Walking London

This morning we took the bus into Greenwich, everything is still pretty much closed today but we headed up to the hill where Greenwich mean time starts and got this amazing view of the city.

From there we headed down to the Thames and got on a river cruise. The driver gave us a brief description of everything we saw, it was freezing, so we only stayed on the top deck for a little while then had to head into shelter. This picture is funny because Jason is just being "gangster" here, but we remembered later that Daren had told us that this gesture is like flipping someone off in the UK.... haha.

We got off the boat at Westminster and walked to Buckingham Palace....tadah!

Then we walked through Hyde park. They have this Winter Wonderland carnival/german christmas market set up. It was really great! Very festive.

We found a schnitzle (which is some kind of breaded fried german meat - very very tasty) You just can't help but enjoy something with such a great name. Jason had a hard time with it and kept omitting the "n" - we had a good laugh about that one.

Everywhere we went Jason was feeding the birds.... and as a result he got pooped on about 5 times (literally) three times in Rome and twice in London - this bird got him good....hehe. It was pretty funny too because Melanie hates birds, so they kept their distance during Jason's bird feeding time. I think she might have been the smarter one.

At the other end of Hyde Park is Speakers Corner which is classically a place where people would get on their soap box and preach about whatever they want. Still happens today, must have been too cold I guess. I am sure Gordon B. Hinckley preache on this corner during his missionary days.

From there we headed into Kensington Gardens. It really is amazing what a huge area of the city is parks. There are 1700 parks in London!

Next stop was the Portabello Road market in Notting Hill.

We even happened upon the "Travel Bookshop". This is the one where Hugh Grant works in the movie! Dreamy!

From there we took a bus ( we had been walking at that point for about 6 hours consistantly) back to Oxford street. We didn't realize how crazy it would be. Today all the after christmas sales started. It seemed alot like Black Friday in the states. It was absolute insanity. We ended up walking in the street to avoid the crazy human traffic.

We found ourselves a nice pub and got some classic fish and chips with pea mash. Good stuff!

After that we wandered into the main square of Somerset House. It has been around since the 16th century and was a favorite mansion of the nobels, now it is used by the government. During they holidays they have this gread ice rink set up in the square. It is sponsored by Tiffanys & Co., so it is very classy of course.

Our original plan for the night was to see Lion King, but it was sold out. Jason went and saw Phantom of the Opera and Melanie and I went to see teeny bopper heart throb Zac Effron in his new movie "Me & Orson Wells". This is the theater where the movie premiered. We walked in his footsteps (sigh! hehe) The movie was mostly just weird, but we were of course entertained by Zac.

I think overall today, by the time we got home we walked at least 10 miles. It was a great day and we saw so much but my feet need a rest.