London - Day 2

Friday was the day of the bike tour for our trip to London.  My sister and her husband introduced us to Fat Tire Bike Tours which gives 4 hour-ish bike tours in Barcelona, London, Berlin, and Paris.  Katie and Kyle did the tours in Paris and London and we had done the tour in Barcelona.  Once you get stamps from all four tours, you get a free t-shirt!  The tours are a great way to see a lot of the highlights of a big city.  Since Katie and Kyle hadn't gotten their sheets stamped in London, we had to make sure we did the tour, so that was the plan for our first full day in London.

The guy at the left of this picture was our tour guide.  He was excellent!!  The big building in the background was someone's castle that Brian gave a score of a -2 when our tour guide asked what we thought about it.  :)

This sign was one that our tour guide ignored with us.  :)  We thought it was pretty funny!

We stopped at one point on our tour in Hyde Park Corner and the Horse Guards came walking by.  These guards change every day and walk to Buckingham Palace.  It was cool to see them in all their garb and riding on the horses.

Brian thought the taxis were pretty cool in London, so he had to get a picture of one of them.  I'm not sure what the building in the back is, but the car in the center is a London taxi.

We then stopped in Trafalgar Square and had time to take pictures and have lunch.  We had to get some pictures of Big Ben and actually got a picture of the two of us!

Brian had a pretty sweet bike on our tour - it was Blue and had a Bee on it - the B bike!

We rode through St. James Park and this dog thought the fountain looked like a good place for a drink.

There were some pretty neat things and views in this park.  One thing that we saw that we didn't get a picture of was the pelicans.  There are a few pelicans in the park and they like to terrorize people and other birds.  There's a YouTube video of the pelicans in this park eating a pigeon whole!  It's pretty crazy!  Unfortunately, the pelican came upon us pretty quickly and there was a park worker chasing it away from the people, so we weren't fast enough to get a picture of it, but here's some of the views in St. James Park.

After the bike tour, we made our way to the Victoria and Albert Museum, but had to take a quick stop by a London telephone booth for a picture.

We also had to get a picture of one of the light posts with Coco Chanel's initials on it that one of the kings had put there when he was in love with her.

We got to the Victoria and Albert Museum and were surprised by one wall on the outside.  They had left some of the damage made by bombs in WWII on one of the walls as a memorial to what happened then.  It was amazing all the different war monuments that were all over the city.

We finally made it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in which I only wanted to see one thing.  There was a Dale Chihuly glass sculpture in the entrance of the museum.  Chihuly had a bunch of pieces at the Fredrik Meijer Gardens in GR this summer and I went to see them with my mom, Oma, and my mom's friend.  I loved what he did with glass and wanted to make sure that I saw this one while we were in London.

We then headed to My Old Dutch Pancake restaurant for dinner.  My sister had told us about this and said it was a pretty good place to eat.  We loved it!  Brian got a pancake with pepperoni, chorizo, tomato sauce, cheese, and peppers on it.  I got a pancake with apples and cinnamon baked into it with whipped cream on top.  They were delicious!  Brian also had to try some English tea and he finally had a chance here.

We then booked it back to our hotel to change so that we could get to the Lion King musical that we were going to that night.  We were almost late since our tube rides were rather slow, but we made it before the show started.  The show was excellent!  I think this was Brian's favorite part of the whole trip!  The different costumes that they had for the different animals were very cool.  I think my favorite was the giraffes because it was people with stilts for the hands and feet and they were walking on all fours high in the air.  It don't think I could do that!  Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures while we were there, so we don't have any pictures of the show.

Apartment Updates from the USA!

This week Brian's replacement in Detroit came to FN for the week to meet people and work with Brian.  Since he has a good standing with the airline, he was able to take some stuff from the States over here for us.  This means that our apartment is starting to look a little better!  We had ordered curtains and a mobile crane and we finally got them hung today. 

We ordered these curtains from Target because we have been unable to find the right size curtains for our living room here.  They are almost the exact same color as our green couch, so they work out perfect!  We went to OBI last night to find curtain rods to hang them from and these worked out perfectly!  Now I have to make some tie-backs for them since we were not too excited about any of the ones we found at the store.  It's so nice to have a little more color in our living room!

This is a paper crane mobile that I ordered from my cousin and her husband.  They recently started a business of selling these handmade mobiles and other handmade things our of their home in SC.  Check out Wabi Sabi Studios on etsy.com to see what they have.  I was proud of myself because we found a "command adhesive" type ceiling hook for this and I was able to hang it all by myself today!  It looks great with our green and brown couches!  It's nice to have a touch of family in our place. 

Brian's replacement also brought us printer ink (since apparently German HP ink doesn't work in US HP printers) and I was able to print out a few more pictures to put in the frames we bought at IKEA a while ago.  Just one more to fill now!

It's nice to have some of these house things starting to come together now that we've been here for over 3 months now.  I'm hoping to have most things done by Christmas so I don't have to think about these things anymore once we get back after Christmas.

London - Day 1

I am finally getting around to blogging about our trip to London!  I've had some troubles with the pictures, so that's why it's taken me so long.  I've also been pretty busy with laundry and knitting, so I haven't taken the time to blog.  It's been long enough now, so here it goes!

We left for London on Thursday, October 28.  The train schedules were not in our favor (a 4 hour layover in the middle of the night didn't sound fun), so we ended up renting a car and driving it to the airport at Memmingen.  We then flew from Memmingen to London where we had to take a 45 minute bus ride to a bus/tube station that was within walking distance of our hotel.  We got to our hotel before the check-in time and they didn't have a room ready for us yet.  We ended up leaving our luggage in their cellar (our clothes were quite cold later!) because we wanted to get going to see a few things before we went to a London Symphony Orchestra concert in the evening.

We took the tube into London and headed toward St. Paul's Cathedral.  On the way, we found this statue of a man walking some sheep - I obviously HAD to take a picture with it!

We then headed to St. Paul's Cathedral where we were able to go inside and use an audio guide for a tour.  We couldn't take pictures inside, but here's one of the outside.

Since St. Paul's Cathedral has a gorgeous dome on top, you have the opportunity to climb up it and get a view of London.  Brian wanted to do this so I went along with it before I knew what I was getting in to.  We first walked up a number of stairs and were in the whispering area because it is said that you can whisper on one side of the dome and someone can hear it on the other side.  At this point we were still inside the church.  The next step was to climb more steps to the lower part of the dome that can be seen from the outside.  You could then walk around up here and get a slightly obstructed view of London because of the columns that surround this part of the dome.  I was doing okay up to this point.  The next step was to climb even more stairs (and very scary stairs!) to get to the very top of the dome where you could walk outside and see London without an obstructed view because there were less columns up here.  Needless to say, I did not enjoy the grated spiral stairs that you had to climb in very small quarters to get to the top.

The view from the top was quite amazing though and we could see many of the famous things around London.  Here's the view we had of the Millennium Bridge from atop St. Paul's Cathedral.

And a few more of the city and Tower Bridge.

I was not very excited to be this high up, so I sat down as soon as we got up there while Brian took pictures.

Brian was much more daring than me.  :)

I was very happy to be on the ground again and had to take a picture with the bench that said "London" on it.

One thing we noticed immediately when arriving in London is that wherever there is a pedestrian crosswalk over a road, there are words painted on the road to tell the pedestrians which way to look for traffic since they drive on the opposite side of the road there.  It was good to have these because we definitely didn't always look the right way for traffic!

We then walked to the Millennium Bridge which was made famous by the Harry Potter movies.  It is a pedestrian only bridge and there were definitely a lot of pedestrians!

From the Millennium Bridge, you could see the London Bridge and the Tower Bridge.  In the following picture, the London Bridge is in the foreground and the Tower Bridge (what most people think of when they hear the London Bridge) is in the background.

We then made our way to the Barbican Centre which is the home of the London Symphony Orchestra.  We had dinner in a cafeteria style restaurant they had there and then headed to our seats for the concert.  It was a great concert!  We both enjoyed it a lot and hope to go back sometime in the future to hear them again.

Car and Fall Colors

Sorry it's been a little while since I've posted!  We went to London this past weekend from Thursday until Monday.  I've wanted to put up pictures from our trip, but I'm having a bit of trouble getting them to face the right way.  Hopefully I can get that fixed soon and I will post some blogs about our weekend there.  I've also been busy with a lot of laundry since we came back.  :)  I've got it all under control now and even have the ironing done!

Our most recent big news is that we bought a car!  We've gone three months without a car, but it is starting to get quite cold and it is often rainy.  This makes taking our bikes less enjoyable and we'd like to be able to go places nearby on the weekends with more ease than we've had so far.  Brian started looking online for a car and found one.  He went with several coworkers to see the car before we left for London and decided that it was a good car for us, so he put a deposit on it so that they would get the necessary inspections and hold it for us until we got back.  The man he was buying it from also spoke no English, so the coworkers were definitely a big help in the whole process!

On Tuesday, the man brought the car over and Brian and a coworker finished the deal.  Yesterday Brian went with the coworker to get the license plates and all the other paperwork done for the car.  We just have to pay the insurance now and we will be all set!

All I really know about the car is that it is a manual, diesel, VW Golf Kombi.  If you want to know more, ask Brian.  :)

The next step is for me to learn to drive a stick shift.  I've never done it before, so this will be rather interesting.  I want to be able to drive the car when people come to visit since Brian won't always be with us when we go to see things.  I'll let you know how the lessons go.  :)

In other news, the leaves on the trees have finally started to change here!  I took some pictures this morning of what I can see outside our balcony.  They're beautiful!