Old London Town

Lots of old friends to catch up with, which, as always, means lots of drinking. We arrived with the train into Waterloo, from there it was about a 300m walk to The Cut, Joz, Frase and Richelle’s house. Incredibly awesome location, and a nice spacious pad at the same time.

Had a visit to a theme park which, apart from queueing for up to 100 minutes for a ride, was excellent. Lots of roller coasters and check out this video…

After a few days Dasha flew over to join in the festivities. We managed to catch up with Stevo, Jo, Alex with 2 kids, Lyn with a kid, Sveta, Muscles, Nikita, Brooke and Toddy was in town (and in true London form) for a few days.
We did a boat trip, where the commentary included facts about the 8m tide and trout and salmon that live in the clean Thames river, to Greenwich, which was nice, but everything was brown from the dry summer. If you wanted a photo standing on the Greenwich Mean Time line you had to queue. Not for us. We avoided some other touristy stuff, because being August it was the absolute peak of tourism, people everywhere!

Called in at Borough market (good fresh food) and also Camden market, which is always an interesting place, full of alternative people/ideas and offers of drugs on the street. Also learnt that The Clink was a prison in London Bridge and is where the slang term used nowadays derives from.

We went on the Jack the Ripper walking tour, which was interesting, if you like hearing and seeing how women get brutally murdered. Went to a gig at Indigo in the O2 arena where we saw 3 up and coming bands playing. After one of our many nights out around the local area Dasha and Richelle had arguably the worlds longest pillow fight, while Toddy was missing in action… actually, missing out of action. We later found him sleeping, well, hissing, in the attic.

The cut was a great place for wining and dining, as well as boozing and bad dancing. My favourite place was the Thai restaurant that we went to one night for dinner, then again in the morning for a greasy spoon (bacon, eggs, sausages, baked beans, hash browns, chips etc.).
But the highlight of the trip, without a doubt, was the Oldest Pubs Tour. Although a few were closed around the city area for the weekend, we managed to go to about half a dozen pubs over 300 years old. And to make the day special, we dressed up in clothing not dissimilar to that which may have been worn around that era. A lot of fun, and lots of people want to talk to you (or sometimes stay far away and give you strange looks). We met some couch surfers randomly along the way, hello if you’re out there. Racing on the rickshaws was part of the fun, as was dancing crazy into the wee hours.

And that, my friends, was London!

More pictures can be found here.