London has some great Thai seafood..

Big Ben and Houses of Parliament

 Well yesterday Hannah and I had our first day walking around London!  We had driven through at 1 in the morning coming back from Paris last week but this was our first time walking around and seeing a few sights (and a little shopping!).  We started off by taking the train to Waterloo Station in Central London, which is a few minutes from some major landmarks in London.  So we started out walking toward the Thames which from this area is home to the London Eye (one of the world's biggest ferris wheels).  Didn't get a shot of it today, but tomorrow we are both going up it and we will surely get some shots from the top as well.  Right next to the Eye is a major stopping point for the ferries on the river that go up and down to all sorts of places.  Hannah and I got tickets for one called the Thames Clipper, and it was 30 pounds for two "roaming" passes, which means that we can hop on and off the boat at any point on the river for the whole day.  Not a bad deal at all considering how much we took advantage of it!

Shakespeare's Globe Theater

 We went just a few stations west on the Thames and right outside the dock was the recreation of Shakespeare's Globe Theater.  This was something we were both interested in seeing, partially because we had just left high school, which means of course that we had read a few of his works in our time and learned all about him and his Globe Theater.

 We walked around it excitedly and took a few pictures and popped in the gift shop as always, where Hannah got a cup with a Macbeth quote on it for her old English teacher.  They had a nice little cafe in there too :)  We were walking away and wanted to go inside, but it turns out you have to take a tour.  We were about to leave when I told Hannah that we would regret it if we didn't go in, so I bought our tickets and we met up for about an hour's long tour.

Inside on the tour

 We met with out tour guide, and it was a nice little walk through the place.  She told us all about how the globe was reconstructed completely authentic to the 1600s way of doing things, and also how this reconstruction was actually built 200 yards away from the original site.  Still the guide had some interesting and relevant information up her sleeve and she did a very good job in keeping the talk flowing.  Eventually we made our way inside and were quite excited to see everything the was it would have looked 400 years ago.  The stage was very large and had a beautiful set up which was for the play that they were going to be running the next few days (A Midsummer Nights Dream).  We sat in some of the seats (which aren't exactly my idea of a Lazyboy recliner) and made our way out to the lobby where our tour ended.  It was worth going on considering that if we did not we would have regretted it the rest of the day.  Carpe Diem

"Salad" with "croutons"

We were both a little grumbly in the tummy-area after the tour, partially probably because of our early start and teenage stomachs.  Therefore we thought the convenience of the cafe there was perfect to solve our little problem.  Walking right up to the cashier of the cafe we noticed a large bowl of mixed veggies with chunks of soft bread ("croutons") soaked in a vinigarette-like oil dressing.  They called this extravaganza "salad".  We got one to share, along with with some tea, given that it was about time for a cuppa.  We sat down and found nice little bottles of fresh milk (never cream) for our tea, which we took good advantage of.  We started digging into the salad, only to find that whatever kind of dressing they had on it, could make anything on earth taste good.  It had a nice herbal-olive oil like flavor which soaked the large tomatoes and bread  into a nice sogginess.  The tomatoes were Hannah's favorite part, and for a good reason!  They had a couple varieties of fresh tomatoes inside.  My favorite part was the "croutons", which was basically bread soaked in dressing, awesome.  And of course what doesn't go well with a nice cup of tea.

Borough Market

We walked along past the Globe and further away from the river until we hit Borough Market.  This is an undercover open air market with fresh tidbits and vendors where it would normally bustle on a Saturday afternoon, except it was Monday :/  90% of things were closed up but there were still a few good finds!

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I'm BEYOND happy that this place was left open.  Walking behind it one can peek through the fence and see the fresh seafood that they put in all their food, and there is a serious range of it.

Mystery woks

When you walk by the cook is actively advertising his product by dipping some spoons in the three large woks of food and letting bystanders take a taste of these fabulous and well sauced woks of food.  I can't totally recall the three flavors, but the one that stuck out the most to us (naturally) was this green chicken and seafood curry..  Without much time between thinking about it and happily buying it we had a nice bowl of this stuff with a fluffy bed of rice underneath.  Well worth 6 pounds.

Right off the bat you can see that there was a good mix of things inside.  On top you can see the fresh mussel, and there was tender chicken and I believe squid rings, and there were definitely more animals inside but I can't even name them all.  Dipping in this made an excellent warm up meal and we made full advantage of it by basically scraping the plastic off of the bowl.

I'm overjoyed to have found it!

Clean as usual!

Trying on some hats

We hopped back on the river boat and went East toward Greenwich (pronounced Gren-itch) which has a rich naval and scientific history.  We both wanted to make a beeline for the famed Greenwich Observatory which is the site where the prime meridian passes through (the virtual Longitude line that cuts the Earth in two) .  We eventually made it around to that, after some milling around in the naval museum as you can see above :)

Royal Observatory Clock

We made a nice little hike up a practically 90 degree hill to come up upon the Observatory.  Hoping to go inside, we soon discovered that it had just CLOSED.  So stupid..  Anyways we took some nice pictures around it and got to SEE the area where people were taking their pictures over the prime meridian, but we would have loved to stand over it, but in another area we could obviously do the same thing, given that it could be stood over on many places on earth :)

London in the background

There was a nice view on the top of the hill so we took a kodak moment and found the nearest English speakers to take our photo.  Stay tuned..  Next up were settling down in the historic town of Guildford!