Bits of the UK (well, London and Scotland)

Here we are again, once more writing our blog about a place that we've long since departed! Oh well, we'll catch up, ...we hope...but from now on, our posts may be more photo based and less prattling on by us. We're sure that will relieve anyone who's still actually reading this thing!
Here's a picture of London from the Waterloo Bridge at sunset: you can see the Eye and if you squint, the houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

We arrived at Heathrow from NY early in the morning on the 19th October, jetlagged as all hell. Lucky for us, we had a home away from home to go to - Rai (Eva's dad) and Yael's (Eva's stepmum) place, right in the heart of London and just around the corner from the British Museum. They love London, and they've taken us on lots of walks around central London (ususally at either breakneck speed, or with Rai taking us on suicidal traffic crossings), showing us the famous London sights and some not so famous sites (in no particular order of fame):
Somerset House

Right near where Rai works for half the year at King´s College, they used to be government offices, and soon Kings will eat them up for their own use.
Trafalgar Square

Those lions are much more impressive than Shayne thought they would be.
Buckingham Palace

Complete with multitude of tourists...disappointingly, there were no Beefeaters, but we did see these adolescent guards outside some other important government building (no, we can't remember where)

While you could do anything you liked (within reason) to the guards, we wouldn't blame the horses for wanting to kick and bite, considering the number of people milling around their flanks trying to get photos (Shayne stood at a respectable distance)
Palace of Westminster
This huge sprawling conglomeration of buildings includes
Big Ben

Which Shayne renamed "Small Ben" because it can't be seen from all over London, which was always the impression he got. Eva thinks Big Ben is still pretty impressive. Close up at least.
The Houses of Parliament

You can just see Yael's head at the bottom of the picure...
The gates to No. 10 Downing Street

We don't really think Gordon Browne's all that important...
On the other side of the gates to No. 10 in Whitehall, there was this recently-added (according to Yael) sculpture which took our fancy:

We can't remember what this builing is, but we tell you what, they don't do this sort of grandeur back in Oz...

As well as all these famous sights of London which we were already familiar with (at least from afar), Rai and Yeal showed us other parts of London which did not fit in with our limited impression, or at least in Eva's distant memory of, London. There are large, open parks pretty much all over the city and even in the centre, like:
Regent's Park

St James´s Park

(and again, the London Eye pops up into view...)
The canal system

People actually live on some of these boats. Hmm. Claustrophobia, anyone?
Camden Market

A really cool shopping strip, with a lot of cult and alternative stuff - and the people to match.
Covent Garden
The place where the start of My Fair Lady was set (and filmed?), it now has hyper-exensive food and some great street performers. Apparently to get a busing license in London you have to audition - we think this could really work in Melbourne. Just think of all the terrible buskers you´ve ever had to rush past...anyway, these guys were great. They were a string sextet who actually made classical music fun for Shayne...yes, he's a heathen.


Later on, Rai hired a car and we drove out to some of the more suburban areas of London, including the house just off (which common?) where Eva spent the first 2 and a half years of her life:

(yes, we include that purely for sentimental reasons...)
Once again, we were struck by just how green everything is in this city. Only a few kilometres from the centre is Hampstead Heath, where many famous writers kicked their muses into gear (including Keats, whose house is nearby), and Richmond Park, which is this huge expanse of lawn and bracken with deer running free:

...and so tame that you can get this close without them getting skittish.
This little jaunt in a car through London taught us another valuable lesson - you'd have to be mad to drive in London every day. Seriously, the conjestion charge of 8 pounds or whatever it is doesn't help one iota, and even to get a few miles out and into the centre of London took us a few hours. By the end of it, even Rai, who loves driving and has some very romantic notions about driving and the insane drivers in the city, was a bit white-knuckled...so the order of the day was either walking, or by Tube. Walking was always more enjoyable, and it was lucky that we were so close to everything. One place, as we already said, was the British Museum.

Most of the museums in London are free to the public except for the temporary exhibitions, and the British Museum is no exception. It's amazing just how much stuff they have crammed under the roof and that you don't have to pay a cent for most of it. Of course, there have been stories told of the unsavoury practices of past British Museum curators in procuring valuable artefacts and not wanting to return them...oh well. They have a wide range of ancient and more modern displays, and we summarise a few:

Throne of Weapons - made of decomissioned weapons that were collected since the end of the Mozambique 1992 civil war, part of a project where arms are donated for agricultural equipment and the like.


The Benin Plaques - more artefacts that the British nabbed from a colonial settlement - they found these old bronze plaques that were probably cast in the 16th century next to the Oba´s palace in 1897 in Benin City, Benin. Later, the British were kind enough to sell some of these things back to the Benin government.


The Rosetta Stone - needs no explanation, really. OK, it was the first clue to understanding and translating hieroglyphics.


Assyrian Lion Hunt Wall Fresco - The Assyrians were mad, cruel buggers. Here they have a whole series of frescoes about the kingly "hunt" for the noble lion. Well, they took caged, enraged lions and let them loose in a confined area so that the king could kill them at hie leisure from his chariot. In this one, the lion nearly gets the oblivious king, but his servants dispatch it with their spears.


and of course...
The Elgin Marbles - the museum are definitely not letting these go! They have a whole lot of them, and it's immediately apparent how many of them have been damaged through the years, mostly deliberately. There´s a whole series depicting some fight between centaurs and humans, and this is one of the few ones with the heads still on the bodies of the carvings:

Most of them look much worse than this:

Anyway, we also got two free tickets from the guy who looks after Rai and Yael's apartment building to the temporary exhibit, about the Chinese terracotta army. Obviously we have no pictures as photography was strictly forbidden, but it was pretty amazing.

We also caught up with a few friends who've moved to London for the forseeable future, and as well as some family of Shayne's whom he'd never met before. Our mate Ben is now living and working inLondon, and his good friend Steph (who turns out to be a really good friend of an ex-student of Shayne's...small world...) also from Melbourne recently came over to do the same. We ended up walking between pubs one night, playing frisbee at tube stations:

L-R: Guy (English guy who's living with Ben), Steph, Ben, that weird girl who keeps stalking us!

And then there's Bec and Captyn, who have a nice little place in Wimbledon (yes, Eva started singing the theme from the Wombles. ALL THE FREAKING TIME!). We went for dinner there on one of our last nights in London, but before that we again trekked around much of the central city, visiting pubs. Yes, this seems to be a popular pastime here...anyway, there are the lovely couple:

We went back to Covent Gardens and caroused with giant pumpkins:

...and there are Cappo and Shayne havng an empty pint glass twirling competition. Shayne thinks they drew, but can't remember...there might have been a few pints involved...

...though Cappo did have the technique down pat...


And it was nice to finally meet Lulu and Shelly, who live in a suburb called Hendon. Lulu is Shayne's second cousin and is lovely, and her husband Shelly is a very funny bloke. Hopefully we can see them again in the days before Christmas when we get back to London.


While we were in London, we also saw two stage shows. We finally got to see Avenue Q - and while it was fun and the puppetry was amazing, the novelty wore off somewhat in the second half, and the ending was a bit too Hollywood-esque. Maybe it had been hyped up a bit too much for us...the other play was All About My Mother, adapted from the Spanish movie of the same name, and really showed up the other two productions we'd seen thus far. The performances by pretty much all of the cast were brilliant, and the story really grabbed you and dragged you in - it was one of those performances where you didn't want the action to end. At interval Eva was reluctant for it to stop, even though she had been hanging on for ages to go to the toilet. Thanks, Rai and Yael, for taking us!

So, that's our whirlwind tour of London. You all might notice something very odd about our daytime pictures: THE SUN IS ALMOST ALWAYS SHINING IN THEM. Yes, we encountered something very rare in London, and had beautiful weather almost constantly. The only time it rained was at night, while we were asleep. According to everyone we talked to, London didn't have much of a summer and now they're having beautiful weather. Lucky for us, eh? We had exactly the same phenomenon on our 4-day trip to Scotland, which we managed to squeeze in while we were in the UK for three or so weeks. Here, we hooked up with our old friend Helen who we met on a pub crawl in Montreal way back in August, and who's now back in Glasgow. We remember when she first got back to Glasgow after weeks of beautiful weather in central America and moaning to us through her FaceBook about the crappy Glasgow drizzle and wind. Well, Glasgow put on a marvellous show for us when we arrived early in the morning and accompanied Helen to the University of Glasgow campus which is mostly old and beautiful:

...but Helen apparently works in a much dowdier part of the campus, so she left us to our own devices while we strolled around. There is much to see. Just nearby the campus, you find creeks in a picturesque setting:

(please to be ignoring the stupid corruption at the bottom of this and some other photos...)

Views of the spire of the campus through the trees:


And the Kelvington Museum, which has apparently been closed for years but was now open for our viewing pleasure...and, again, was FREE! We love free stuff.

The museum was a bit of a mix of stuff, and it seemed that they didn't really know what their focus was, apart from the whole theme of "this is the history of Glasgow." So they had prehistoric exhibits, contemporary exhibits about domestic violence, and mental illness in the area, and displays of famous Glaswegian artists. As well as the ubiquitous Egyptian mummy:

These were kinda cool though:
THE HEADS! OH MY GOD!

This really cool painting (we forget the name of the artist)

Shayne destroying exhibits (it was the Discovery Centre, you were allowed to!)

In the same Discovery Centre, Eva's teacher training once more came out:

...and she went a little nuts...

Eva loved this dog made of old wellies:

And finally, this grand old organ in the middle of the hall, which is apparently played every now and again. The sound must be amazing.


That night, we met up with Helen again and went for dinner at a restaurant that she and a few of her friends work at, which is apparently one of the best gourmet retaurants in Glasgow (if you're reading this, Helen, don't kill us but WE CAN'T REMEMBER THE NAME OF THE PLACE!!) Anyway, it was here that Shayne tried haggis...and loved it. That was entree - the main was rabbit wrapped in bacon with...bugger it, the picture describes it better:

And we got all this great fare at a HIGHLY discounted rate...we are indeed very lucky.

It was here, after a few wee drinks, that we managed to coerce Helen into giving up a few days at uni and coming with us on a road trip up the west coast. It didn't actually take much coercion though...so we hired a car and Shayne drove for the first time in over 3 months. Yes, he got road rage a few times, but it was all in good fun. He's missed ranting at the stupidity of drivers.

Here are a few pics of the drive and the places we stopped - again, the pictures tell the story much better than we could:






Loch Lomond




Us at Eilean Donan Castle


Finally, we crossed over a mammoth bridge to get to the Isle of Skye, our intended destination, and we scored a room at a nice little hostel in the "town" of Kylakin, which is basically a couple of pubs and a few hostels/hotels.


That night, we did as the Romans do, and had a nice pub meal and got slightly maggotted. Shayne managed to avoid the cheap beer of choice - yep, you guessed it...FOSTERS. Blech. The guy who sang in the pub managed to butcher some great Australian classics and yet did Alanis Morisette very well, but when Eva and Helen got up to dance...well, the music ended.


So we all went to the next pub, where we downed single malt and Helen danced with a guy in wellies, and somehow swapped footwear as well...


Somehow we made it back to the hostel that night, and somehow we got up early to go on a drive halfway into the Isle:


We stopped at another little fork in the road called Sligachan, and walked through the countryside, freezing our butts off but stunned by the beauty of the place:






Shayne in particular was really taken by this place. It's easy to see now why the Scots have such a reputation for being a hard, rugged people, and why the clans have such a great history. And how they thought up a meal like haggis...

We drove back to Kylakin, where Helen and Eva had, unbeknownst to Shayne as he went to bed a little earlier than them, promised a guy called Neil a lift to Glasgow the next day. It's funny what a little malt will do to you...anyway, it was another pleasant trip through the Scottish countryside. We stopped at a nice coastal town called Oban:


Here are Helen and Neil at our last stop before Glasgow...hopefully we'll see them both again one day.


So...that's the UK. As we're right now in Europe, you can see we're very behind. We'll try to catch up ASAP. Next stop - France. And possibly Spain...