London

It's coming up to six years of living in Belgium, the perfect launch-pad for travel around Western Europe due to the number of European institutions based here, and yet despite promising myself to travel while I'm here I haven't really done much.

One of those glaringly obvious places to go is London, being just under an hour's flight away (and with the time-zone difference you land a few minutes before you take off), or just over two-hours on the Eurostar high-speed train. What excuse could I have for not going yet?

This long weekend I've finally managed to go (following a lot of encouragement from A), so here are a few photos and stories of the visit.

With the hotel so near to Hyde Park, it was worth a visit, just to be able to see ranting. This woman was keen on all of the foreigners to get the hell out of the country. According to her I had no right to be there. Check out the amazing evil looks caught on camera. The guy that looks like Wally kept the argument nice and fiery, but it just went around in circles.

Speaker's corner was a lot quieter that I had expected, and for the most part it was religious nuts with poor arguments about a large variety of ways and reasons we'll all die because we've chosen the wrong beliefs. Maybe I've spent too much time on the Internet, but my interest waned pretty quickly.

I was about as disappointed as this guy must have been. While the others were yelling and screaming, this guy was quietly reading what sounded to me like the Torah to an audience of none. I think I appreciated this guy the most, since his approach was relaxed, but I was already exhausted from the American Jesus pimps I'd just passed. I suppose I had an image of what to expect and this really didn't live up to expectations. I don't need to come back here again.

Wandering back from Tower Bridge (known to Americans as London Bridge for some reason) I took a few photos. For the Americans, the top photo here is London Bridge (the current incarnation of it, anyway).

After reaching London Bridge, and feeling a bit chilly, we headed in to find a tube station and stumbled across The Monument. Unfortunately it was already closed so we couldn't go up, but it's very easy to recognise even if you've never seen it in person. It's very easy to stumble across things in London!

Tom (Marketing guy at work) recommended a great Cornish Pasty place on Covent Garden, and he hasn't wrong. They have some good ale too. From the balcony, I spotted these two poor animals in a cage being forced to be poked and prodded by the public. I thought it was disgusting.

I knew of a really cool bridge in London, but had no idea where it was. I had seen the bridge on YouTube at one point, but very little information was available on the Internet as to its location. Since it is experimental, it's only about the size of a footbridge. For some reason we thought it was a good idea to consult a map and try to work out where such a bridge could be, which led us to Paddington Station. We wound up on Sheldon Square, a relatively new looking office development sandwiched between a motorway, train lines, and a canal. The area didn't seem right, so we stayed for a coffee and re-evaluated our plans.

With no better idea, we decided to follow the canal and discovered Little Venice, which was an amazing contrast to what we had seen literally 50 metres down the canal. After some more wandering in what is clearly not the right area for this bridge, we stumbled across a woman working for British Waterways who was very keen for a chat, even going so far as offering us a ride to go and visit it with a nice cup of tea, but since we didn't have life jackets we couldn't. Her directions were invaluable though, and it turns out we had to head back down the canal towards Paddington Station and follow the canal the other way.

We wound up at Paddington Basin, the end of the Paddington arm of the canal, which is essentially stagnant water surrounded by office buildings, many of which are still under construction. Still no sign of that illusive bridge, though. We gave up but continued to walk through as we assumed it would be faster to get back to a tube station by continuing ahead.

Εὕρηκα! Here is The Rolling Bridge, which can curl up to allow boats to pass. It's amazingly sturdy for something which is secured only on one end. It's a very clever piece of engineering.

We stumbled across another curious bridge on our way out of the area: The Helix Bridge. This one apparently retracts in a cork-screw motion, but I can't find any information about it and from what I've seen it really didn't look like it would, but perhaps they need to remove the walkway before retraction (although it looks like it's all stonework to me).

The rest of the trip was spent shopping. We also managed to see Avenue Q before it disappeared from the theatres (recommended by John, but we only remembered once we saw the ads in the tube stations). If it's touring near you, go and see it. Brilliant stuff.