London

London peak hour in a train isn't too awesome. London peak hour in a train humping a 20kg backpack is pretty cool though. The blokes in suits that were bouncing off my backpack might disagree though.

We left Brunei pretty uneventfully- Picked up Lyns camera from lost n found, got through security and all and got into the departure lounge. Met yet another aussie doing the same as us- a few days in London, then reading, then tomatina festival- Popular itinerary.

Got into Dubai half asleep with a 30 min refueling stopover but managed to bolt to the duty free emporium there and score a few litres of top shelf spirits for $40- not bad for a dry country. From there is was back onto the plane and land at Heathrow at 6am. We couldn't check into the hostel until 2pm so figured we'd burn a few hours bumming around the airport. Bad move- we forgot other people are working and use public transport to get to work. By about the third station the train was pretty full. By the 7th station people were almost standing on my bag. I thought Perth was bad for people pushing in your way... London is worse both on the streets and on the pavement.

The first day we jumped on a bus/river tour of the city and sleep-walked through after being awake for 30-odd hours. It was pretty relaxing and gave a nice run through of the city. Saw most of the sights from the bus- Shakespeare theater, Leicester square, the gardens, tower, eye, wobbly bridge.. got lunch/Dinner in Greenwich meandered back to the hostel. The day after we fired up a free walking tour- Awesome value, and a good laugh. We met up with a high school mate of Lyn's in the arvo and hit the same company's pub crawl. Also pretty decent- cheap drinks, shooters, and a good crew to boot. Finally got to see the walkabout- awesome place (till the air con was shutdown and the YMCA started pumping...) Cheers to the blokes from Jersey that led us back to London Bridge come closing time- We all would have been hiking the wrong way up the Thames otherwise.


Pretty late start today after the pub crawl, Me n Lyn hit 5 pubs with the crawl group, and another 4 during the day- Solid effort for 2 non-drinkers I reckon. I hate to say it, but I'm actually getting used to fosters and marmite. WTF? Another thing to note is that both these items are easily available from the local supermarket. They used to have the same appeal to me as bonox and the coopers 0% beer in woolies, but I'm changing my tune slowly. To marmite and fosters that is, I haven't completely lost it yet.


After the sleep in we hit the Tower of London - That's the big castle in the middle of town that has been constantly added to since 1078. Its large. Saw some rocks (crown jewels), some sticks (jousting) and some poms (beef eaters). Again, our awesome timing and weather couldn't have been better- it got us front row at the jousting and straight into a tour of the place. No rain at all here so far, which I'm told is a miracle as its been hammering down the past few weeks, but stopped as soon as we got into town.

Probably should have done more to organise this plane trip tomorrow (We fly to Edinburgh at 6am from one of the 3 London airports) meh... I hope the trains are running at 3:30am.

oh yeah.. went to Tate modern and blew a few hours there.
I don't know how to describe it. Maybe akin to scattering kids paintings through a house under construction that has homeless bums living in it. Seriously, I shit you not- there is: a pile of bricks, A painted canvas with a stripe on it, a hessian sack with blood-soaked canvas (I hate emos) stuck on it, and steel tiles on the floor all on display. Its so mind numbingly incredible. There were some great things in there but bloody hell a mouth-painting dolphin with an amputated dorsal fin could do better than most of that crap.