Well, I thought I had an original title for this post, a play on “Rule Britannia”, but on our second day in London, from the top of a double-decker bus, what did I see? A shop called “Cool Britannia”. Oh well, so much for being original! 🙂
We left Calais early and waited a while for the Eurostar which was delayed by half an hour. But we can hardly complain about that, because we learned afterwards that just a few hours later the whole chunnel was closed, causing major delays; click here if you want to read the story. Then we were in the channel tunnel for 20 minutes or so!
And ended up in England! 🙂
In the afternoon we hit the streets and went to Buckingham Palace first. As you do. 😉
The Buckingham Palace tourist shop was a little more upmarket than most.
The Queen rather rudely didn’t let us into her residence.
So we enjoyed it from outside the gates!
THE balcony!!!
And THE couple. 😉
Okay, enough photos at Buckingham Palace! We moved on round the corner and saw another: St James’s Palace:
And saw this carriage that was carrying a man in a suit inside. Not the queen.
We had a brief look in Burlington Arcade.
Some of the window dressings around London were apparently pretty old and been around for a while.
While other windows were a bit newer:
We sat in Green Park for a while before heading to Hyde Park.
Where I spied a familiar little varmint:
When we lived in the States I said you could always pick the Kiwis, because they’d stop to take photos of squirrels. And, apparently, this is the case in England too. 🙂 Then we found THIS squirrel:
Head first, right inside the bird feeder, having a feast! The bird didn’t look too impressed.
Hyde Park was pretty!
Then we went to this rather large shop:
We only went into one small area of 2 of the 7 floors, it’s a huge store, 4.5 acres of luxury shops!
These escalators were in the Egyptian area:
We went to a cafe across the street where we saw these:
We’ve never seen porridge in a pot that you can take away with you. Only in Britain.
Mike was amused that I was amused by the mews:
He explained that these used to be the stables for the more expensive houses on the main road.
Just on dusk we arrived back in the street where we were staying.