Covent Garden - home of opera and apple

Matt arrived last night to great excitement. He scooted around to the Warrington to have a drink with friends leaving today for Iceland, then started getting into this time zone.

This dreary, grey morning we donned macs, erected umbrellas and took the number 6 into town for a damp walk around some of the landmarks. Piccadilly Circus,  Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden. Only tourists were out and about this morning, certainly no mad dogs or englishmen. Even the pigeons had stayed in bed.

Covent Garden was once an important market for London and one of its red light districts. Now it is a charming, touristy set of shops, coffee houses and restaurants. Broadcast announcements warned us to take care with our bags. Syl and Caity and Hugh took off shopping and came back with a handbag (which I presume she bought) and clothes for Ronaldog and JaiLin, now the best-dressed bed-toys in London.

Among the buskers and just around the corner from the Royal Opera House, we heard opera singing to loud applause. Backed by a little amp, this woman was cheerily belting out the classics. She was good. We  tipped.

Matt and I walked into the huge, but discretely branded Apple store. Hundreds of people were worshipping at this shrine. Matt was happy. We stroked various glossy devices, then found the others. 

Then we yielded to London's weather and took the 6 back to Little Venice. 

All of Europe was shopping with us on Portobello Road this saturday morning

If you were wondering why your local market or shopping centre was a bit quiet this morning then I have the answer....everyone was shopping at the Portobello Market in London! 

Peter, Caity, Hugh and I set off on foot this morning for the market. We passed over the beautiful Little Venice canal and under the not-so-beautiful motorway on our way unique antiques, cool vintage clothes, tacky souvenirs and abundant fruit and veg. 

The market runs the length of Portobello road. We were shoulder to shoulder with Italian and French tourists with the occasional smattering of other nationalities. Since we had approached from the north and the nearest tube station is south of the road, we were swimming against this human tide. We shouldered our way to the southern end of the market and then 'surfed the human wave' north. 

Peter and Hugh went off to check out old prints and watches while Caity and I perused the fashion...after procuring a much needed coffee! Along the way we were entertained by many buskers....some good and some not so good. One guy, wearing one flipper and lip-syncing some sort of heavy metal was so 'not good.' Two Bobbies tried to move him on.

We hooked up an hour later and headed to the British Museum in search of personal space and Egyptian mummies. This involved a lightning fast journey on the underground from Notting Hill to Tottenham Court Road. Boy do those things go fast! Once there we tracked down toilets, food and mummies, in that order. 

The British 'discovered' and brought home so many treasures in the last couple of centuries. I believe they have repatriated some of their  'discoveries' but that hasn't affected the breadth of the displays at the Museum. There are some 5 halls with mummies dating from 3000 BC to about 200 AD. The kids were really keen to see an unwrapped mummy. Judging from the looks on their faces, I reckon they were a bit let down by the quality of the embalming. 

After the mummies and a quick detour to another exhibit on life and death, we headed home. After walking much further down Oxford Street than we had energy for, we boarded the number 6 bus to our tranquil garden apartment.

London calling

Well rested after our inter-continental flight, we set forth for London Zoo. The weather looked gloomy, rain imminent (yes, we are yet to realize that this is the weather every day), so we changed plans and headed for the Natural History Museum. On Clifton Road, we bought bus passes 'Oysters', kids under 11 free. Caity now 10 again, we boarded the number 414. Kids loved their front row seat upstairs, driving the bus.

It is truly an outstanding museum. The upside of hundreds of years of ruthless, acquisitive colonialism is that all the very best stuff is here. Rare? Unique? Extinct? No problem! We saw the most extraordinary collection of ichthyosaur fossils. It included specimens giving birth, proving that these aquatic dinosaurs were live bearing. We saw stuffed dodos and auks - extinct flightless birds. We saw a life-size model of a blue whale, together with a skeleton. So big, so grand, so sad.

Then we wandered off to Harrods to leer at the food hall. Australian wagyu a snip at $A300/kg, iberian jamon a snort at $500/kg. Fully loaded with our souvenir tin of lollies, we pressed on. Next stop - to gawk at the Sloane Rangers, corner of Knightsbridge and Sloane, Knightsbridge. So cool. The best moment was when a distracted, mobile-phone chatting middle-aged Sloane was horn-blasted by a like Sloane in Jag. She jumped about a metre, but landed like a cat and glided on. 

On to Hyde Park, where we fed the wildlife. A squirrel tried to climb into Syl's bag and my jeans (this is where and why skinny jeans were invented), before passing Marble Arch on our way to Waitrose and home.       

Garden at back of our apartment

Hugh with Cessna sized ichthyosaur

Blue whale. What a magnificent animal.

Apartment

Apartment

Apartment

Keep out of our garden

Best caption wins a prize!!

Squirrel contemplating Syl

Syl contemplating squirrel

Gotcha!

Autumn upon us

Marble Arch

How kids survive long european holidays...........

Not everyone loves soccer

We have arrived in London and settled into a lovely apartment in Little Venice. After we'd unpacked, we went to explore.

The apartment opens to a small private garden, which unfolds into a huge community garden, enclosed by Georgian terraces. It is a ten minute walk around, with huge plane trees, a playground and landscaped shrubberies. And a squirrel!

 As we walked around, Hughie kicking his three euro irish foam soccer ball, we came across a group of kids playing football. Hugh introduced himself - with help - and it was game on.  I have been delighted by the way Hugh has made soccer friends everywhere we have been. It has been striking for me, a shy, un-sporty boy, to see how the world opens up.

I watched the game and the girls set off to provision the apartment. These kids were good - it was a serious game and I was enjoying their enthusiasm. And the kids were delightful - praising Hugh's efforts, congratulating each other, stopping the game with very genuine concern when there was any injury. It is a beautiful game.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman approach, walk through the play. She paused - I thought she had dropped something - then unfolded a mat, took a book from her bag and plonked herself down in the middle of the game. It ground to a halt as a circle of kids formed round her to remonstrate. They were joined by a carer for one of the children, who tried to engage the woman, to no avail. Her unyielding view was first, that they were making too much noise, second that they were stopping her from working in the terrace adjacent and third, that the garden statutes specified that only children younger than ten could play there. Hughie and I were gobsmacked!

It was a protest! She was glued to her mat, cranky and inflexible. The kids tried everything - they knew her and this was a familiar game - and the carer tried reason. Nothing worked. In the end, with the carer's blessing, the game restarted and they played around her - literally.

Yes, she was mad, maybe sick mad, but it made a fascinating spectacle!

We'll go back tomorrow to see what happens.

Celtic tiger an endangered species?

Coming from a country that has grown grown grown since colonization, it is hard to come to terms with one that has done mostly the opposite.

Ireland's population trend since the 1800s has been a ski jump. During the big famine in the 1840s, some two million Irish died or emigrated. And the trend continued, the country losing citizens like lemmings until the sixties, when it flattened and turned. Most of what we value as tourists is a result of that depopulation and stagnation - quaint, old-fashioned villages, unchanged rural landscapes, narrow cobbled roads winding  through a land forgot. More a museum than a modern western country, a product of neglect rather than conservation.

The last twenty years were a different story. A combination of accession to the EU, deregulation, immigration and growth policies saw Ireland trumpeted as the celtic tiger. Investment and economic activity reached fever pitch. There was an anything goes feeling and pretty well anything did. This Ireland had cranes dot the Dublin skyline, big black beemers and audis cruise the motorways and clog the villages and new country estates spring up like mushrooms. Everyone was making money, everyone was happy.

And now, it seems, the party is over. Caught in the global financial crisis, with high, unstable levels of private and public debt, a contracting economy, a credit squeeze and widespread corruption, Ireland is reeling. The national newspapers are dominated by the crisis - corporate closures, job losses, corrupt development deals, public sector debt, EU mandates. The local papers call for buy local campaigns, community solidarity. And the government is framing the biggest reduction in public spending ever, slashing services across health, education and welfare, freezing public sector wages until 2014.

And yet it has a surreal feel to it. Grafton Street in Dublin, a walking street for shopping south of the Liffey, is pumping, shoppers jostling along, bags full (although it did seem quiet in Louis Vuitton). The Irish Times  give equal space to the crisis and Lady Gaga's Dublin gig.

It seems to me the Irish are completely surprised by their own luck - whether it's good or bad. How could this happen, they seem to ask, whatever happens. Perhaps we are captive in some way to our national past, to centuries of invasion, stagnation, oppression. If that's so, the celtic tiger may indeed be an endangered species, a blip on Ireland's more sluggish evolutionary path. Or maybe, the national will is different now and that, together with the cajoling, deep-pocketed big brother, the EU, will see Ireland through. Either way, the long-suffering Irish will be there, blinking, drinking, bemused.





ok sorry, not a tourist blog at all really! here are some photos!