A few photos from London...

Here are some belated pictures from London...

Squirrel!

The Australian War Memorial - the big words are places where Australians fought, and the whole thing is made up of names of places where they were born (in and out of Australia)

English ambulances are a funny color

London from the top of the Tower Bridge - in the foreground is the Tower of London

Officially bored of London...

... and if anyone tells me that if I'm bored of London, I'm bored of life, I'll shoot them. I think I allowed myself too many days here - I planned a day's downtime upon arrival and didn't use it. I ended up catching a matinee of Les Mis yesterday, which was as good as I remembered, and visiting the British Museum, which was great. I wish I'd have been able to visit that when I was studying Ancient History in high school :(

Today I got up early with the intention of going to Stonehenge - the book said that it was £14 each way on the bus (3 hours) or £25 each way on the train (1.5 hours). $120 seemed a little expensive for 3 hours on the train, so I was going to opt for the bus. Unfortunately, when I got to the bus stop at 8:30am, they said the next bus wasn't until 11am.... so I gave up. Instead, I visited the Cabinet War Rooms, which was quite interesting, and Madame Tussauds, which was definitely not worth it. This afternoon, I was going to visit the Planetarium, but apparently it doesn't exist anymore, so I might take it easy.

Tomorrow I'm leaving London, heading north to visit some relatives - I have two aunts to visit and a cousin to meet for the first time. I'm hoping that other places won't be as expensive as London, which seems put on this earth just to rip off tourists. The currency is worth twice as much as everyone else's, and they still charge double what you'd expect to pay to do anything.

Anyway, I think it's time to use my last £2 to buy an absolutely terrible excuse for coffee somewhere.

Hello from rainy London...

Well here I am, safely arrived in London, which constantly looked like it was going to rain for the first couple of days, and is actually raining now. The flight was horrible - 9 hours to Bangkok, a 3 hour wait, and then 11 and a half hours to London. Surprisingly, there was a larger than normal amount of legroom for all seats (taller people might want to note this - Thai Airlines) and excellent food. There was no personal entertainment system though, which is half the fun of international flights, and the air hostesses kept waking me up to ask if I wanted food, which was really really annoying.

Once I got to Heathrow I spent 2 hours in the immigration queue surrounded by Americans complaining alternately about the fact that they didn't have a special queue for Americans, and about the security restrictions (aren't they their fault anyway?). American tourists are the bane of my existence. People say that the English whinge - the Americans complain about *everything*, and they're so loud that you can't block them out. I was privy (along with everyone else in a 3 mile radius) to one American lady's complaints about how Pounds were so difficult to work out - I'm not really sure how she got to this conclusion considering that they're exactly the same as dollars, just with a different name.

London is very expensive, as I was warned... I enjoyed my $10 Subway sub yesterday. It's also surprisingly difficult to find internet. The cafe I am in now unfortunately doesn't let you access USB ports, so no photos today. I've seen lots of things, including lots of squirrels (but no hedgehogs), the outside of Buckingham Palace (still not sure if it's worth the £15 to get in), 30 seconds of the changing of the guard (from behind around 3000 tourists - I got bored and left), the inside of Kensington Palace (where I was surprised to see that queens have bedrooms not much larger than most "main bedrooms" in Australian houses), Hyde Park, the Tower of London and the Crown Jewels, walked across the top of the Tower Bridge, and visited Leicester and Trafalgar Squares and Harrods (totally non-user friendly - no maps and no directions, unintuitive layout).

I was hoping to see Les Miserables at the theatre tonight, but tickets are £40, so I might see if the matinée is any cheaper. I'm going to head over to the British Museum soon, as I'm keen to see the Rosetta Stone.

Tomorrow I'm considering heading out to Stonehenge, despite numerous warnings about how unimpressive it is. Not sure what I'll do otherwise...

It is time...

All packed, including stupid little bag of no more than a litre in size with any liquids you want to take carry-on in containers of no more than 100mL. Of course, toothpaste is normally sold in 110-130mL containers, and the only ones that come smaller are kids ones - I'm sure the security guards will be laughing at my sparkly dinosaur toothpaste.

I hope I haven't forgotten anything...

Officially Homeless...

Handed the keys in on the unit yesterday - now officially homeless.

Apparently my tickets don't need confirming - this worries me, after rocking up to the airport to fly to Peru and being told "you didn't confirm your ticket, we sold it to someone else" (I'd never heard of confirming tickets before).

I've triple photocopied all of my tickets, my passport and my insurance, and have distributed them around. Vaguely amusing being as I went to Peru without any photocopies of anything (once again, I'd never heard of it).

There is only one thing on my list now, which I should really do tomorrow:

• disconnect electricity

3 days to go...

6 days to go...

After a busy weekend of moving and cleaning, all of my stuff is now in storage or the bin, and the carpet cleaners are coming tomorrow at 1pm. Today I bought a Lonely Planet book for the Czech Republic, as it isn't covered in Western Europe, and picked up £50 and €50 from the bank for first arrival in countries. That leaves me with no Danish Krone, Swedish Krona or Czech Koruna, but I'm sure I can pick some up somewhere.

On the weekend I picked up my plane and train tickets - flight to London via Bangkok, flight from Madrid via Bangkok, Eurostar Waterloo to Nord ticket, Eurail pass and a Prague Excursion pass. I also bought a 2gb USB key, which I will hopefully be periodically transferring photos to, instead of paying to have them stored on a CD.

The list of things to do is now rather short:

• disconnect electricity
• organise mail redirection
  
• pack
• confirm tickets

The last thing to do today is to clean the balcony of my unit, before the carpet cleaners arrive. Then, after handing in the keys, I am officially homeless.

Not long now...

A new destination...

I changed my mind, again :) Cheap flights are wonderful things. I am now skipping Pisa (unless I get bored in Rome), and catching an overnight ferry across the Mediterranean to Greece. On the way back, I'm going to skip the south of France and catch a flight from Athens to Barcelona.

While I'm in Greece, I'm hoping to visit Olympia, Mycanae, Athens, and maybe Delphi if I have time. I was practically obsessed with Greek mythology when I was growing up, plus I studied Ancient History for 2 years - this should be fun :)

I wonder if I'll see any pentacosiomedimni :P