Staycation

Mike & I both had this past week off from work and we had a great time just hanging out.  We bookended the week with Saturday day trips to Oxford and Brighton but stayed in London during the week.

We haven't had a chance to visit many museums so we stopped in at the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone which was surrounded by a whole lot of camera wielding tourists, pushing into the crowd to get their picture and then pushing their way out.  We just stood back and watched the people because getting too close to the Stone would've proved catastrophic.  Our experience at Jim Morrison's grave site in Paris taught us that a tourist will cause bodily harm for their picture (I was hit in the face with a long-lensed camera by a tourist with no care or remorse).  It's sad, really.  All those tourists would rather get a mediocre picture to look at later than to experience the history live and in person.  Don't they know, both options are achievable?

We stopped at the Victoria & Albert museum in Kensington, too but we didn't find anything there that held our attention.  We're more art museum fans than anything else and even those make me really tired.  Minutes after stepping into both the V&A and the British Museum I was yawning, so we left rather quickly.

We enjoyed fantastic weather throughout most of the week, only having rain on Thursday.  The week was gorgeous otherwise, allowing us to spend much of it park hopping, one of our favourite London past times.  Ever since first arriving in London, we've enjoyed the novelty of picnics (including beer & cider) in the park.  Our favourite area is The Serpentine at Hyde Park and if you can't find us on a sunny day it's because we're catching a nap near this area.

We wandered away from Hyde Park long enough to find London's Japanese garden, located in Holland Park in Kensington.  Kyoto Garden is a very small but pretty area and only took us a few minutes to explore.  We expected London's Japanese gardens to be a larger affair, at least larger than Seattle's Kubota Garden, and we were shocked by how small the area actually was.  Perhaps London does not have a large Japanese population and the size is proportionate to said population?  If that's the case, though, I can't help but wonder why.

We walked along Regent Canal, from Maida Vale to Regent's Park.  This area is called Little Venice and it was picturesque and pleasant.  There were houseboats, kayaks, and canal cruises; actually, this and The Serpentine may be the only place in the UK where water is used for pleasure rather than just commerce.  This canal reminded me a bit of Seattle.

The weather was so nice this past week that we were even able to enjoy an evening stroll along the south bank without jackets.  A perfect summer evening.

Our week's staycation has been great.  We've done a ton, exploring a lot of the city in more depth than weekends and evenings alone allow.  Surprisingly, we had thought our favourite areas of the city were Shoreditch and Camden but we wound up spending most of our time in the Kensington and Chelsea area.  We dared to venture into the Primark on Oxford Street (something we're sure only tourists are crazy enough to do), explore the Marylebone area a bit further (do the tourists queueing outside Sherlock Holmes's house, in the pouring rain, know that he's fictional and didn't really live there?), and even experienced a couple different shopping centres (Brent Cross and Canada Water) where I may have discovered my replacement for REI (Decathlon).  

This first week of our last month in London has been idyllic and if the rest of August resembles it at all we'll have been very lucky this summer indeed.