Day 21 - London

Distance walked: 14km,  Alcohol consumed: 2 bottles of beer

We caught up with our cousin Rachele from Italy today and her daughter Vanessa. Vanessa stayed with me in Australia for 7 months when she came to Melbourne to improve her English. She now lives in Graz in Austria, having got there via Barcelona, Mallorca and 6 months in Rio. She puts my travel history to shame.

Vanessa's English is excellent but Rachele can only just get by. Also, they are only here in London for the weekend, so they don't have much time for sightseeing. Because of this they wanted to do one of the hop on-hop off bus tours with commentary in multiple languages so that is what we spent the day doing.

We hopped on our bus at King's Cross station and road it down through the city of London to the Tower where we hopped off. Mary and I wanted to visit the Tower but the others weren't so keen, so we just hopped on a river boat (included in our ticket) and sailed (motored?) up river to the London Eye. We got off there and wandered along their south bank - puts ours to shame. We stopped for lunch at a place called, imaginatively, The Wharf where we had fish & chips with mushy peas. The views were excellent.

After lunch we wandered along the river bank stopping in a quirky gift shop called Suck, where I wanted to by a folding cardboard tank for Pete but they were sold out.  I settled for an umbrella that changes colour when it gets wet. We also stopped at a small flea market, where I bought a summer dress. That is the sort of sightseeing my cousins enjoy.

We then hopped back on the bus and road it to Buckingham Palace where we got off. It is a very unimpressive building. The most interesting thing to look at were the guards in their traditional uniforms doing silly walks back and forth. We wandered through Green Park before hopping on the bus again and riding it back to King's Cross.

When then broke to return to our respective hotels for a rest before dinner. We ate at a place called Tavistock Tandoori as Rachele has never eaten Indian food and we thought it was a traditional English thing to do. The food was Harmless but the waiters were very entertaining. They were very business like and bossy. At one point we got scolded for taking too long to make up our minds what to order as they were very busy. Vanessa got scolded for not liking her dessert (gulab jamun) as it was too sweet for her taste, on the grounds that it was supposed to be that sweet. We enjoyed our meal immensely.