More London, with some universities and beaches thrown in.

Hello everyone!

Ok, I know it's been a little while since I last posted, but look on the bright side, now you gets lots of photos!
First I thought I'd give you an idea of the place we've living in. It's a one bedroom apartment, and the picture you see here is the living room. It's got 2 sofa beds, as you can see, so 3 of us crash out here. 2 people get to share the bedroom, which is fairly small, but has a good sized bed. Out the door you see there is the very small veranda, from which you get the veiw I've already posted.

The place has a bathroom with a shower-bath, which is an alright size. The crazy thing about the place is the size of the kitchen. Below is a picture, shot through the doorway. The place is insanely small, such that it's really only comfortable for 1 person, 2 people if you're quite friendly, and 3 people only if you have no real desire to breathe. In it somehow fits the oven and cooktop, microwave, sink, fridge and washing machine. No dishwasher or drier. So, there you go.









Our days have been intermingled with day trips out of London, or with meandering around London. One of my highlights was when a couple of us went to the British Museum. This is definately a place to go people!
Easily, for me, the best thing to be seen here was the Rosetta Stone. It was a bit crazy, we just walked into the Egyptian scultpure section, and there was the Rosetta Stone, right there in front of us. Looking at the picture, you can clearly see the 3 different sections of text, where the same thing has been written in 3 different languages. At the top, where the most text is missing, is ancient Egyptian Heiroglyphics. In the middle is another Egyptian language, that which most literate Egpytians could read, and at the bottom is Ancient Greek, the official government language of the time.







Another day a few of us headed off to Cambridge, a short 50 minute train ride. Cambridge was beautiful! It had parks all over the place, and the Colleges were without exception beautiful old buildings. Here you can see the front of Kings College. Many of the Colleges were closed to the public, since it was an exam period, and they all charged entry anyway, so we didn't go into any of them, other than to shoot snaps through the open front gate. Most of them, including Kings, have a large central courtyard, with a perfectly manicured lawn. So most of that front wall you see there just walls of a courtyard, which you could see straight through the windows. Anyways, Cambridge was a lovely town to just meander about, soaking up the ambience and lounging in the park.








Back to another day in London, and we visited, among other things, Westminster Abbey. I was dumbfounded. You walk in, and you literally cannot help but walk over the graves of people. Some of the graves have had the engraving on them worn off by thousands of feet, whereas some are well maintained, and some quite new. Among the notable peoples graves I stepped on were Charles Dickins and Jeffery Chaucer, but for me the big one was the scientists. There they have the graves of Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Faraday and Dirac among others, and you quietly walked over all of them. You couldn't take any photos inside, so here's one of John standing outside it. Shame really, as you could fit in most of the scientists' graves in a single shot, they like to cram all of them together.






And of course, after talking about a day in London, now we have a day out of London. This time all of us (except Sammi) headed off to Brighton, also taking about an hour by train. I know this beach looks pretty, but in fact the entire beach is made of smooth rocks. It is actually remarkably comfortable to sunbathe on, and we agreed that the rocky beach is superior to the sandy beach if you just want to lay about. This is of course what all the English were doing, laying around on the rocks in swimmers, or more commonly just underwear. They also do this in the parks a lot as soon as the sun comes out, so Warren should be sure to include some summer time in London in his next travels.








Ok, now a breif summary of some of the other things we've been up to. John and I went meandering around Harrods for a day, which is enourmous! Among the notable potential purchases was a 114,000 pound watch, a 3,700 pound bottle of wine, a 14,000 pound feature bathroom tile by Versace, and 1,500 pound toy poodles. We didn't buy anything.

John is currently off at a music festival with one of our housemates. The headline act is 30 seconds to Mars, which those two are fans of. Since I've never listened to them, or any of the other bands on the lineup, I decided to stay at home with the others.

Upon arriving back at the apartment this afternoon we discovered this hole in the ceiling over the stair case leading up to our apartment (we're on the third floor). After a bit of thinking we realised that this hole is actually immediately below our bath tub. Apparently John's showers have been taking too long, and the water has leaked out and caused the ceiling to fall in. Once the owners of the place removed the side panel from our bathtub, you could actually see directly into the hallway below, although that has no been thoughtfully covered up by a piece of cardboard. We're not sure exactly when this is going to get fixed, but I think we're all afraid to have a shower now.





And I think that's about it for me then. This Wednesday we are heading over to Belfast, where we will stay a night before moving over to Enniskillen where John's family resides. London has been very cool, and all the day trips we've had; Bath, Cambridge, and Brighton, have been really good, although different from each other.

Despite the poor weather on the first day or two, it's been unseasonably warm here. It maxed out at 26 today, and the suns been shining down on us almost the entire time we've been here, with only a few showers. Most of us came back from Brighton a little sunburnt, and John and I are awefully tempted to buy ourselves a pair of shorts!

Have fun everyone, the next time I post, I'll undoubtably be in Ireland.

Bye!
Bob

Some Baths and some Stones

Ok, well don't you people feel spoilt? I only put up a post a couple of days ago, and here I am doing it again!

For those people that have been following the blog so far, I'm sure you've already looked at the photo to the left and said to yourself "Oh damn, those people are back, AGAIN?!". That's right, Team Duamo has been reformed. I'm sure you already knew that, but now there's photographic evidence, designed to make you all cringe and run away.

Anyways, as I'm pretty sure I mentioned in the last post, we headed off on a bus tour to Bath. Sitting on a coach with this bunch of social misfits had an eery sense of deja vu, the only thing that would have made it more creepy was if we were sitting at the back with a few loud Americans.

On a side note, for the car spotter, England is the place to be! On the trip there and back I spotted 4 Rolls Royce Phantoms, 8 Aston Martin DB9s (or as I like to call them, sex on wheels), about half a dozen Ferraris, 4 or so Lamborginis, perhaps a dozen Maseratis, and maybe 15 Bently Contis. Porsches must be sold under a "Buy 12, get 3 free" policy, and only commoners drive cars like Jags, BMWs, Audis or Mercs. All the Aston Martins, they make me druel.

Anyways, we did actually get to Bath, and so we went for a walk through the baths, which these days is a museum. The baths were built by the Romans, so they're kind of old. Oh, and I'm not really sure if I'd want to go swimming in them, since the water comes out of the natural spring at 46 degrees, green (as you can see) and leaves red iron deposits on the walls of the baths. But they say it's theraputic, and a gift from the gods, so who am I to argue? So the baths were pretty cool, with a nice audio tour to guide us around. Only after three quaters of the way through did we discovered that Sammi had decided to listen to the childrens' guide, because she claims the guides sound cheerier than for the adults.





The township of Bath itself is really pretty, because in the middle basically all the buildings are made out of "Bath Stone", which is this nice honey coloured stone. It gives the town this really nice uniform feeling. I sampled the local Ale, which was good (of course) and we just walked around for a bit, before getting back on the bus to go back home. Here's a shot of the central square of bath to give you an idea of the buildings.









On the way back, the bus made a toilet stop for an hour or so. The place that the bus stopped had all the requirements for a good toilet stop, a cafe, and free toilets. Oh and they also had these rocks sitting on the hill just across the road from them. We figured we may as well go look at the rocks, because lets face it, rocks are cool. We walked around them, decided that they were cooler than usual rocks, and took a few photos of them. It was then time to get on the buss and head home.






(Note: in order to avoid the idea that I found the rocks disappointing, may I just state for the record that I didn't. I found the rocks very very cool)




But that was yesterday. Today we walked around the Camden Town markets. The place was crazy, clearly the place to be on a Sunday, especially I guess on a bank weekend Sunday. The Camden town markets aren't really A market, but rather heaps of small to medium markets, going all over the place, with regular shops all over the place as well. The end result is big, disorientating, and hectic, just what any keen market shopper would love. I'd recommend them for someone coming to London, but be warned, emo's abound!

In response to requests for photos of the apartment, I'll try and remember to take some tonight, and put them up next time. Until then, everyone have fun, I'm off to find the fridge back at the apartment, and more particularly, the beer in it.

Bye, Bob

London

Ok guys, how's it going?

Good news, we've reached the UK, meaning that I finally get to type on good keyboards again! Hooray for typing at a decent speed, rather than taking twice as long as it should to put up a blog post.

So..... when I left you, we were in Antwerp, home of diamonds. Well, simply put, we caught a plane to London city airport, and so now we're in London, home of stupid guard hats, some queen-ish person, and english-speaking people. Let me tell you, it's a bit surreal finally making it to a country where english is the primary language. We haven't been in one of those since Australia, actually, so it's a welcome change.

We're sharing an apartment with Team Duamo (minus Vanessa, who already lives in London) from Italy, so that's fun. Above is a photo of the veiw from out apartment. It's nice and close to an Underground station, so getting into town is nice and simple.

So far we've only really had one day here, and we just spent that strolling around London. The weather was appropriately english, meaning it was cold and raining on and off. As such a lot of my photos didn't come out well due to bad lighting, but I've done my best.

I'm sure the photo below gives you an idea of the lighting we had. Note that this is with flash. Anyways, at least you can kind of see me, and make out the sillouettes of Big Ben, the houses of parliament, and the London Eye in the background.





We walked right under the London Eye, but decided not to go for a ride on it that day. Perhaps another time. The whole thing is so unbalanced it makes me shiver, but it seems to stay upright. I decided to get a bit artistic with the photography, some impressive skies helped.















Walking across the river, the sun revealed itself for long enough for me to shoot this shot off by sticking my arms through a fence, hence no people in it.












The night ended by us heading off to meet up with Michelle, a friend of Angie and Sammie's. She lead us to a nice pub called 'Hornimans on Hayes', which I get the feelig she chose purely for the comical value of the name of the place. But they did have a nice selection of English Ales, of which I tried a pint of one of them. I forget the name, but I remember thinking two things; namely that the beer was pretty damn good, but that this english thing of room temperature beer was not pretty damn good. Admittedly it was cold enough that room temperature was pretty cold, but John reckons it needed to be about 6.5 degrees colder.

The place was just outside London Bridge Underground Station, so I took a quick walk down the warf and snapped this of London Bridge at night time. Now I would like everyone to admire my beautiful use of shutter speed and stabilising handrails, and go 'Ooooooh, Aaaaaah'


Ok, well that basically sums up what we've been up to so far. We've got 2 weeks here, and the internet cafe is close by, so stay tuned for a couple more posts. Tomorrow we're going on a bus tour of Stongehenge and Bath, so that's something you can look forward to. We'll also be heading off to Cambridge, as well as all the obligatory London sites.

Anyways, have fun people, I'll let you know what's happening when I can be bothered :P

Bye all,
Bob (John's vedging in the apartment)