Steve & Ella's Excellent Adventure

Tasty London! Seems to have been a while in between posts. Since we moved to Queen's Park, life has been a little quieter. Steve & I have been looking for jobs and living day to day life, you know getting groceries, doing the washing, writing some letters and a few more postcards to people I realised I had forgotten in the last batch..Opps sorry! I have to say the weather has been atrocious here (I am still waiting for that Summer I was looking forward to!.. Where are you Summer?) There has been little motivation for Steve & I to get around to finishing our sight-seeing tours of the British Museum & The Museum of Natural History. I hear you say "But rainy weather is perfect time to do the indoors stuff!! " Like hell it is, when you actually got to get out of your cosy apartment and tackle the wind and rain outdoors to GET to the museum..*chuckles* I probably exaggerate that a little, it hasn't been that bad, but I've had this compulsion to stay indoors...

From Willesden Green to Queen's Park! So on Monday (11 th June, Queen's Birthday Holiday in Australia) Steve and I moved from our temporary (but lovely) accommodation in Willesden Green to Queen's Park. Thank god we were only moving across to the next suburb and not across town! In our last potential flat hunting blog, I described the pain of looking for somewhere to live without a car. We threw our hands up in the air and phoned London Accommodation (whom we got our room in Willesden through) to help us find somewhere to settle into for the next few months. On the day we moved from Willesden Green to Queen's Park we COULD have asked them to give us a lift across, this we were told would incur a fee of £20. So on the Monday, we took it upon ourselves to relocate independently! Not the brightest idea we ever had because in order to get to Queen's Park we had to tube it from Willesden Green to Baker St on the Jubilee Line and then change onto the Bakerloo lin...

British Museum! On Saturday (9th June), Steve and I after a nice lazy lie in which is an Australian tradition on Saturdays.. *yawns and stretches* we took ourselves to the British Museum! Obviously, this post is a bit out of date, but to keep the time line real of when we actually went, I'll keep the date of this post as the 9th June. Right, so we finally made it to the museum around 2:30pm in the afternoon, giving us 3 hours before they closed their big doors! We were first overwhelmed by its architecture just from the outside, we hadn't even made it inside yet. In 1794, the museum acquired something called Montagu House, in Bloomsbury and it remains on this site today. The Great South Front of the museum, was designed with inspiration from Greek Architecture by Sir Robert Smirke in 1823, but not completed until almost 30 yrs later. Since then, there have been numerous additions to the museum to accomodate its expanding collection (and what a collection it is!) Indoors, we wer...

Big Brother is watching YOU! Completely off our usual tourist like blogs, we feel we need to comment about a few things around here! Big Brother of course is still on TV in Australia and until we left we thought that the people in the Big Brother house in Aus, were a bunch of un-intelligent and bored individuals. However, Big Brother has started here in the UK and they filled the house entirely with women! I thought to myself particularly "Oh, that should make for interesting viewing"..and it has in some way. It started out alright, the girl's were really polite to each other and they had meetings to organise chores and so forth. Then, after a couple of days they put in ONE red hot heterosexual male inside with them and all hell broke loose! It brought the claws out and there was some good ol' fashioned cat fighting. It all kind of fell apart after that! I am shocked that women could behave this way, but then again NOT surprised. The UK version makes the Australian ve...

Covent Garden, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus! On Wednesday (the 6th June), Steve and I found took ourselves to Covent Garden for a pre-arranged meeting with another mysterious internet friend. Turns out Joel wasn't so mysterious after all and really friendly! After some confusion on my part on the tube, we made it to covent garden late and really HUNGRY! Covent gardens being an area we were not familiar with, Joel took us to the market square for lunch, which is really rich in fabulous places to eat. Opting for Italian Cuisine, Steve and I ordered our favourite dishes and before I had a chance to blink my eyes, Steve's plate was empty! ;o) It was very busy in the Covent Garden market square, they had several stalls relating to their promotion of Malaysia Week 07. They had some lovely cultural stalls with Malaysian made traditional clothes, jewellery, and some ladies weaving big rugs of sorts. As well as this, there was a fashion parade displaying current fashions in th...

From the Queen's Roses to Kensington Palace! And so the continuing story, after our ridiculous excursion to the next suburb (which we could have reached on foot), the sun was still shining. On Sunday (the 3rd June) we decided to get on the tube again (this time to a valuable destination) and explore Regent's Park. When we arrived there, we were greeted with a very busy area. Strewn out all over the lawn were people relaxing on blankets, reading books, listening to music, big groups of people having HUGE picnics with HEAPS of food and even people sun baking in these sun chairs you can hire for about £1 each. It definitely seemed the place to be on the weekend! The park definitely serves as a place for social gatherings for the young and the old. It is also a centre for recreational activities such as tennis, netball, Aussie rules footy, cricket and Frisbee just to name a few. The boating lake allows people (for a small fee) to get on a paddle boat and take a spin around th...

Friends, Apartments & Shirl's Neighbourhood! After our big excursion around London on Tuesday (the 28 th May), we decided to take a few days off to look around our current neighbourhood, do some boring things like shopping, washing, looking for apartments to possibly move into as well as job hunting. We succeeded in having a look around the neighbourhood at least. We found our way to a park near to our current place of dwelling called Gladstone Park. It is a very popular place for people to come in the evenings and do their exercise whether it be running, walking their dogs, a game of soccer with the kids and we even came across some obvious Aussies having a kick of the footy! The photo's can be found at : http://picasaweb.google.com/hillsj/WillesdenGreen On Thursday (the 31st May) , we made a date to catch up with an Internet friend and his beautiful wife I had been chatting to for about 5yrs in Australia for an evening drink around South bank in London. Odd meeting som...