London Again Part 1

So we flew back to London town and had organised to stay at our friends Ange and Brian's house in Ealing. Now after spending a week in London at the start of our trip I had said something along the lines of London being a friendly happy place. Of course within a few weeks of saying that London had exploded into a ball of rioting flames. How do I do that?

One of the centres of the riots was, you guessed it, Ealing. So when we arrived we wandered around the streets, including the street we used to live in, and examined all the smashed windows and fire damage along with a few burnt out cars. They even attacked a organic food cafe, an OXFAM shop and a kids clothes op shop. What gives?

Didn't stop us going to our favourite cafe when we lived in Ealing, Carluccios

 

Carluccios! Yum, yum

After getting over the shock of seeing the place we lived in all smashed in, we set up shop in our Ange and Brian's house (they were away on holiday).

 

They torched this Budgens store.

The next day we headed to south Kensington and the Natural History Museum. More 

queues but not too much time. 

We got in and there was the spectacular dinosaur in the middle of that marvellous hall. We got to see a tree ring about 4 metres wide from a tree that was 1300 years old. 

 

Not only that we got to sit next to a blue whale (big!) and some rather large fossil tortoises. 

After investigating so many sciency things we needed to some artyness. So we popped over to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the wonderful William Morris Rooms Cafe. Scones and clotted cream please!

After that the decided after travelling on so many trains and buses was most appropriate to go to the London Transport Museum. Being a trainspotter from my early days, I was very keen. We got to hop on and off old trams, old buses, old trains. The old tube trains really were fascinating. Would you believe there used to be smoking carriages on tube trains? We also got to play with an conductor's old ticket machine. Then the boys got to be driver in a double decker bus. 

The we had to have a few quieter days and catching up with friends from our Ealing days. We visited the mum's group folk Claire's place. The kids had a wonderful time. It's hard to believe Ben hadn't seen these kids since he was one, but they just picked up where they left off. 

Then we moved to another friend, Toni's house in Shepherds Bush and Toni being another generous soul (we have encountered many of those in our travels) temporarily decamped to her parents' house and let us have her whole house to ourselves.

The following day we headed to Southbank where a roof garden project had been set up on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. They had set up an enormous number of raised garden beds full of fruit and veges. The whole thing had been put together by homeless men, then they harvested some of the crops and got chefs to cook it up right there on the roof. We had a coffee too.

On Southbank they had also set up an funky fountain and we had forgotten to bring the kids' bathers. So it was running around in their undies. Classy Australians!