Out and about around London

Since I haven’t created an update for a little while I thought I’d summarise what we’ve been up to in the last month or so which mostly consists of visiting places around London. We have been taking some photos while we’ve been out and about most of which can be seen here.

Work consists of most of what we’ve been doing for the last couple of months, but we’ve managed to get out on the weekends most of the time. Over a few weekends we visited the National Gallery, Tate Britain (art museum), Natural History Museum with ice sculptures, the Monument to the Great Fire of London, Westminster Abbey, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Westminster Abbey and the V&A were my favourites out of those. The abbey had a huge amount of history to it, and magnificent architecture; while the V&A had many varied exhibits of art from throughout history and throughout the world. The absolute best item on display was Tipu’s Tiger, an Indian 18th century fullsize wooden crank driven tiger mauling a white man. It even produces sound like a roaring tiger, and a dying man’s wails.

We’ve also managed to go to a few markets (apart from our local Acton market) around the city. The best ones so far have been the Portobello Road Market and the Borough Market. They are usually massively busy on the weekend.

As you may have heard on the news a few weeks ago, London had a lot of snow fall on it’s streets causing most people to skip out on work for the day. I was excluded from the festivities though, as I can easily work from home. We took a few pictures of the snow from our flat which I’ve posted up here.

When Waitangi Day came around, Tanya was keen to head out with other London kiwis and join in on the festivities in the Waitangi Day Pub Crawl. The photos we took of the event can be viewed here.
We weren’t too keen to write off the whole weekend, so we only made it to a couple of pubs. The first one we went to in Notting Hill had almost completely cleared out by the time we got there, but we caught up to the crowds of kiwis at the second pub in Victoria. After the Victoria pub, we tried getting the tube to Westminster for the highlight of the day, the haka in Parliament Square. The tube train we got on was packed full of drunk kiwis, some with open beers, attempting to sing kiwi songs such as “Slice of Heaven”. Of the few non-kiwis on the train, all had fear in their eyes.
At Westminster, the hoard jumped and stumbled off the train with a cheer and we headed up with them to Parliament Square. It was busy. We made our way into the square, but had trouble seeing the haka when it was eventually performed by a load of drunken white guys with their tops thrown off.