After travelling around Europe, and seeing castles such as Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau, I have to admit we weren’t initally that impressed with Buckingham Palace.  Where were the turrets?  Where was the moat?  Buckingham Palace just seemed a grand house, fronted by guards, a gate and a constant stream of tourists.

Still, with the parents visiting, I decided to take advantage of a day’s leave and the Summer Opening of the State Rooms of the palace.  Of course, London attracts tourists all year around and every day of the week, so we were still greeted with long queues (which we couldn’t even join until the time printed on our tickets).

Once inside, we picked up audio guides, which led us through the nineteen State Rooms that were open to the public.  Buckingham Palace is far more palace-y on the inside, with all the expected impressive artworks and beautiful furniture.  Some of my highlights were seeing the pink ‘his and hers’ chairs in the throne room, the long hall of the picture gallery with its glass roof, and the state dining room, laid out as it would be for an official dinner.

I was also suprised by the vast gardens that exist behind the palace.  Having only seen the palace from the front, I had no idea that such an immense green space existed within the walls.  It was very difficult to be a good subject and stick to the path when faced with the beautiful lake and the wilds beyond which would’ve been lovely to explore.

Tash

November 11 is Remembrance Day here in the UK: a time of red poppies on lapels and remembering those who have died serving their countries. It thus seems appropriate for today’s entry to be about the New Zealand War Memorial, which was dedicated on November 11 2006 and stands in Hyde Park Corner here in London.

From a distance, the memorial looks like 16 large metal poles, rising from a grassy hill. But as you get closer, you notice the angled crosses on the top of each one. And as you get closer still, you notice that each of the poles are quite different: some with embossed Maori carvings, others decorated with ferns and fauna.

And, with the accents of other New Zealand visitors around and London traffic in the background, it was a good place to stop awhile and think about other New Zealanders who travelled before us. And those who didn’t come home. And to remember them.

Tash

We’ve just got back from dinner at the Coal Grill and Bar in Wimbledon, and saying farewell to another friend who’s heading home (home, in this case, being Canada).  Goodbyes are sadly an all-too-frequent part of our life here in London, and I’ve got a mouth ulcer and this could rapidly become a totally miserable entry.  To prevent that happening, I’m going to focus on the restaurant itself.

We’ve gone to Coal for breakfast a couple of times now, most recently last weekend.  With pancakes and maple syrup, eggs and bacon (£4.85) and a better than average hot chocolate, it’s definitely a step up in quality compared to the breakfast menus of your standard English pubs.  On our last trip, they also gave us two vouchers for £10 off when you spend £20 on food, to be used by November 30.

So we went back tonight, and Matt had a Prime Scotch Beefburger (£8.95) and I had a Sicilian Pizza (£6.25), and our friend – who was fitting in goodbyes to several people in one evening – had already eaten, so she didn’t eat at all and so we didn’t make the £20 threshold.  So now we have five £10 vouchers to be used by November 30. 

Anyway, I’m getting side-tracked.  Coal Grill and Bar isn’t super-fancy, but it’s a nice place to eat.  It seems warm there when it’s raining, but that may just be a psychological side-effect of the fact they’ve got decorative coal-behind-orange-plastic in the walls.  The Sicilian Pizza was a fantastic mix of olives, salami, parma ham and mozzarella.  And it was delicious… even to a tired 27-year-old with a mouth ulcer who was once again saying goodbye. 

We’ll go back again – who knows, maybe even sometime in the 20 days left in November.

Tash

There’s lots that’s appealing about London: the events and the culture, the career opportunities and the sense excitement that comes from being in a place with such a history, such a continuing significance.

However, it’s also a big city, with crowds on the streets and crowds on the public transport.  That’s why, whenever we do manage to get away to other parts of England, Matt and I will usually turn to each other and wonder aloud if we really have to go back.

I’m sure there are plenty of great places in England that we haven’t even been to yet, but based on almost two years of weekend mini-breaks, these would be my top three non-London-but-still-in-England places to live:

Salisbury

Perhaps I’m biased here, as Salisbury was the first place we visited outside London and thus it was the first time we realised how green the rest of the country was.  We did the usual touristy things in Salisbury, visiting Old Sarum and the Cathedral and making a day trip to the stone circles at Avebury and Stonehenge.  But I also liked the market square, the parks and the walking paths.  At once point during our stay, I was so serious about a South-West move, that I even stopped by the public library to check if it would meet our needs.

Durham

Durham was another place that had us checking the real estate agent windows.  Again, it had a cathedral and castle and history to spare, but what I liked most was the way the locals seemed engaged with that history.  Outside the library (which unfortunately was closed) we stopped to look at a newly unveiled statue.  Noticing our interest, a local man came up to us and explained the story.  He’d barely finished and left when another local replaced him at our side saying that he’d got the story wrong.  A strong university presence meant that what otherwise might have just been a gorgeous town – and it is gorgeous with that huge cathedral and the river – also felt quite dynamic and an appealing place to live.

Cambridge

We spent our first wedding anniversary in Cambridge, and fell in love with both the town and the surrounding countryside.  The weather was perfect, as we wandered around the University Backs and out to The Orchard for scones and tea, ate at local pubs and were punted along the river.  Central Cambridge, like central anywhere, had the usual high street shops, but the town centre felt so much more romantic with the presence of the River Cam.

Sadly, it’s probably too far to commute from Cambridge or Salisbury or especially Durham to our jobs in London every day – so moving out of the city isn’t really an option.  But we’re off to explore the out-lying neighbourhood of Kingston this afternoon.  I’ll let you know what I think.

Tash

Hampstead is one of my favourite places in London.  I love Hampstead Heath, the narrow streets, the cafes and bookstores.  We we first visited, early this year, I came out of the tube station, looked around, and thought ‘yes, we could live in Hampstead’.  Then, as we walked past a real estate office, I read the million pound prices on the advertisements in the window, and I realised that, actually, we will never live in Hampstead.

Still, it’s a nice place to visit.  And Everyman Cinema, on Holly Bush Vale in Hampstead, is a very nice place to see a movie.  Even when that movie is the latest James Bond, (which I found both brutal and boring, though I know some of my fellow film-goers do not agree), it’s a much more pleasant experience to watch the movie on a two-person couch and in a cinema with waiter service.

At £12 a ticket, Everyman is slightly more expensive than a regular London cinema.  But for a special film or a night out with friends, it’s definitely the one I’d reccomend.

Tash

According to elections.org.nz, there is 23 hours, 31 minutes and 13 seconds until Election Day in New Zealand.  Here in London, I’ve already voted.  I took the tube across London at eleven o’clock this morning.  There were free seats, and when I arrived, Piccadilly Circus was surprisingly quiet.  Only one person handing out flyers for cheap theatre tickets, and I think I only walked through one tourist photograph.  For the first time, I really noticed how grand the buildings are rather than being distracted by how annoying the crowds of people are.

But, with my early lunch break ticking away, it was on to Haymarket and to New Zealand House.  There was a sign in the window saying that New Zealanders  overseas could vote in the elections by downloading their voting papers and then faxing them back.  That just doesn’t seem like real voting to me.

So, I went in and there were the orange signs and the white ballot boxes.  The girl behind the desk almost gave me North Shore papers by mistake.  To be honest, I’d probably be more familiar with the candidates on the North Shore than the ones in Wellington Central, my current electorate because it’s the last place we lived in.  I filled in my name, address, job title, signed a declaration and then went into the boxes and made my two ticks.  Given our experience with the postal system, I doubt they’ll make it back to New Zealand before the winner is announced – but I’ll be watching the results come in on Saturday regardless.

While I was in the area, I also stopped in at Kiwifruits, a New Zealand store in the Royal Opera Arcade behind New Zealand House.  It was great to see a book by a fellow MA on the New Zealand fiction shelves… but what I was really there for was the Pineapple Lumps.

Judging from the faces of some of my colleagues this afternoon, the bubblegum textured squares of pineapplish goodness covered in chocolate may never catch on in England.  Without a ready supply in the corner stores, we must limit our Pineapple Lump consumption to the packets sourced on the rare trips home, the rather squashed bags that arrive in packages from the parents, and those sold at Kiwifruits.  There the rarity is reflected in the price: £2.75 a bag!

(That said, I still bought two bags.  I did intend to save at least one for Saturday, to eat as I watched the election coverage.  However, that second bag has, somehow, in the time since I arrived home tonight, opened itself and is half empty already).

Tash

After all the excitement of last night, the festivities surrounding the fact some guys once tried to blow up Parliament dulls in comparison.  Last year, we watched a public fireworks display in Battersea Park from across the river in Chelsea.

This year, I’m content with taking blurry photos through our kitchen window of a display that’s going on somewhere nearby.  Fireworks are a rather unsettling prospect in the London suburbs.  It’s hard to know where they originate from, and the explosions echo between the houses, along the narrow streets.

Still, the fact that I can see them at all, is an improvement from the New Year’s effort.  We made sure we were at Embankment.  We made sure that we had a good position – one with a great view of the London Eye.  We stood there, in the cold.  The fireworks started.  The smoke started.  The smoke mixed with the cold, and became like fog, and after a couple of minutes, our view of the fireworks had become completely obscured.

There were thousands of people there, walking along the strand.  There were streamers and the tubes home were free.

I can’t believe that the end of 2008 is almost here.

Tash

Went to West Side Story at the New Wimbledon Theatre last night.  It was the final performance of this 50th anniversary production.  It was London.  It was raining.  There were too many people to fit in the foyer, so arriving at quarter past seven, we had to stand outside in the rain while other patrons slowly filed through into their seats.

There’s so many shows to see in London that we’ve adopted a policy of buying the cheapest tickets available.  While this technically does mean that we can afford to see more, it often means that we’re unable to see less of the individual shows.  Last night, we were once again up the back, near the follow-spots, and the angle of the ceiling meant that we missed some of the balcony scenes.

But while we needed binoculars (on hire for 50p) to see the actor’s expressions, the dancing was enthusiastic and the voices were superb and there was song after song I knew.  The second act, in particular, packed an emotional punch and I found myself crying alongside Maria at Anton’s death.

50 years on, the language of West Side Story, with all it’s ‘buddy-boys’ and ‘daddios’, is somewhat dated.  But in a city where every week there’s a story in the papers of a teenage stabbing, the plot is sadly still all too relevant.

Tash

Well, I did it.  I survived Race for Life 2008.  And I ran the whole 5km, despite forgetting to wear sunglasses and my iPod dying around the 2km mark.  And despite how desperately emotional I felt at the start line, reading the back plates of the other runners which described who they were running for – people who had fought against cancer, many who were still fighting.

Afterwards, as we looked at a map of Regent’s Park, Matt asked me to point out the route that we ran, and I couldn’t.  I remember a lake and some green elephant statues, but apart from that, it was just a case of putting one foot in front of another and hoping the finish line appeared soon.

Eventually it did, and when it did, I was suprised to see that the clock read something like 28:59.  5km in under 30 minutes – I was pretty pleased with that, as it’s better than I’d done in any of my training sessions.  Matt and Cautney had barely had a chance to get through the food queues between the start and the end of the race.  For me it seemed much longer, and a week later I’ve still got the blisters on the soles of my feet.

All in all, I still don’t think I’m a candidate to run the London Marathon.  But another 5km in a year or so?  When sufficient time has passed so I can forget that last km of suffering? 

I’d consider it.

Tash

Last weekend, I downloaded a training plan from the Race for Life website. It was a six week training plan, and at that stage, I only had three weeks left to train. Oh well. Next year I’ll start six weeks beforehand. This year, I started from week four, running around the block in 20 minute bursts, singing along to the dance music playlist I compiled for our wedding.

This morning, my fellow Race for Lifer, Anne and I took on a new route: running from Putney Bridge to Hammersmith Bridge. According to mapmyrun.co.uk, that’s about 2.75km each way – and I think it’s even further than that, because the Thames Path diverts away from the Thames in places (we had to run around the Fulham Football Club, for example).

The Thames isn’t the most scenic of rivers. At low tide, the brown water reveals brown mud. But there are benches along the path, and a multitude of dogs, and parks, and the bridge in the distance to aim for. It would probably be a nice walk on a sunny day. We ran today, and it rained on us.

It’s 7 o’clock now and I’ve just got home from writing group. I’m writing this, and then I think that’s enough mental and physical exercise for today. Next on the agenda is some couch time, and watching others exert themselves as the last few sets are played out of the Men’s Final at Wimbledon.

Tash