a week for work. Amazingly, Ireland looked just like the inside of a Dell office building… which means that I didn’t have the chance to do any fun site-seeing while I was there. But then again, I was sent to Ireland for work and work is what I did! And I may have also eaten A LOT of delicious Irish food (potatoes every which way possible and custard topping on the desserts)! But anyway, since I didn’t get my site-seeing fix in Ireland, I vowed to spend our next few weekends touring places we, or at least I, haven’t yet seen in and around London.

View of River Shannon and King John's Castle from hotel room in Limerick

I returned from Ireland on Friday night and Saturday, Jeff turned the big 1-8. To celebrate, Karen and Jeff met us at our flat and then we headed to nearby Westfield Mall to do some birthday shopping. We visited the Apple store (sorry Dell) to pick up Jeff’s bday present. Then Karen and I went shopping while David took Jeff to the pub for his first pint.

There is really just one word to describe Westfield – AMAZING! It was just as good as, if not better than, an American mall. It had a bunch of normal stores like Monsoon and H&M and then the high-end places like Chanel and Louis Vuitton. The movie theatre actually assigns you seats, and gives you the option to pay a premium for VIP leather semi-recliners. There was one pretty ridiculous part to the mall, though. One of the stores had 2 lines out front. One line was formed around a velvet rope. The second line was a line to get into the velvet roped line. “Which store was that?” you ask. No, not Gucci. No, not Prada. It was… Hollister. Hollister? Yes, Hollister. You would not believe the number of kids (and some adults) waiting to be admitted into Hollister. I wanted to run up to those stupid kids (and adults) and tell them, “HOLLISTER’S NOT THAT GREAT! STOP WASTING YOUR TIME IN THIS IDIOTIC LINE!” Personally, I think their clothes are WAY overpriced and really bad quality. I don’t care how cute they are, I wouldn’t waste my time standing in 2 lines to get a chance to buy a shirt from Hollister. There were perfectly good comparable UK stores without velvet roped lines. Dumb kids (and adults).

The best part of Westfield is the restaurant selection. Ankeeta, my college roommate of 3 years and maid of honor, visited us last week. We were headed out to dinner on Thursday but weren’t sure what we were in the mood for, so we headed to Westfield. There are so many good restaurants at Westfield. There’s a place called Yo Sushi! The sushi plates travel on a conveyor belt in circles around the bar. You just pick up whatever you feel like as it comes to you. Once we tried Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Yum! That has replaced my Red Robin fix, though the selection is not as great as Red Robin. On Thursday we went with Wahaca with Ankeeta for some Mexican and it wasn’t bad. Speaking of Mexican food, for Jeff’s birthday dinner on Saturday night, Karen took us to the new Chipotle in downtown London. Jeff had actually just gotten back from America, but he was still dying to try it out to see if it tasted like the real thing. And it did! I asked the manager where he gets the Tabasco because I can’t seem to find it anywhere here and I’m not going back to the states until October. He was nice enough to give me a bottle of theirs – for free! So nice! We will definitely be heading back there often.

Since Friday was spent sleeping after my long week abroad, and Saturday at Westfield mall, my London excursions started on Sunday. It was a beautiful day out, so we strolled through Hyde Park – end-to-end. We started at the Wellington Arch, which was free to get into with the National Heritage Membership David got for his birthday. We ended our walk on the other end of the park at Kensington Palace.

Wellington Arch

The palace is currently undergoing a major makeover, so most of the wings are closed. I actually didn’t know that the palace remained in use after Buckingham replaced it as a royal residence. In fact, it was Princess Di’s official home. Even though much of the palace is off-limits, officials have put together a fun game to draw in visitors. The object of the game is to find 7 princesses that lived in the palace by travelling from room to room searching for clues. As you can imagine, David was not exactly thrilled to participate in this site-seeing adventure, but we ended up having a good time and we aced the test by correctly naming all 7 princesses!

These giant bushes outside the palace look like big green Dots! 

When we came to London back in April to find a flat, our relocation agents gave us a ton of maps and tour and restaurant guidebooks. Wagamama was voted the #1 UK restaurant last year in many of those guidebooks. So yes, I’ve been dying to try it. Strangely, there’s a Wagamama in the basement of Harvey Nichols, a high-end department store near Harrods. After a long day walking through the park and palace, we chose to take a double-decker bus back down the high street to the restaurant. Believe it or not, that was my first time on a double-decker bus. So of course I made David take a picture!

The bus looks like it's going really fast in this pic - but it wasn't!

Dinner was delicious of course. I had a teriyaki steak bowl and David had some kind of ramen, curry chicken noodle bowl.

This past weekend we were planning on going to Hampton Court, but that is really a whole-day affair and we wanted to sleep in after our long weeks at work. So instead, on Saturday we visited the Natural History Museum. It wasn’t nearly as cool as I thought it would be (my reference being “Night at the Museum” with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson). It was fun, though. We saw lots of big animals like lions, whales, dinosaurs… and a giant lobster!

I don't know what that expression means....

After the museum we ate at a nice Italian restaurant on Exhibition Road. The museum district has so many great little food shops! There are a ton of crepe bars, a cheese store, and a Belgian waffle shop! David is not a huge sweets fan, but I almost always get dessert. I declined dessert at the restaurant because I wanted one of those Belgian waffles I spotted earlier. David said he was too full and he would just have a bite of my waffle, but the moment we stepped into the shop and smelled the waffles baking and chocolate warming, David turned to me and declared, “I’m getting my own!” So he enjoyed a chocolate cream waffle, while I chose the chocolate covered cherry waffle.

While we walked home that night, we made plans to wake up early on Sunday and head to Hampton Court via the Richmond train. However, there were problems with the District line tube on Sunday morning and we ended up waiting almost an hour for the stupid tube to stop at our station and take us to the Richmond train station. At that point, I was so frustrated with public transportation that I decided we HAVE to get a car. So we vowed to purchase a car (and learn how to drive on the opposite side of the road – scary!) by the end of October. That will also make it easier to get places with Kirby, like the dog park or vet or boarder (aka Karen), when he comes over in November.

Moving on, we never did make it to Hampton Court because we lost too much time waiting for the tube. Instead, we chose to stay closer to home and see Kew Gardens. Kew Gardens are the Royal Botanical Gardens of England. The place is absolutely enormous! It was about a 4 mile walk around the park, which would have taken way too long and I didn’t wear my tennis shoes, so we bought tickets for the tram. It was actually a great decision because our driver gave us a tour of the park as we cruised around. We saw the Japanese pagoda, which used to be the tallest building in England and covered in gold. We also saw the largest indoor plant in the world, a Chilean palm tree. We climbed up to the tree tower, a circular walkway above the trees. I have to admit, it was pretty scary. The walkway was swaying a little bit in the wind. There were actually little kids screaming and crying that they wanted to go back down. David was screaming and crying on the inside.

One of the glass houses inside Kew

A section of the treetop walkway

Kew Palace is on the grounds of Kew Gardens, go figure! I hadn’t heard of Kew Palace before our tour of Kensington Palace a week before. Interested to find out more, we bought tickets and headed inside the tiny palace. We ended up being the only visitors there! One of the guides remarked that we had the whole place to ourselves. The palace was King George the 3rd’s home. He married Queen Charlotte and they had 15 kids! The palace was too small to house all those kids, so only the girls lived in Kew. The boys lived elsewhere. We learned that King George suffered from porphyria, which used to be called “madness.” We saw the locked door to the room where they used to chain him up during his “fits.” King George eventually went blind and people thought he was so crazy that he spent the last 10 years of his life in isolation at Windsor Castle. In Queen Charlotte’s bedroom, we saw the chair she died in. No one told King George his wife had died. They had to put straw outside the castle so he wouldn’t hear the funeral procession passing by.

Kew Palace

We’ve learned a lot over the past couple of weeks. Museums are free in England and we have the membership with the British National Heritage, so we can easily continue to learn more! Monday is a holiday in the UK, so to take advantage of the long weekend, we’re headed to Bath for a relaxing spa getaway. We are taking a tour to nearby Stonehenge on Sunday, though, so we can soak up some more culture!