Since the breakfast at the hotel was nothing spectacular, Henni and I had decided to find a cozy-looking cafe to have brunch at one day. Lars isn't big on brunch, so he want to brave the toast-lady himself, while Henni and I headed out towards Brunwick(sp?) where we'd previously found a cafe (Giraffe) that fulfilled our requirements.
Good choice! The bruch was delicious! Henni had a fairly standard English brunch, but I'd decided to order their Mexican brunch with salsa, guacamole and scrambled eggs on a tortillas. It wasn't as heavy as brunch usually is, which was both good and bad, as I ended up being hungry for lunch after all!
From Brunwick we walked to Russel Square to take the train to Warwick Avenue and Little Venice. That turned out to be easier said than done as there were signalling problems on the Piccadilly Line, but fortunately it's really easy to find your way around the London underground, so I quickly found an alternative route, and we were on our way! :)
Little Venice was rather quaint-looking, and it turned out that we arrived at the perfect time to take the water-bus through the canals of London to Camden Market. Honestly, the trip was as canal tours are most, and not something I'd be likely to repeat, but it was a nice way to get a fair distance without having to worry about sore feet! ;)
Unfortunately we weren't too keen on Camden Market. It was a lot bigger and more busy than Borough Market, and seemed both more touristy and as if it appealled to a very different clientel. Henni did find a tea booth, and I fell in love with bags made out of zippers! (didn't buy one though), so it wasn't that it was a waste of time, I just very quickly felt stressed out from having so many people around, and not really feeling like I knew my way around. I don't think it actually was that big, but there were a lot of windy passages, up stairs, through houses, down stairs inside the house etc... Like a labyrinth really! I think I'd have liked it a LOT more if there had been a tad fewer people, and if we hadn't gone there on the second-to-last day where my legs had more or less had enough! So after about an hour we jumped on the water-bus again and went back to Warwick street where we took a train to Piccadilly Circus.
As has become tradition I wanted to buy a Swarovski figurine while in London. I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but Henni and I had visited practically every Swarovski boutique we'd walked past, and I'd fallen head-over-heels for a slightly bigger, and definitely more expensive! figurine than what I'd usually buy. I hadn't wanted to spring such an expense on Lars, so asked him for 'permission', and thankfully he saw nothing wrong with me splurging a bit, so after having arrived to Piccadilly Circus, Henni and I walked up Regent Street (making a detour into the National Geographic store, which has some AMAZING photo books, but otherwise wasn't really all that interesting. But those books? Wow!) and popped into the Swarovski store there to add to my collection:
Welcome mother and baby koala! :D
From Regent Street we walked to Oxford street to browse a bit, but discovered that both Borders and Waterstones had closed :( Instead we found the nearest "Pret a Manger" to relax for a bit with our books and a cuppa.
Once our legs decided they were on speaking terms with us again, we left the cafe and walked past Foyles (so I could pick up the Walter Moers book I was missing, as well as a present for Isabella) down past Cleopetra's Needle (which was unfortunately being renovated, but Henni did get a photo of the miniature Sfinx next to it) to Temple station where we'd arranged to meet Lars.
Henni and I had found a very nice English pub close by when we were in London last, and we wanted to have our final dinner there.
Unfortunately it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment :( I don't know if the pub just did lunches better than dinners, or if they'd just deteriorated in the two years since our last visit, but unfortunately it really was nothing special :-/ It wasn't bad just not as good as we'd hoped or lead Lars to expect. We weren't even tempted by any of their desserts!! ;) Ah well, we bought some chocolate on our way home, and ended the evening with a very cozy chocolate-tea-bezzerwizzer-fluxx session back at the hotel :)
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