It looks like it's going to be another beautiful sunny day. We take our time in the morning as our scheduled east wing palace tour is for 1:45 pm. We haven't had the traditional English breakfast yet, so that's our plan and we head out to walk to Buckingham Palace through Picadilly Circus. We wait probably too long to pick a breakfast place and stop at what looks like a nice place. It turns out to be a chain (Caffe Concerto) and whether it's the chain or this particular restaurant, this is our only bad eating experience we have while in London. They are painfully slow taking our drink order and then slow to bring us our coffees. The waiter seemed indifferent (maybe he had a thing against American tourists) and the food took over 20 minutes to get to us - and when it did, the eggs (both mine and Carrie's) were undercooked and cold. I was hungry enough to force down my eggs and eat the sausage - but the toast was cold too. It wouldn't have been that big of deal, but this was even on the high side of price - probably because it was right in the heart of Picadilly Circus. Eating at a place like this (we did it in Times Square in NYC too) is generally a bad idea as you usually get mediocre food at best and generally shitty service. Carrie didn't touch any of the food and complained and they didn't charge us for her food which made the sting of my shitty/expensive/poorly served food not so bad. We hit a Tesco Express after and get a £1.85 croissant and a few other things - fresher and even warmer than the crappy restaurant food - I can see why these Tesco Expresses downtown are very popular places.
We cut through Green Park after making our way through the busy crowds of Picadilly Circus. We vow ourselves to avoid this area from now on - too crazy.
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| Picadilly Circus - London's Time Square |
Green park is beautiful and we see some green birds in the trees (we believe they are parakeets). I couldn't get a snap as they blended into the trees too well.
We get to Buckingham Palace and not surprisingly, it's busy and we aren't sure where the entrance to our tour is. The Palace is closed to the general public this time of year so we had to opt for a guided tour of the east wing which is a small group of 20 people. We probably prefer this over the summer state room tours as they would probably be crawling with crowds and we are still a little scarred from our Versailles and Louvre experiences in Paris. Outside Buckingham Palace they are prepping for the London Marathon which runs on Sunday (the next day), but today there is a kiddy marathon. We can still get some reasonable pics of the palace and surroundings even though there are crowd control fences up.
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| The kiddy marathon |
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| The Canada gate at Buckingham palace |
We scramble a bit to find the entrance in time but manage to find it with about 2 minutes to spare. It's not sign posted at all and you have to ask police through the fence about where to go. They let us in and we are the first (and only) people behind the fence at Buckingham palace and we feel like royalty. All the commoners are wishing they could be us! I give a few queen like waves to the peasants and head in to our tour. Our rushing around has worked up my bowels so we ask to use the bathroom and it is an elegant bathroom fit for a king - it gave new meaning to "sitting on the throne". I take a royal dump and head back to the tour group. No photos allowed - as soon as we entered the area behind the gate and throughout the whole east wing tour - I guess it's a security thing.
Our tour guide has a strong "royal" British accent and I have a bit of trouble making out some of what she is saying. It's a nice and informative tour though, with a very intimate experience being able to be very close to everything with a very knowledgeable tour guide giving us all the history of this part of the palace. It's mostly Chinoiserie style (a term I learned there - but Carrie knew) which was a bit of a surprise to me. Very well kept, including any cracks in light fixtures - even though some rooms may be, as the guide put it, "not your taste". The last room of the tour is the room behind the palace balcony where all the royals come out and wave (from the center of the palace). There are some pretty "over the top" artifacts in some of the rooms like a giant multi-layered clock in a very vibrantly yellow multi-purpose room. I'm surprised at how one could just touch (or accidentally bump over) likely priceless artifacts like a pagoda that they said they had to pack into 400 boxes to move. Great tour and worth the extra money for such an intimate experience.
We leave the tour, again pausing for the paparazzi to take our photos as we leave the palace and watch the kiddy marathon for a bit. We make our way through Green park again to grab a coffee in a nice cafe area in Mayfair.
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| Green park |
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| Lovely cafe in Mayfair |
We head over to Hyde Park to check out a small piece of it. Seems like this is London's Central Park - and we just cut off a slice of it and park ourselves beside a fountain for a quick break.
Not wanting to walk through Picadilly Circus again, we decide to try the bus service for the first time. We haven't taken city busses in other cities like New York or Paris, but the double decker ones, if you get the front seat, can be a good way to do some sight seeing on the cheap as well as getting you pretty efficiently to your destination as traffic doesn't seem to be gridlocked. It turns out this was a really good choice as the people traffic on Picadilly/Shaftesbury heading back to our hotel was insane. There must have been something going on as we saw a parade of multi-coloured lamborghini with a ton of people around them:
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| This was a circus - Picadilly Circus |
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| Multi-coloured lambos |
We head back to the hotel, get cleaned up and given our restaurant experience from this morning, we opt for some grab and go food from Tesco with some wine to eat in a park at sunset. There is a park near our hotel, but it looks private but the gate was open so we go in and have a lovely dinner on a bench in a very quiet and peaceful park in downtown London.
Well, it turns out that the park didn't just "look private", the open gate that we came through to get in was now locked shut and you needed a card to get out. We were trapped! We had to ask a nice elderly couple to let us out and claim we didn't understand the concept of a private park, but he scolded with some witty retort I don't recall in the politest British way possible. We felt embarrassed and took our second bottle of wine to go drink somewhere else. We walk through a more public Russell Park, and take a bus across Waterloo bridge and find a bench along the Thames to have a drink for the rest of the sunset. This seems like a popular thing to do on a Saturday night in London as the gentleman we were sharing our bench with, was drinking a beer and the couple in front of us were smoking a blunt - we fit right in - not like that pretentious private park.
Cool skateboard park right along the river - this seems to be a bit less touristy then what we've been used to in the west end (we are in "South bank" here)
Confident with the bus system now, we bus back to the hotel for the night.
