On Monday there was a tube strike in London. This meant that there were no tubes running from Sunday night until Monday night. Being in Sudbury Hill, this makes us very isolated as it's so far from anywhere. I had a look at getting buses, but to even go from Sudbury Hill to Hammersmith, we would have had to have taken 3 buses and it would have taken over an hour! This trip usually takes 20 minutes on the tube.
Fortunately the overground trains were still running, there's a station just down the road from the tube station in Sudbury Hill. It was our first time on overground trains since we've arrived. They don't come as regularly as underground trains, but they are super fast. We caught the train to Marylebone station, and it only took 20 minutes to get there. On the underground this usually takes about 45 minutes. So it's actually quicker to get the overground if we need to go into the city. This is good to know, because it is a pain transferring onto different tube lines when it takes so long to get there!
Since we didn't want to stay home the whole day, we decided to go to the Sherlock Holmes museum and to Regent Park. We were kind of limited as to what was around Marylebone station, since that's where our train line ends and there were no tube's running.
The Sherlock Holmes museum was pretty interesting. We went more for Bradley's sake, since he's just started reading the Sherlock Holmes books. It's a little museum on Baker Street that is like a 4 story house. They make it look like he lives on the first 2 floors, then the next 2 floors have life sized figures depicting famous scenes from the books. I don't really know much about the books, so these didn't really mean anything to me. Some of the figures were really lifelike, it was creepy.
After the museum, we went to Regent's Park which is right across the road. This is a really big park, and it is also the home of the London Zoo. We didn't end up going to the zoo, because to be honest it looked a bit like OLD Auckland Zoo. When it used to be stink and you felt sorry for the animals in their tiny cages, and it had those polar bears that turned green and died :(
Anyway, so we didn't go to the zoo, but we spent a couple of hours walking around the park. In the middle of the park there's what is called the Inner Gardens, which are really pretty, kind of like the rose gardens in Parnell, lot's of different roses and flowers everywhere. It was a grey day, but not too cold, so it was a good day for walking. There were lot's of people walking their dogs, and it was funny to see them all chasing the squirrels.
We keep forgetting to bring food for the squirrels whenever we go to a park, they walk right up to you to see if you have anything interesting. But we never do, so they lose interest in us pretty quickly.
There is a canal that runs long the side of the park and through the zoo. You can get a canal boat from here up to Camden Markets which aren't too far away. We were there on a Monday, and there didn't seem to be any boats operating. Perhaps they only run on the weekends, or maybe only in Summer.
We also need to remember to keep some cash on hand at all times. We keep forgetting this isn't Auckland, and a lot of cafes do not take cards, only cash. This seems ridiculous to me, but I'm not really a person who carries cash ever. It's like going back in time, like debit cards are a brand new invention, not something that has been around for several years.
All of these photo's were taken with my new I-Phone. It actually takes really good photos, maybe better than our actual camera.
We had lunch at GBK on Baker Street. This is a Kiwi owned burger place. They're burgers are so good, and really big. I'd say they're better then Burger Fuel, and about the same size. I had a Greek Lamb burger which was really yum, and Bradley had a Buffalo meat burger. Buffalo meat is really good, you can taste the difference from regular beef, but can't quite put it into words what the difference is. Either way, it's really yum and I'd definitely have it again
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