Our 4 days in London included a social whirl, meeting up with several friends and relatives.
It's always an honour to be invited to someone's home, and we enjoyed splendid hospitality at the Woodside Park home of Kevin and Christel. Theirs is a terrace home not so different to ours in Surry Hills, but maybe a little bit newer, being Edwardian, whereas ours is described as Victorian. Kevin met us at the station, near the northern end of the Northern Line, and he generously drove us back to our Docklands hotel later in the evening.
We had coffee with friends Steve and Allan near Piccadilly Circus. Steve and Allan are like us, on a round the world trip, but our itineraries fortunately intersected in London. It was good to catch up with them. And then we had a delightful italian meal at Carluccios in Covent Garden with Imogen and Stu, just before they fly back to Australia for Christmas. Meeting them was a bonus, because we will miss them on Christmas Day in Wollongong.
In between these encounters, we had enough time to see some of the classic sights of London. We did a lot of walking, and enjoyed seeing the theatre district, the shopping strip of Oxford Street, the markets of Covent Garden, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge (photo) the food halls of Harrods and the Christmas fair at Hyde Park. The Christmas lights in London are stunning, and since it is dark from about 3pm, these are particularly effective. We looked inside stunning St Pancras Station, just renovated as the departure point for the Very Fast Train (Eurostar), and had a meal at Canary Wharf, the ultramodern new city in the docklands area.
We got around mostly using the London Underground, using Octopus Cards we had prepurchased and loaded up in Sydney. London public transport is not cheap, and you have to top up your cards when they run out of money, as they quickly do. Sadly these cards do not work on the Heathrow Express, and not on regular rail lines, as we discovered when we tried to catch an "above ground" train from London Bridge to Cannon Street. Octopus Cards are just an easy repositary for cash, and it is annoying that not all public transport providers will accept them, as they seem to in Hong Kong. The Underground is an extremely comprehensive system of trains in London: in our days here, there were a lot of interruptions and delays due to causes such as failed trains, suspicious packages, overcrowding. We know this because of excellent communications, where announcements on such matters are made frequently on both platforms and trains. The overcrowding we experienced first hand - even at 10pm, we had to cram into incredibly crowded carraiges. It's amazing how many people the London Underground moves around.
After the really miserable conditions on our arrival in London, we have enjoyed spectacularly good weather here. The days have been sunny, windless, but freezing cold. In the morning it is below zero, with daily maximums of 5-7C. Brrr!
Mike found a pleasant run in the mornings around the Royal Victoria Dock, judging by the time it took, it's just under a 5km loop. Around the dock is about 3/4 redeveloped, with nice paving, several hotels, including our Ramada, a floating hotel called Sunborn, and, on the southside, lots of new apartments. There are a few cafes, but not as many as we would expect - maybe the weather doesn't encourage that type of development. The run also passes the end of the London City Airport runway - in fact the Ramada is almost in the flightpath of this airport, but our room is triple-glazed and is perfectly silent.
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