Look Right, Look Left

It just seems wrong! Our first “lessons of London” (LoL for short) was to follow the rules as indicated on the street to avoid being whacked and ruining your holiday. The second LoL was walk to the left – this realisation (please note the english use of “s” in place of a “z”) came after several blocks of pondering why we kept bumping into everyone causing annoyed but knowing glances. We’ve got the first two down pat and are anticipating several more LoL’s to come. A surprising discovery for us was how pleasant it makes a trip when you know the others’ language. Not having to “par-lay voo aanglay?” everyone makes for much more enjoyable adventures.

To catch everyone up to our exact moment of writing this blog we have experienced the following…our first day here was pretty tolerable (thank you Lunesta) our room was not ready for our arrival at 10 AM so we grabbed a quick cup of coffee in the concierge lounge, checked our baggage with the porter and headed out on our first excursion of London. This consisted of walking around our immediate area of Holborn (pronounced “Hoeburn”), learning the valuable first two LoLs listed above, and purchased week-long travel cards to allow us unlimited access to London’s underground and bus system. Sidenote: The underground is phenomenal and very easy to use! Believe it or not that took up the majority of our day and we simply wandered back to the hotel through Covent Garden. That night we met up at The Lamb (walking through a torrential downpour) with a group comprised of locals and travelers who all post on TripAdvisor. Not to our surprise we were the spring chickens of the group, but had a wonderful time chatting with a couple of Londoners, an Aussie, New Zealanders, Canadians, and an American from Pennsylvania. The beer of choice was Young’s bitter – The Lamb actually used to brew Young’s before it moved locations. I did have my Guinness however it was served ice cold, which was odd as I expected all beer to be p*** warm! Oh well, there’s always Ireland…

This morning was a beautiful and sunny day for the most part. We both felt entirely rested and ready for a full day. Adam knocked out some work in the morning while Mandy (napped) planned the days itinerary. The pictures to the right and left are of our view and the stairwell in the hotel we are staying at.

That afternoon we headed out to the Covent Garden market/Jubilee Market where we looked at a bunch of stalls full of antiques, chotchkies (Gary or Bruce, help with the spelling!), and clothes. Then we went on to Leicester Square (pronounced ‘Lester’) to see if we could find cheap tickets for a West End show. The jury is still out if we will actually see one or not. On to the British Museum where we saw the actual tops of the Parthenon (to think we went all the way to Athens for the fake stuff!) and a few mummies. Braving the dreaded disease of “museum madness” we went on to the Tate Modern after a spot of lunch. At the Tate we grabbed some coffee and enjoyed the awesome views of the River Thames, St. Pauls, and the pedestrian bridge. Realizing we did not have much of a taste for

“modern art” (read: dead birds pinned to blank white wall with arrow), we left to walk across the bridge pictured to the right, and wandered around St. Paul’s cathedral catching a genuine red double-decker bus back to our neck of the woods in time for the concierge lounge’s free ‘canapes hour’. Well, that brings us to right NOW where we are currently enjoying our second round of bitters in a pub named “The Ship” as we write this post.

For those of you (Mom!) who really enjoy seeing our travels via pictures, we’ve uploaded a bunch below for your viewing pleasure. Adam is going to sync a web album to the blog so that you can simply scroll through web photo albums to see all that we have been seeing (just click on the “Our Photos” here or to the right)! We miss you all and can’t wait to recount all of our adventures, in way too much detail, in person!

Love from London – us