Saturday 21 April - Time for Tamasine, and Rob

Last cooked English breakfast. More servings of bacon and eggs, (I've had this three mornings in a row now) but this morning we got baked beans with it, which reminded me of home. Time to check out after repacking our bags and contemplating the weight of them. No time to worry though, we were off to meet Tamasine and Rob for brunch (that's Mrs Glassford to those from Ilam School reading this). She is due to have her baby in 10 days.

On the way to brunch I had to stop for a mandatory photo with a phone booth. It's just a shame that this one appears to have been used as a urinal the night before, hence why I am outside.




We also visited the British Museum which was just around the corner form our hotel. We saw some pretty impressive mummies.









I'm convinced this one has gold nail polish...




Even animals were mummified, this is a young bull.



This one was from 3400BC, and we thought the castles were old!


On the way back to get out luggage we came across this cute wee fellow. The video footage is very cute of him rolling around playing like a kitten.




We met Tamasine and Rob at the Convent Garden underground station for brunch.

Here we are at Covent Garden with a London cab sneaking into the picture.





Here's Tamasine with her pregnant belly - Justin made me put that one in even though my eyes are closed.

After brunch we had a walk around Covent Gardens catching up on things, comparing life in London to life in New Zealand. I've never had the urge to live and work in London. It never really appealed, but after spending some time here, I could probably manage it. Not that I am planning on doing that, it's just a thought.

Learning from our mistakes, we headed to the station with plenty of time to spare. We had just enough money to load up one more ride on the metro to the train station before returning our cards for a refund. (Thanks to Tamasine for buying me coke from Tescos because I didn't have enough money!). In fact I now only have 20p to my name. It's a good thing I have plenty of Euro, but that won't get you anywhere in London.


We are now on the train to Lille again and catching another train to Paris because it was going to be 3 times the price if we took the Eurostar straight to Paris. The time from Lille to Paris is only about another hour but it just means that we have another night of getting to our hotel after 9pm. We have four whole days here, so one of those days is going to be a cruisy one I think.


Later...
We learnt at the Lille station that school holidays have just started in France so Disneyland can wait until Hong Kong in October. I'm guess at least the children won't be on wine tours in Champagne (or so we are hoping).

Seeing as it was 10pm by the time we got to our hotel, we didn't venture far to find some tea. We found a great Japanese restaurant only half a block from our hotel, which was luck because most things were already shut. We had to laugh when we realised that we were in France, in a Japanese restaurant, ordering in English for food cooked by Chinese speaking staff. Gotta love Europe!

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Location:London, England