9 January, 2012 · 6:47 am

London Day 5

Today we headed out of the city to catch up with my cousin E who’s lived in England for a good few years now.

We met at Hampton Court and headed off to visit Hampton Court Palace, home of Henry VIII, amongst others. Along with the palace, they also have extensive gardens, a maze, and even an ice skating rink and a carousel! What fun!

We wandered for a while, taking in the unseasonably early flowering bulbs that were raising their heads (hello daffodils!) and admiring the formal gardens which had just been replanted for spring, before deciding that if we wanted to admire gardens, Kew Gardens was probably the best bet, since it was nearby.

We stopped off at M&S for a picnic lunch on the way, and were sidetracked by the terribly interesting TK Maxx, home of many discounted clothes and accessories. We picked up a new carry-on case while we were there, as our various souvenir shopping bouts have maxed out our current bags!

Kew was pretty cold, but we managed to have our picnic lunch under the supervision of various seagulls who were desperate for our salad leftovers, before hightailing it into the gift shop to warm up and get (you guessed it) more pressies for people at home!

The rest of our gardens visit consisted of walking very briskly between the greenhouses to get into the warmth. The Princess of Wales Conservatory had about 10 different climactic areas with heaps of different plants – from cacti to ferns to carnivorous plants! The other greenhouse we spent time at was the Palm House, which as you’d expect, had LOTS of palms, plus a marine exhibit in the basement. It’s a pretty amazing building, not least because it was built over 150 years ago!

By the time afternoon tea time rolled around, it was getting dark and close to the time the park closed, so we hightailed it back to E’s car, accompanied by the sound of a helicopter doing laps of the sky above us. We weren’t sure if this was the Kew version of flicking the lights off and on again in a nightclub to get people to leave, or what. It certainly added to the urgency of finding an exit!

Then it was back on the tube to the hotel before taking a stroll up to Paddington Station to have sushi for dinner. The Yo Sushi place was just closing when we arrived, so their sushi was a bit dated. Nevertheless, it hit the spot, and we picked up fruit and yoghurt at M&S again for dessert. Kinda getting back to usual meal habits in preparation to heading home later this week…

 

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8 January, 2012 · 7:04 am

London Day 4 – Happy Birthday to me

After waking up to many birthday wishes and a Skype call from home, we celebrated my birthday by hitting the markets.

We started with Camden Markets, which were quite interesting to begin with, but then they seemed to be the same four or five shops repeated ad nauseum. There were some interesting Nepalese multi-coloured clothes which I liked, but they were the wrong shape for me, bajillions of goth-y shops with nice-looking corsets which had good busks and some spring steel (by the feel) to reinforce the lacing, but the merely spiral boning around the rest of the corset (too flimsy). Otherwise, lots of tshirts, souvenirs and belt buckle shops. Also random large horse statues!

We ate lunch here, fast food Mexican, overlooking the Camden Lock while sitting on Vespa seats (weird, yes) before having a quick look at some Doc Martens shops, then heading back onto the tube.

The next destination was to look at Tower Bridge and wander along the Thames to The Globe Theatre. The first part of this was easy – pretty hard to miss the Tower Bridge, really! The second part was complicated, partially because when we decided to walk over London Bridge to the other side of the Thames, the best bridge to return over was the Millennium Bridge.

One small note about the Millennium Bridge – it’s got open sides. We’ve talked about my fear of heights a bit before, right? What makes it worse – if I can see through the sides of whatever I’m walking across! Even so, the bridge was just wide enough and had enough decorative poles hanging off the side of it to make it manageable, even though I thought it wasn’t going to happen! A nice cupful of caramelised nuts at the beginning did help, I must admit.

Once we reached the other side, another challenge arose. The Globe was shut this weekend because of site works! What??? First the V&A closes the fashion exhibit, and now The Globe is closed, and on my birthday as well?? Argh! At least it’s open again next week, so I should hopefully be able to get there this trip. Phew.

Since the nearest tube station was near the Borough Market, we decided to wander up there and see what was happening. Although I don’t watch Market Kitchen religiously, it’s always fun to go somewhere you’ve seen on the telly, and it did always look like the markets had great food and drink!

We were pretty amazed at the wares being sold – from farm fresh “raw” milk, to cheese and home-cured sausages, to baked goods and mulled cider, we wandered with our mouths open. We tried the milk, I had some hot chai, some spiced mulled wine, and R tried a traditional pork pie. We saw gorgeously “food” themed ceramics and table linen from Richard Bramble, which was really eye-catching, but we didn’t think we could bring any more ceramic home without breaking some of it! As we were leaving, I spied Neal’s Yard Dairy, place of all good cheese. We tried a couple of different cheese and ended up buying some young brie and some slightly more aged Ardrahan, from Ireland. (Of course, not having a fridge in our hotel room means we’ve taken great pains to keep it cool, hanging the bag out the window from the window handles. Cross fingers that the squirrels we saw from the window earlier don’t take a liking to cheese!)

Since we were heading out to my birthday dinner at Pollen Street Social, it was time to head back to the hotel to freshen up.

Dinner was really, really lovely. I think it was the best dinner we’ve had on this trip, which is saying a lot! Not only is it a Michelin starred restaurant, it prides itself on “relaxed dining” – wear what you are comfortable in and eat what you want. Great, delicious, yummy food, attentive and friendly wait-staff and at least 2/3 of the clientele were wearing jeans. Gluten free was easy – R had let them know in advance so they’d organised GF bread and had made sure they could work with the menu.

We looked at the tasting menu, and while that was amazing, the two dishes we really liked on the a la carte menu weren’t included, so that was ruled out. We were started with an amuse bouche of olives and pork scratchings with two dips – a smoked cod and garlic, and a pear and vinegar. Delicious!

Then came our entrees. I chose the lightly smoked salmon, which was huge – the size of a respectable main course salmon fillet! It was barely smoked, and tasted close to sashimi, with a hint of smoke behind it. This was served with radish, creamed avocado and some little diced squares of something yummy. Deee-lish! R started with deer tartare, which he said was amazing as well.

We asked the sommelier to recommend wines for us, and she advised some whites for entree and reds for mains, as we were both having red meat.  It turns out her husband is Australian, so she was quite knowledgeable about Australian wines as well, which helped make us feel very at home.

The main meal for me was rack of lamb, which was divine, accompanied by aubergine and a few other yummy vegies. Really, really good, and the meat was melt-in-your-mouth good. R chose ox-cheek, which he was also in raptures about.

The dessert menu, while extensive, seemed more about cold dishes than a variety more suited to winter, but they were very delicious too. I had the “lemon meringue” which was lemon and lime meringue icecream. It tasted the way icecream cakes used to, back when they were more cream than “ice confection”! R’s rice pudding hit the spot too, and was much more suited to the season. We finished the meal with a serve of Jason Atherton’s chocolates, which were served from a large wooden box which opened out in layers like a fishing tackle or tool box! Lots of drama! And delicious, too, of course.

When we’d arrived the waitress gave me a key to a “special gift” at the end of the night, which was such a great idea. There was a bit of running around when we asked for the bill, because our waiter told us they had wanted to organise something gluten free for my goodbye gift, and they were SOOOO apologetic that they hadn’t organised a birthday cupcake for me to take home with me. (Hey, I was just happy they’d got bread!)  In the box we found “Breakfast on us”: two tiny little friands and a gourmet tea bag. What a lovely way to finish, and what a fabulous end to my birthday.

 

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8 January, 2012 · 1:11 am

London Day 3

Today was another museum day, as we spent most of the afternoon at the British Museum.

R made sure we saw the Big Ticket items first: The Rosetta Stone and The Parthenon Marbles.

The Rosetta Stone looks like a big rock, mainly obscured by other people’s heads and is enlivened by people trying to elbow you out of the way so they can take pictures of themselves in front of it. We went around the back instead, so we could have an unimpeded view.

The Parthenon Marbles were more my cup of tea, having studied them at uni. Seeing them all there was pretty mind-blowing, and I did love the nasturtiums cast on Greece for having the temerity to actually want them back!

We also saw lots of Egyptian mummies, the Lewis Chessmen, and the Portland Vase which I also remembered studying at uni – so very cool. The Reading Room (the cool round building in the middle) has begun to be used for (paying) special exhibits, so we didn’t end up going in there, even though we climbed all the stairs.

After leaving (through the gift shop of course… you too can take home a life-sized plaster head of the horse of Selene from the Parthenon pediment for only 1650 pounds. Plus shipping of course!) we wandered down to Drury Lane, home of theatre. We stopped for a drink in the Lowlander Grand Cafe, on the erroneous prediction that it was a cafe (it’s actually a pub) and tried some beer (the raspberry beer tastes nothing like beer, by the way, which is good!) and chips and took in the dramatic atmosphere (we were on Drury Lane after all, even if we weren’t in a theatre) before heading back to the hotel to refresh before meeting L, an old buddy from home, for a (another) drink and dinner.

We met in Piccadilly and detoured to one of the Slug and Lettuce pubs, which was warm and served cold drinks. After a couple of ciders, we wandered through Chinatown, trying to decide which of the many very similar restaurants we would bestow our custom onto. Choosing The Crispy Duck simply because it had a great name (without Pagoda or Dragon in the title), we sat down for a yummy meal. R, emboldened by the offallicious delights of the night before, decided to try the Octopus With Pig Organs, a dish which sent shudders down L and my spines. The waiter was similarly surprised, and went do far to doublecheck – “You want… with ears? and tongue?” It actually mostly wasn’t that bad. I’m gaining an appreciation for tongue, in a small corner of the gamut of offal, although there were bits (ear maybe?) that were just wrong. Ick. Needless to say, we didn’t finish that. The king prawn omelette and garlic bok choy was muuuuch better.

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6 January, 2012 · 7:34 am

London Day 2

After the mega-museum day yesterday, we thought we’d take an easy day wandering along Oxford and Regent Streets and seeing where they took us.

We started by walking along Bayswater Rd until we reached Marble Arch, so named because it has a large, marbly arch in the middle of an intersection. This is also where the SHOPS start.

I’d been advised to visit Evans, Next and Debenham’s among others, but only really had luck at Evans, where I found a pair of jeans. The others had lots and lots of stuff, but not much that appealed. I had an interesting time with “customer service” at Evans!

The changeroom is plastered with signs saying “for any assistance with sizes or locating items, please ask”, and the girl at the changerooms mentioned it as well. However, when I found that in my attempt of “let’s try a few different sizes”, UK size 18 was too big (yay – that’s a size 16 Australian – phew) and looked around for someone to swap it, there was noone to be found. I waited a bit, then pressed the “for assistance, please ring” button in my changeroom. After a good three or four minutes, a different shop assistant appeared. I asked for the swap, and her response was “I can’t leave the changerooms, so I’ll have to find someone else to do it.” Hmm. I waited a few more minutes, and eventually yet another lady thrust the jeans into my changeroom.

Meanwhile, I’d tried on another pair, and while the fit was good, I’d accidentally grabbed a “short” pair instead of “regular” length. I asked if I could try them in the “regular” as I’d picked up the wrong ones. Deep sigh. She’d try to find one.

More time passed, enough to try the other jeans, found they were pretty good and cut enough on the generous side to allow for the big dinners we’d been having so far, and put them on the “I think so” pile. I was thinking about maybe trying a size 14, but things were taking so long and with so many deep sighs that I was worried that I’d be either hounded out of the shop in my underwear if I asked for another favour, or given a decisive “No.”

Finally, the lady returned with the jeans, but as I was putting them on I noticed she’d picked up the “extra long” length rather than “regular”, so the hems were literally under my feet. Rather than have another discussion, I decided to just buy the first pair! Nicely stretchy and wide-leg, in a deep indigo denim. Noiyce!

Even though I didn’t find anything to my taste at Next or Debenham’s, we did manage to find a few suitable items for small people of our acquaintance at Mothercare, so before long I was dragging a couple of shopping bags with me to show for the morning’s efforts.

Morning tea was a wheat-free Red Velvet cupcake and a cup of tea from Lola’s in the Selfridge’s’s food hall. Gorgeously light and fluffy, it tasted like a real cupcake! Nom nom nom…

Appetite sated for the moment, we wandered up to the Wallace Collection near Oxford St to keep a little culture in the day. The lower floor has a lot (and I mean a LOT!) of awesome old weaponry and armour. Suits of armour, equine armour, shields, swords, pikes, daggers, rapiers, flintlocks, spurs, and other pointy and dangerous things abound!

Upstairs was a lot of paintings, the most interesting one to me was the Madame la Pompadour image, as I’d seen photos of it before. One of the big rooms upstairs was closed, but I found there was certainly enough art to more than satisfy me in the rest of the building!

Next came lunch, and I fulfilled my salad craving at the Selfridges food hall. I don’t know why you aren’t allowed to combine salads in the same container, even if they’re the same price. Hmm. Yet another strange “customer service” moment? In any case, my red rice and aubergine salads were tasty, even if they were in separate containers!

We took a detour down Regent St after lunch, and stepped briefly into Liberty, until the price tags cowed me into submission and we left. Some very pretty things in there, but three hundred pounds for a small scarf is a little out of my price range.

Then through Piccadilly, a quick stop for R to revisit Kirsty MacColl’s memorial bench and we hopped on the tube to return to the hotel before heading out again to dinner at St John’s Restaurant to celebrate R’s birthday (4 weeks early, but we thought we may as well use the occasion to have a nice night out).

St John’s was great. It’s a “nose to tail” restaurant, so they use quite a bit of offal and cuts which don’t usually get served as gourmet food. From the outside it’s a very unprepossessing place, but we arrived 10 mins early and were told we were “too eager” and needed to have a drink at the bar before we could possibly take our seats. And I checked – our table was still sitting empty all that 10 minutes!

Nevertheless, the cider I had while waiting was nice, although not on tap. The food itself was lovely. I started with the lamb’s tongues and a glass of champagne, which went down very well. While I’ve never been a huge fan of tongue, this was light and tender (and didn’t look at all like those huge beef tongues you used to see in the supermarket!) R was enamoured of two starters, the rabbit offal (heart, liver, kidney and something else he couldn’t quite identify) and the restaurant’s signature dish: marrow on toast. So with the waiter (who sounded exactly like Mr Nigel-Murray from Bones) aiding and abetting, he tried both, and said they were amazing.

For mains, I had the mallard with beetroot, and a side of green salad. This was really lovely – the beetroot somehow cutting through the intense gamy flavour of the leg, while adding to the sweetness of the breast. R’s choice, deviled kidneys on toast, was apparently another winner.

Then came dessert. I chose the chocolate mousse with creme fraiche, which was incredibly rich and dark chocolate, cut beautifully by the sourness of the creme fraiche, while R tried the rhubarb crumble, which was “the best rhubarb dish he’d ever tasted”. I forebore to mention my humble homegrown rhubarb crumbles from last year; after all, this was a restaurant that Tony Bourdain reckons is his favourite restaurant, and won Best London Restaurant in 2001. I suppose the rhubarb grown in our backyard and lovingly sauteed and baked can come a close second best…

I’d recommend St John’s to anyone who enjoys something a little different. While there’s (strangely!) not a lot of vegetarian offerings on the menu, there is one or two entrees and one main, if so desired. There are also a few options of “usual” cuts for those who might be a bit taken aback by the signature uses of offal and lower grade cuts. While they didn’t make a lot of changes for my gluten free requests (no bread provided, and they forgot by the end and gave me wheaten biscuits with dessert), the waiter was able to advise which dishes had toast as an integral part, or used flour in the preparations. It was really a lovely dinner.

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5 January, 2012 · 6:08 am

London Day 1

Our first proper day in London started with… wait for it… a very exciting trip to the Launderette!!! Well, I have to say I was quite enamoured of the prospect of clean clothes that I hadn’t hand-washed in the bathroom basin and draped over the furniture for a while.

The day properly started after this nail-biting interlude, with a wander through Hyde Park. I’d started the morning by reading a regency romance, to really get me psyched up for this, so I was imagining dashing heroes and swooning maidens meeting in a secluded corner of the park to exchange pleasantries and maybe even hold hands, before promenading on Rotten Row at the fashionable hour!

Well there may have been some illicit meetings behind the trees, but probably not many. We did see lots of birdlife (Canadian Geese are huge, btw) and wildlife (squirrels are still very cute, but rats aren’t) and human life (but the only people allowed to swim in the Serpentine are the Serpentine Swim Club, and only between 6.30 and 9am) and joggers.

Rotten Row was pretty devoid of Fashionables as well, unfortunately, but we fixed that by promenading up to the Albert Hall and memorial.

Next stop was the V&A Museum, which I’d been looking forward to, as I’ve got some fabulous books on their fashion collection. Unfortunately (this did cause a lot of indignant squeaking from the peanut gallery) the Fashion Collection is closed for remodelling and not opening again until Spring! How could they do this to me? Many exclamation marks later, I managed to drown my sorrows in lunch, a fish pie from the cafe. (I didn’t see they’ve got a salad bar until after we’d procured pies. Once again I was eating potato. Sigh.)

Thankfully, the Theatre and Performance collection was open, otherwise I think I may have staged a one-woman riot. They had an Annie Lennox exhibit, which was great, and included some of her fabulous stage/video costumes. Other pieces of interest included Pete Townshend’s broken guitar (one of them), and stage costumes from Adam Ant and Mick Jagger. And of course, there was some scribbles from Mr Shakespeare.

The jewellery rooms were pretty drool-worthy as well – some pretty blingy pieces there. Well worth a look!

Next up was the British Galleries, and we focused on the 19th century ones. Luckily I was able to catch a glimpse of a Regency gown in the early section, to appease my costume hunger. They had a lot of furniture, tapestries, crockery and all sorts of accoutrements of life, which was very fabulous.

Our last stop at the V&A was to see the Raphael exhibit, on loan from the Queen, apparently! These were on a huge scale, of course, and were very imposing.

The gift shop provided lots of opportunities for pressies for people back home, and while the bookshop had lots of books I wanted to add to my collection, taking coffee-table hardbacks in long-haul luggage just isn’t fun. Good thing bookdepository.com has a nice range of V&A books with free shipping. Woohoo!

Our next stop was the Natural History Museum, just across the road from the V&A. R wanted to come here to see the dinosaur skeleton, and it was pretty amazing! Their exhibits on the whole were great – like the Roman Baths at Bath, these guys do a great job at organising and arranging their stuff so that it’s interesting and relatively easy to manage wandering around finding things out. Well worth a visit, especially for kids! The gift shop here also had some great things – anything nature, science, or dinosaur related you could think of, and more you wouldn’t think of!

By the time we finished here, the gates to Hyde Park had closed, so we walked the long way around, past Kensington Gardens, back to the hotel.

Dinner was a Malaysian place around the corner that we spied this morning while finding the launderette (see? Great things came of that launderette trip!) which was very tasty, especially the black glutinous rice pudding. Yum!

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5 January, 2012 · 3:12 am

Arrival in London

We left Edinburgh at some ungodly hour of the morning, with the promise of dirty bad weather ahead: gale force winds and blizzards in the north. Good time to get out of Dodge!

More fun awaited us at the train station, as all the trains on the board had a platform assigned, except for our trusty 8.30am to King’s Cross. Hmm. We wandered about, looking for info, and at 8.15am all the screens went blank. More hmm. Lots of people were now wandering around looking slightly panicked. Since it was now 8.25am and no info on the screens, I found a harried-looking person with an official-looking badge and asked her where our train might be. She said she “guessed” it would be Platform 11, so we rushed over there, and successfully boarded before the train left.

The wifi system gave us free access to the train update webpage, which was a font of information, such as telling us that all further trains north of Newcastle were now cancelled due to the weather, and apparently shortly after we left Edinburgh, Waverley Train Station was closed until engineers could assess the building! Scary stuff.

We were continuing nicely until I used my 15 mins of free wifi to post this on facebook. This apparently jinxed us well and truly, and we stopped. This was apparently due to signal failure somewhere, but since at least three trains passed us in the opposite direction I’m forced to conclude that it was actually Signal Jinxing that caused the problem. We started again, then stopped. Then started, and stopped.

Eventually we limped into King’s Cross Station almost two hours late, but hey, at least we hadn’t been blown over like the truck in Scotland!

After two short tube hops, we burrowed out from the Underground at Lancaster Gate, to be faced with Hyde Park on one side, and our hotel on the other. Great location.

The same can’t be said for the state of the hotel. It’s a bit similar to the Tyddyn Llan: it’s an old building that is a bit in need of some love, but this one is even more so. The furnishings are all a bit old, the carpet has bare patches, the floor creaks and we can hear the people in the room upstairs – whenever they move it sounds like elephants tapdancing on the ceiling, the tiles in the bathroom are cracked, there’s a bit of a musty aroma, mixed with stale cigarette smoke from the “smoking” rooms… and the lift is only big enough for two people, or one with luggage!

Nevertheless, the bed is big (it’s two single beds squashed together, which at least gives us room!) and the bathroom has hot water, even if the pressure isn’t great and it’s liable to change temperature if you look at it funny. The room size isn’t too bad: there’s room for all our stuff, and it’s conveniently located and relatively reasonably priced.

We wandered out quite early for dinner, as we’d missed lunch due to the train fracas, and stopped at a pub near Paddington Station which looked quite nice. The food was pretty dull, but at least they had Aspell on tap.

Next stop was the Sainsbury’s in Paddington Station (like everyone else in London, it seemed!) for supplies: yoghurt and pineapple for dessert and some GF bread to augment brekky.

The walk back to the hotel was pleasant; while it’s cold here, it’s nowhere near as cold as Edinburgh was!

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4 January, 2012 · 3:56 am

Scotland Day 3

Our last full day in Edinburgh we thought we should head back to the shops, as I was starting to think about all the pressies I needed to buy! Our first week in the UK wasn’t really conducive to the purchasing of pressies for people back home, as we were either with family, or in places where there weren’t a lot of souvenir shops. We’d been tossing up the idea of going to The Playhouse which was directly opposite the hotel, to see We Will Rock You, but decided against it in order to support the more commercial enterprises of the city.

Souvenir shops are something the Scots seem to do very well! I was looking for a few things in particular, and went into heaps of different shops, and they all seemed to have these things (I won’t mention what they were – it’s a surprise!) at exactly the same price! I ended up buying the stuff I wanted mainly from a place on the Royal Mile, because it’s got the cachet, right? Tshirts, woolen items, dodgy coasters, they all went into my bags, which were very heavy by the end of the day.

R on the other hand, was in his element, because the other thing the Scots do well in the tourist precinct is whisky shops! We chose a few 50ml bottles of interesting and different single malts for pressies as well as R picking up a bottle for himself.

We also stopped into a pub for lunch just off Princes St after wandering down in the bracing (bitterly cold!) wind. I chose my lunch off the “Light and Healthy” section of the menu – a Baked Potato with Bacon and Brie! Not the healthiest thing I’ve ever eaten, or the lightest, really. A bit of an understatement. The potato was about the size of a human skull, with some bacon slices (not just bacon bits as I’d expected – slices!) and chunks of brie shoved inside. Yum! I suppose it did come with a side salad, rather than chips…

The entertainment over lunch was watching the traditional New Year Edinburgh Derby, where one section of the pub would roar at something, then the other half would roar at something else. We left before it finished, but not before each lot of supporters had roared for a goal.

We did find a Middle Eastern restaurant just off the Royal Mile too, in case anyone is looking for a break from haggis and neeps. Unfortunately we found it just after we’d had lunch, so we couldn’t sample its wares. It does look a touch out of place next to all the “ye olde” woolen mill shops and kilt factories.

After a long day of souvenir-shopping, R decided he wanted an evening of a couple of wee drams of scotch over a traditional pub meal for his last night in Scotland, so we headed up the street to our “local”, the Conan Doyle. They lived up to expectations, providing a couple of scotches R hadn’t had before, and my new favourite cider, Aspall, on tap. Again, I tried to go for a slightly lighter option for dinner, starting with a nice grilled field mushroom. However, as you can see below, it was Scotland-ised, being served with another slice of bacon, smothered with cheese and swimming in a cream sauce! At least there were a few sprigs of greens for garnish. Thank goodness Edinburgh has a lot of hills, otherwise I don’t think I would be able to do up my jeans anymore!

Then for main, I ordered grilled seabass with rocket mash and vegetables. Hmm, rocket mash, I thought. Must be a wilted bed of diced rocket or something. No, they were missing a comma in the menu, and the lovely fish arrived on a mountain of potato mash with a pile of peas and a few more sprigs of rocket. Sigh. I tried. You really get your money’s worth with food here!

Off to London in the morning, so an early night after packing up our stuff and squeezing as much as we could into our bags. Too much pressie shopping!

 

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2 January, 2012 · 5:37 pm

Scotland Day 2

After the frenetic night that was Hogmanay, things are much quieter here on New Year’s Day!

We slept in and missed the dubious delights of breakfast at the hotel, so trundled up to the Conan Doyle pub for a Scottish Breakfast (or part of one for me- no Cumberland sausages or Haggis) and giggled at the lads up early looking for a drink, when the bar didn’t open until 12.30. Kind of strange that nothing else was open (not even the Tesco Expresses) but the pubs were!

We found this out in great detail after breakfast as we’d hoped to get some washing done and so walked down to the nearest launderette, a km or so down Leith Walk. We got there, only to find they are closed until Tuesday. We hadn’t figured on this, since most launderettes at home are unattended. This one apparently is not, so we huffed and puffed our way back up the hill with the same dirty clothes in our backpacks.

Lunch was the next mission on our list, and finding something relatively GF that wasn’t pub grub turned out to be more difficult that we thought. I was a bit sick of heavy meat meals, so we kept walking until we unearthed a Pasta Fresco cafe near the Royal Mile which among the Italian dishes, did baked potatoes. I had mine with Coronation Chicken, a combination which sounds weird but tasted great. The waitress told us she’d had a big New Year’s too, but had managed to turn up for work with a huge (manic?) smile.

We checked out a couple more souvenir shops on our way back to the hotel, but didn’t find those elusive perfect gifts. More shopping tomorrow hopefully – even though it’s a bank holiday, most of the tourists will have headed home so there won’t be as many crowds.

The rest of the day consisted of an afternoon nap – the first I’ve had since Chefchaouen! Then we wandered out again for dinner, this time another Italian place called Jolly, for the hugest plate of chicken and king prawn risotto I’ve ever seen. So much for a slightly lighter meal! I can’t wait for London where we might be able to get smaller meals like sushi or salads occasionally – I don’t think my tummy’s been empty ever since we landed at Gatwick!

We finished the day with another local delicacy – a deep fried Snickers. I’d wanted the classic of the Mars Bar, but the chippy had run out, presumably with the influx of the world’s 80,000 biggest party animals the night before. It tasted pretty good though – just like a hot melty Snickers bar, really!

Maybe it’s the comedown from New Year’s, but I’m starting to get a bit homesick now, and missing family and friends. Plus, having to go out for every meal is fun to begin with, but it would be nice to just have some toast and a cup of tea now and then! It’s three weeks since we left home, which so far has been my travel limit. Another week and a half before we head back to Australia though, and moving down to London tomorrow will probably help. The frequent moving from one place to another, which is unfortunately our modus operandi in order to fit as many things in as possible, is taking it out of us and it’ll be nice to be in one place for a week.

 

 

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1 January, 2012 · 11:49 pm

Hogmanay 2011

Hogmanay was amazing! Princes St and a lot of the surrounding streets were blocked off to make the street party, and there were thousands and thousands of people wandering around between the stages and the bars and food stalls.

There were about 5 different stages with various bands playing – pop, folk, electronic and rock, and the two separated “extra ticketed” areas were the Keilidh (traditional music section – I could hear bagpipes) and the gardens section where the rock concert was.

I was a bit unsure about this at first, as the crowds in the street party were huge, with thousands of teenagers drinking. Think a cross between the Big Day Out with the Royal Show and multiply it by a hundred! Not really my scene, these days. Nevertheless, we had a great time. We watched a few of the smaller stages for a while before heading to the gardens section, as you couldn’t come back in if you left. Once we’d gone in there, there were a few less teenagers, but still thousands of people! The Princes St Gardens is on an incline looking down into a slight valley, facing Edinburgh Castle where a lot of the fireworks were coming from.

We wandered in quite late, so the best spot left was behind a tree (at least it was a deciduous one so we could see through it!) People were pushing to get through quite a bit, mostly because they were all getting pissed and didn’t really notice, I think! There was a no glass policy, but people were bringing in all sorts of things and the portable bars were doing a roaring trade. No bins either, so people just dropped their rubbish where they stood. By the end of the night it was quite literally a sea of plastic bottles and other rubbish.


Our spot under the tree got quite muddy quite quickly, as it’s been a bit drizzly for the past couple of days and it was on the hill. We ended up moving back slightly to a temporary barricade right at the back of the gardens which we hung onto and helped people get past without too much slipping, but a lot of people refused to take a hand and took a tumble instead! So many people were so drunk they hardly noticed, or bounced back up, only to slide again. Our boots were sodden with mud by the end, but we managed to not cover ourselves completely in it.

It was quite a sideshow, watching people trying to get past without slipping over. One guy managed to make it right to the top while balancing three open cups of beverages, without spilling a drop!

The concert itself was great. I’d listened to Primal Scream a bit before, and they really got the crowd moving (even though dancing in the slippery muddy slopes was a bit scary! We dug our heels in and wiggled where we stood for the main part.)

We got to talking with a couple next to us, a Scotsman and his Scandanavian(?) partner who had seen the band before and were really into it. They wished us a happy new year with a swig from their hip flask and helped us give a hand to those affected by the slipperiness.

The fireworks were amazing – they had a small show on the hour until midnight, when they were going off for a good six or seven minutes, from the walls of Edinburgh Castle, and all along the ridge of the Royal Mile. They were so close I thought people would get burnt from the debris, but they had it perfectly measured I think.

The band continued for most of an hour after midnight, even though it was raining by this point. It’d held off except for some drizzle for most of the evening, but started raining more heavily after midnight. Thank goodness I’d swapped my slightly warmer coat for my raincoat, and thank goodness again for my layers of Icebreaker merino!

We left just as Primal Scream was just finishing the last song, Rocks. The security staff had started taking down the barriers at the back (and some had fallen down, too – that’s how muddy it was) so we were able to clamber up the back bank rather than attempt the slide down the long muddy gauntlet we’d been watching people fall over in all night. This was was still very slippery, but at least there was a tree and a couple of the barricades to lever ourselves up with.

It was a relief to get back to the hotel and have a hot shower – we were both aching from the cold and from walking and standing bracing ourselves in the mud for 5 hours or so. The chippy around the corner from the hotel was doing a roaring trade, so we stood in the queue to get our own. Pretty terrible chips, as they were cooked really quickly to get then out to the customers, but at least they were hot!

So that was Hogmanay! A definite experience, but I don’t think we need to experience it again.

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1 January, 2012 · 10:59 am

Hello Scotland

After packing up, driving two hours and dropping the car back to its owners Thrifty in Wolverhampton, we hopped on the train and headed north to Edinburgh. The train was a bit squishy and quite warm, and although the booking page had assured us we were booking two window seats facing each other over a table, in reality we had two window seats one behind the other. We nabbed one of the aisle seats so we could sit together, and I sat there holding my breath at each stop waiting for someone to tell me that was their seat, as people seemed to be doing at every other seat!

We arrived at Waverley Station as it was raining (of course) so we hailed a taxi to take us the short drive to the hotel. We’re staying at one of the Holiday Inn Expresses, and it’s very boring and anonymous, but still it’s kind of nice to be in somewhere boring after all the “character” hotels we’ve stayed at! The outside is lovely anyway, as the building is an “historic” one. There was a moment of panic on check-in, as they couldn’t find our reservation, which I had dutifully carried out on their website, and prepaid! Thank goodness I had the reservation confirmation with me, as apparently their reservations department hadn’t passed it on. Only eight months of notice, thanks guys! We managed to get a room at least, and they gave us a drinks voucher, which was nice.

As we were settling in, there was some noise out on the street, and noticed they’d put on fireworks, obviously to welcome us to town. Yay!

There are the occasional creaky “character” floorboards we’ve come to expect, and breakfast is a bunfight (almost literally) as there is nowhere near enough space for everyone booked into the hotel to eat breakfast. Wonderful shower though – awesome pressure and nice and hot.

After checking in we wandered out into the chilly evening to find some food. I was craving something not hearty or traditionally British or Moroccan after the huge servings of meat we’ve been having so far on this holiday, so we were looking for Thai or Chinese or something similar. We found the No. 1 Chinese Restaurant a couple of blocks from the hotel, and set on combination stir fry with gusto! Yay for crunchy vegies!

This morning after the breakfast skirmish, we wandered around to the Royal Mile. Because it’s New Year’s Eve, there were thousands of tourists wandering around. We walked up to Edinburgh Castle, but were put off by the huge crowds.

We had a look in some of the souvenir shops, and contemplated tartans, but R already has a traditional kilt from his last trip, and my family doesn’t seem to have any affiliations. I’ll pick up a few souvenirs before we leave though. We did see dog kilts, which would be a hoot next Christmas on the family doggies, but the largest size they had as for Scottish Terriers, and all our dogs are much bigger than that!

After wandering down the Royal Mile to see Holyrood Palace, we started walking up it again in search of lunch.

After popping into a whisky shop to R could taste a couple of new and different expressions (the shop had a resident dog, Maggie), we ended up stopping at the oldest pub on the Royal Mile, which was first opened in 1740-something. Not bad! Unsurprisingly, they had some “traditional” Scottish food, so R had a lamb hotpot, and I explored the “Stovies” – basically potato and beef, mashed together. Imagine cottage pie mooshed. Tasted pretty good, but bland and salty at the same time.

After lunch we wended our way through the ever-increasing crowds, through a shopping centre (and over a scarily see-through pedestrian bridge – my fear of heights was on full alert!) and back to the hotel to prepare for our Hogmanay evening.

 

 

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