So last weekend me and hubby went to London, England for a lil weekendtrip - just the two of us :) We stayed at this posh hotel - The Royal Horseguards - which was smack in the centre of the city & had flatscreen in both the livingroom and the bath (so you could take a bath while watching the TV) and it had its own iPod-dock which I found pretty cool (esp as we brought the iPod with us :) ). Mm I'm easily impressed, I know :p(oh and the above photo was the first one I snapped of the hotel when arriving at like 10pm in the evening - loved the blue hue it had from the sky & lovelovelove my camera allowing me to take not too shabby handheld pictures in the dark :) )
Oh, and the hotel itself had a real nice history from both the World-wars and had served as an embassy for several countries and Secret Service-HQ and stuff. As I said - I'm easily impressed :)
For our first breakfast we had to get ourselves a real British breakfast at a pub - ofc ;pBacon, some kinda potatostuff, shroom, beans, scrambled eggs and sausage. Heh.
I kinda liked this one. The quote that is. "The glorious dead".
I love the tubes of London and the cool signs there :)Hubby sorta patiently sat closer to the sign so I could get a nice piccie of both :p (you can tell he doesn't like to be taken piccie of, but uhm, w/no kids around I had to snap some of him no? :p)
"Everybody" recommended Camden Market in advance before we left, so we hit that one first. Totally loved the colorful food-stations and hubby regretted buying food at the first one we saw when we realized there were lots and lots of them there from diff countries :)
After spending some time at the market we had sushi for lunch. SUSHIIIIIii ♥♥♥
In the evening we met up with an old friend of us - Pete :) (yes he sorta looks anxious here and not like the very lively&animated person that he was during our evening. Must be the camera doing that to people :p )Personally I've "known" him for close to nine years - ever since our EverQuest-days back in '99 or '00 (we play WoW together now) - but this was the first time I got to meet him in real life. Hubby met him once at his last London-trip :) It was great finally getting to meet him, and we had dinner (yummy ravioli at Kings Cross) & an evening out together :)
When the night ended we took a pirate-taxi (for the first time in our lives haha) back home. He was a sorta club-taxi (chatting up w/the bouncers at the bar we spent the rest of the evening at so it seemed safe enough + it was raining :p) and it turned out he was a Somalian raised up in Finland teehee (I know I'm silly finding that somewhat amusing, but seriously - Finland of all places?? Sorry Fins!!! (but..when I think of it I guess it's just as amusing as me ending up in Norway hmm!). Couldn't pass up the chance to snap a nightphoto of the Eye (which was like across the Thames from the hotel) & the Jubilee Bridge. Beautiful :)
We spent some time at the pubs during the weekend (isn't what Brits do - go to the pubs? :p) - gotto have my refill of Guinness!!! ♥♥♥
I thought the reminders of which direction to check before crossing the streets were sorta cute. And useful!! :p
For dinner at Sunday we found this little Korean restaurant downtown. Now, I'm adopted from South-Korea, but I've never really tasted Korean food before (I came to Norway when I was 7 months old) so this was a nice experience to me :) I was sorta worried the food would be like, somewhat funny, but the menu we went for was really yummy :)
We went to the London Eye at our last day in the city - a nice touristy thing to do :)Tbh I wasn't personally sold on getting up there and was still undecided until we met a sweet friend of Pete who lived next door to the bar we were at and dropped by to say hi and she was sooo into the Eye and loved taking it whenever she could and then I was like hmm alright I'm a tourist dammit :p Turned out it was a nice relaxing trip (& thank god for A/C inside each of these "boats") and I had fun trying to squish the buildings & humans from atop :p
Then we tried to find The Forbidden Planet, and roamed around in circles for about half an hour before giving up & getting some breakfast instead. Found this really nice italian cafe (Cafe Milan) which had great, yummilicous food & cappuchino. Yum! Totally recommended, and when we finally found The Forbidden Planet it turned out it was like 3mins from this cafe - further down the street :P (oh, and the store was great - thanks for the recommendation!! We bought some minor stuff and some books (X-men & Blueberry Girl) and I was totally oogling the Tara McPherson-stuff in the store :p )
And I totally get the obsession some people have w/Starbucks. My fave was Dark Berry Frappuchino (if I recall the name correctly) - although at the first Starbucks we got it w/bits of chocolate and at the second there were no bits of chocolate - bit bummed about the latter cuz that was what made it so extra yummy! (and not sure what I did wrong cause I am fairly sure I did order the same thing twice :p)
At Charing Cross station we saw this cute little mouse. Although hubby thinks it's a rat but I thought rats were like, bigger and not so cute :p *cough*All in all it was a nice getaway, and it was great having such a nice hotel to return to - esp as hubby wasn't totally recovered from his back-op which meant we had to return to the hotel a lil more often than we probably would have normally. But as the hotel was very central (across the street from the Embankment tube) and with the very nice & spacious room we had it wasn't that much of a problem and it was nice resting the feet when insisting on wearing high heels most of the time ;p We didn't get to hit too many clothes-stores which I'm slightly regretting now (but the wallet stays happy :p), and I'm still a bit torn about the Diana-camera I didn't buy at the Photographers Gallery (which by the way wasn't really what I had imagined sorta - wish we had found the time to drop by the other photo-exhibition w/Marilyn Monroe & Audrey Hepburn - which I only found about the last day :( )
Also, wherever we went and mentioned we were from Norway everybody seemed to know that "Oh yeah Norway, it's that highly expensive country isn't?", and that a lot of Swedes loves to come here to work because the pay's much better than in Sweden :p They all seemed to have had some friends/relatives visit Norway at least once and apparently that's what they remember the best - ouch :p
Oh and I'm so happy I brought the 50mm along instead of the 18-200mm. Sure - the latter would have been more practical I guess, but I was so annoyed about the quality on that lens on my D700 (the lens being a DX and the body being a FX - fullformat - and while it's a great lens on DX-bodies it's not so great w/FX-bodies imo. It's probably totally not noticeable in the grand scheme and no big deal, but just the very knowledge of its inferiority on this body did annoy me soo) and I guess I could have brought the d70s instead for that lens but bleh. My D700 makes me happy and my 50mm makes me happy soh!
Anyways. Amalie is going to her very first "real" birthdayparty tomorrow and is totally excited about it (she's been counting down the days since she got the invitation on tuesday and kept reminding me about having to buy gift&make a card), we have a sleepover here atm (our youngest nephew) and actually both kids are off for diff. bdayparties tomorrow. Mm. Interesting I know :p
Have a nice weekend! :)
