New Years Eve

New Years Eve in a new country…our first time for that. Well to be perfectly honest we started the day off quite late because we’re still adjusting to the fact that our bedroom is darker during the day than at night. Not to worry though we knew we wanted to do two things-see the fireworks by Westminster and visit Marianne at work. We spent the afternoon meandering around and later in the evening scoping out the Westminster area. All the streets leading out of Trafalgar Square were closed down and filling with people and there were Jumbotrons operating in the square for Embankment spillover. The police force was out in force, pun intended, with a lot of mounted police but there didn’t seem to be any tension. We walked down a closed Whitehall all the way to Westminster and realized the Westminster Station was closed. Good to know for later when we come back down. We could see the Thames Embankment was packed with people. When you walked by the odd alleyway that led to the embankment you could hear the distinctive roar of people and thumping of music peak through. It was hard to not notice the centuries old buildings and contemplate all the different methods of New Years celebrations they’ve seen. We’ve never been in a large city with a proper New Year’s celebration so we were excited to experience it. Soon enough we went over to Marianne’s work around 10:00pm to grab some food and drink. Marianne was kind enough to hook us up with passes so we could avoid the cover charge. The place was already full and the New Year’s energy was quite abundant, not in a rowdy manner but just friendliness. We spent sometime talking to some new friends but realized it was already 11:20. We freaked because we were at least 30 minutes away from the fireworks. Needless to say, we booked out of the bar, hands stamped for later entry, luckily caught an immediate bus to Notting Hill Gate, charged into the Tube station and onto the Circle Line. 11:33. We were relieved to be on the train and moving towards Westminster. The train was excruciatingly stop and go and was filling up. 11:52. We arrive at St. James Park Station which was the last stop and everyone flooded off. The station crew was expecting the crowd and was shouting herding orders as everyone hustled up the stairs. We were about a 1/3rd of a mile from a viewable spot so we hurried with the crowd towards the Embankment. Everyone was really excited and didn’t want to miss Big Ben turn over. We hit a wall of people near Westminster Abbey; we tried to push through but gave up and settled in. About a minute later Big Ben tolled and the fireworks shot into the sky. The scream of the crowd above the Big Ben tolls was pretty fantastic and something we won’t forget. We stayed till near the end and then made our back to Victoria Station because St. James closed after our train. 12:46. We made it back to Marianne’s bar in Notting Hill and the party was still going. We hung out downstairs till about 2:30am and sort of helped the staff clean up but not really wanting to step on toes and cause more of a mess we bowed out. Not before Beckie did a little solo dance to karaoke “Rock with You.” One delight of the evening was not only the hospitality of Marianne’s work mates but free travel on London transport. We got back to the apartment after a late night bus ride around 4am. So much for trying to reset our clocks. Happy New Year!

Jack the Ripper Geocache

December 30th. We've settled into the short term place now and have taken some time to get to know the area. Two days ago, we decided to try and do the Jack the Ripper geocache hunt. Basically, the geocache takes you to all theoretical Ripper kill sites and has you collect a visual clue. The visual clue then helps you to do determine the final GPS coordinates of the cache. We took the bus over to the starting point, Whitechapel High Street, and started off. The area around the Whitechapel tube station was one giant market, very Asia Minor feel to it. There were quite a few vendors selling £3-4 pound jeans, shirts, and scarfs. The multi-cache was spread out over quite an area so we hurried off to start... in the rain. Fortunately, we were able to get around fairly quickly and strolled down some side streets that may be best left alone at night. We tried to stop in a pub next to Martha Tabram's unfortunate rendezvous with Mr. Ripper but it wasn't serving food. We opted to move north and ate at a small, warm pub in Artillery Row. After that, we did the final clue and got the coordinates; Beckie zeroed right in on the cache location and had the honor of signing the log. We ran back to Liverpool Station and on to the Central line...out of the rain and ghostly grasps from victims passed.

Late Night

It's fantastic to walk around late, late at night. There are very few people out and when there are, they seem to stay in the shadows. This is especially true on neighborhood roads that are off of the main "A" roads. The streets at night are far more isolating and all the more wonderful for it!

Moving day #1

Today began much like the others before it. We got up, took a shower, and went down to the hotel restaurant to eat breakfast (beans on toast for me, of course!). What came next was not quite as relaxed as those other days. We had attempted to contact the porter of our short-term apartment intermittently over the past few days. No luck. Now, it was the morning of our "check-in" day and we had no keys, no way of getting into the apartment, and no more days left at the hotel. The pressure was building. We had left messages for Ambi (the porter) to meet us there at Noon. At 11:15, we left our packed bags in the hotel and headed over to *hopefully* meet him and get into the flat. We waited outside the building, frantically calling Ambi and the flat manager trying desperately to contact at least one of them. Finally, we noticed a gentleman exiting the building and stopped him. He was kind enough to give us Ambi's mobile number. Success! We reached Ambi on his mobile and agreed to meet him there in an hour.

We hopped back on the Tube over to the hotel, arranged for them to hold our bags a bit longer, and returned to the building just in time to meet Ambi. We had the keys, we made sure there was no one else in the apartment (Ambi thought the previous tenants were still there; yikes!), and we went back to pick up the luggage. Whew! We had a place to stay for the night. Thank goodness!

After settling in a bit, we realised we were hungry and there were no groceries. Off to the market... but where? M&S just food (located IN the Tube station) was our first grocery shopping experience. It took us forever to find the eggs. Check the refridgerated section, you say? Try on the top shelf of what was essentially an end-cap. Lovely.

Market days

Of course, our first days here were spent walking, walking, walking. On Boxing Day, we took the Tube up to Old Street in Hackney. We found the Columbia Rd flower market - an entire street closed down to traffic and set up with stands. Despite being a rather cold day, there were plenty of people out gathering their cheery bits of flowers. It was a fun experience walking through while the merchants shouted things like, "two for a fivah!" After the flower market, we stopped for a quick hot chocolate and made our way on foot down thru Brick Lane on to Spitalfields Market. Brick Lane is simply a row of shops during the week, but on weekends street merchants take over. It's all food, clothes, and bootlegged DVDs... and sometimes trash. I will admit, it was a bit weird to see someone picking trash out of the bins and placing it on a blanket to sell. I felt like buying something just to give the person some change and throw the thing back in the bin. Spitalfields was an "outdoor" market on a grande scale. Rows and rows of merchants selling higher-quality goods. The market tradition in that area began in the 13th century, in the field next to the hospital and priory of "St. Mary's Spittel." Popularity grew after the Great Fire of 1666 as well as the edict of Nantes. The current market building was established in 1893.

To learn more about Spitalfields and the important influence of immigrants in this area, go to:

http://www.spitalfields.co.uk/about_history.php

To see our route, go to:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Old+Street+station&daddr=51.528357,-0.072033+to:Brick+Ln+to:Brushfield+St.+5mins+walk+from+liverpool+street,+Brushfield+St.+5mins+walk+from+liverpool+street,+UK+(Old+Spitalfields+Market)&geocode=FeE3EgMdAqr-_yljVfb4pRx2SDFbmoH5y0-c3Q%3B%3BFds6EgMd9OP-_w%3BFaIeEgMd8tb-_yG-LUaFBSCnEw&hl=en&mra=dme&mrcr=0&mrsp=1&sz=16&via=1,2&dirflg=w&sll=51.527997,-0.076153&sspn=0.00542,0.013025&ie=UTF8&ll=51.523911,-0.079865&spn=0.010841,0.02605&z=15

The Kiwi plane has landed...

United Kingdom, day 1…what have we done! After what seemed to be a fairly long flight (more than last time) we landed at Heathrow. We proceeded to the customs checkpoint (Border Office) and it was 7 stanchion rows deep with people, each row was about 40 yards longs. About a third of the way through the queue a Home Office worker came out and announced “If you have a visa or right of residence please follow me.” That meant us….uh oh. We squeezed out of the queue, tons of weary people staring at us, and dragged our jet lagged rears to the worker’s window. There was no line at the window. The Home Office worker said, “That line is for non visas, you’re residents so come through here next time…it’s faster.” Sweet! Three minutes later we were through the door and out into the madness of the airport. We made our way through a crowded airport and boarded the Heathrow Express with our 6 bags. A 15 minute rail ride later and we were at Paddinton station. From there it was a quick cab ride from Paddington station to our hotel; we were fortunately allowed to check in 3 hours early. For a European hotel room it was large. Luckily, shops are open on Christmas Eve so we made our way to O2 (cell phone provider) and HSBC to activate my debit card and pay and go cell SIM. We napped too long afterwards and prepared in a rush to go over to the Winter Wonderland at Hyde Park Corner. However, in my haste I plugged our voltage unrestricted hair dryer into the 220 volt outlet. The hair dryer started taking off to Mars and then about six seconds there was a “pop!” from the outlet and the light went out in the room. Awesome. There was no fuse box in the room and with engineering out on holiday we had to change rooms. After schlepping our bags to the next room we set out for Hyde Park. Our hotel is a block north of Hyde Park therefore it is easy to pop into the park. Winter Wonderland is basically a German style theme park, but very loosely German. I think what makes it German is the “German” village which charges about £6.50 for a sandwich. It was nice and chilly out. Oh, there was a 2-man band in the German village. When they played the Macarena, the crowd went nuts. A weird German beef sandwich later for Beckie and bratwurst for me and it was midnight. We got back to our hotel room only to realize our clocks were an hour fast…huh. So we watched Gremlins on TV, the perfect Christmas Eve movie.