London

My mother and I came back from our London trip last night and we had a wonderful time.

Saturday
We left Stockholm on Saturday afternoon, my uncle gave us a lift to the Central station and we took the Arlanda Express train to the airport. At the check-in, we found out that the flight was over-booked and that they were looking for three people who could go the following day instead. For a while, no one volunteered and we were a little worried we would be left behind, as we checked in quite late. But in the end it all worked out somehow and we got on the plane.

Our hotel was called "Royal Cambridge", which sounds a whole lot fancier than it was. It's on a street with practically nothing but hotels, and we were wondering if our's was the tiniest one. But the receptionist was friendly and carried our suitcases up the stairs as the lift was broken (he offered to carry my mother as well, but she managed to get up on her own...).

After settling in at the hotel, we went out for dinner in a nearby Garfunkel's restaurant.

Sunday

We woke up with aching backs after spending a night on very hard mattresses and had a breakfast of toast, jam and cereal (in my mother's case, just toast and jam as she can't have milk). We decided to buy some other kind of bread and some fruit for tomorrow's breakfast, and try to find some lactose free milk or yogurt for my mother.

After breakfast we took the tube to Waterloo and then a train to Haslemere to visit my au-pair family. It was so nice to see them all again and we had a lovely day with them on the English countryside. This is the lovely Orchard Cottage where they live:

"My" little boys had grown so much that I hardly recognised them! This is what happens in nearly 8 1/2 years:

We had a delicous lunch and a nice walk with Cleo the dog (forgot to take a photo of her!). I had brought my photo albums from my time in London, and everyone was very interested to see what they looked like back then:

Thank you all for a lovely day!

Monday
On Monday we bought a 3-day travelcard and got on the tube to Oxford Street, where we walked around for a while, mostly window shopping. We then went to the market in Covent Garden:

We saw a man wearing trousers that looked a lot like the trousers I wore when I was a clown, so of course I had to take a photo of him. Unfortunately I didn't get my camera ready until he had already passed, but you can still see a bit of his trousers: :)

We continued to visit places on our "tourist list" and next was Harrod's:


Harrod's food hall:

Here's my mother (and a few other people...) at Piccadilly Circus:


Exhausted after a long day of walking, we got on a bus just to be able to sit down for a while, and ended up at St Paul's cathedral. We got off the bus, took quite a lousy photo of "St Paul's by night", crossed the street and got on a bus in the other direction.

My mother's pedometer showed more than 21000 steps that evening!

Tuesday
On Tuesday, we decided to go to Madame Tussaud's. Luckily we got there shortly after they opened, so the queues weren't too bad, but we still had to wait for about 30 minutes to get our tickets. I remember queueing (spelling??) outside for ages last time I was there.

Here are some of the celebrities we "met":

Tiger Woods

The Royal Family

President Obama

A genius. And Albert Einstein. :)

Two talented singers


This is as close as I'll ever get to Johnny Depp...

After Madame Tussaud's we continued our window shopping for a while, but as our feet were a bit tired from all that walking on Monday, we did a lot of sightseeing this way:

I love London's double-decker buses!

That evening we were too tired to go very far, so we went to the nearest pub and had some delicious fish and chips with mushy peas. Very English indeed.

Wednesday

On our last day, we did our packing in the morning, left our luggage at the hotel and took a bus to Buckingham Palace.

There were obviously a lot of people there, but we managed to see a bit of the changing of the guards:

While we were waiting, some Italian tourists asked us for directions for something that sounded like "arrows". We looked at their map, trying to figure out what kind of arrows they were talking about, until one of them said: "Arrods. Big shop. You know where is?" with a huge Italian accent. :) For a moment there, I had forgotten about Italian people's problems pronouncing the letter H... Their map was the kind that has little drawings of all the famous sights on it, so I pointed to the big picture of Harrod's and they were very grateful.

On our own map, there was a coupon for a 15% discount at the Rainforest Café, so we decided to go there for lunch. The restaurant had a rainforest interior (obviously) and right next to our table, there were two huge elephants that did this every 10 minutes:

After buying some presents and doing some final bus sightseeing, we went back to our hotel for our luggage and took the train to Heathrow. I came home around midnight, went straight to bed - and woke up at 11 o'clock today! I guess I was a bit tired...

Here's our hotel room, with some lovely flowers that the boys picked for us on Sunday:

And this is the "royal" bathroom...

Kate, if you're reading this, please leave a comment (click on "kommentarer", then write something in the box that appears). If I know you're reading, I might just write some more in English!