London - Day 1

London is a 1 hour flight from Glasgow. Or, if you're on a budget, an 8 hour bus through the wee hours of the night*. Lets just say that I'll remember the National Express Bus 588 for the wrong reasons. I boarded at 11pm, and arrived at 615am to an absolutely freezing city.

My first port of call was Victoria Station, which was, well absolutely huge. Its arrivals and departures board is larger than Perth Airport...

Anyways, I went down to London to catch up with Richie (a.k.a. Wee Cheng to the rest of the known world**) as he was on a work conference (paid holiday). At 9am, we went to check in to our hotel to discover that we could only do so later in the day. This was slightly annoying as I was hoping for a quick shower - i'd slept 4 hours on-and-off the whole night on a bumpy (and annoyingly vertical) bus seat...

Well there was nothing to do but hit the town and see the sights... smelly socks and all... First we paid a visit to our good friend B. Elliot


Traipsed down to Big Ben
We also took a look at Westminster Abbey. On a sidenote, we also wandered into a Westminster Cathedral, and were about to explode into full tourist mode (camera flashes everywhere), when we simultaneously noticed that there was a service on... and made a hasty retreat =P

The London Eye - for some reason, it doesn't look as big in real life.

The (Over) Friendly Indian tourist...

It was still early in the day, when we'd walked past Westminster Bridge, so we went on through Whitehall - the govt area. Richie wanted to pay a visit to his boss Mr Brown.

Unfortunately, his office was closed - obviously the British PM doesn't work weekends =)

However, we were just on time to watch the patrol of the Horse Guards. They seemed like a nice bunch of guys on horses, though maybe they took themselves maybe a tad too seriously.

Anyways, later on we headed to Trafalgar Square. And being the culturally aware people that we are, we proceeded to the National Gallery (in the background). The Gallery boasts paintings from Monet, Cezanne etc etc... and we used the toilet***. Ok we also saw the paintings lah. We're not complete philistines.

Anyways, I'll end this post here... with a brief teaser of the nocturnal activities that followed our exertions =)

You can tell what the highlight of my weekend was.

* I realised later that Ryanair flies to London at pretty cheap rates! Gahhh
** Apparently Mr Yeo Wee Cheng took up the alias "Richie" in Australia because his lecturers couldn't deal with 3 syllables...
*** Public toilets are sparse in London...