Now we come to you from London, where the unusually cold temperatures here are giving us a good taster of the weather that is yet to come in northern Europe.
Last night was the coldest night in London since 1997, and it doesn't look like the weather is changing anytime soon. The news is even predicting a smattering of snow tomorrow and/or Friday, which will make for an interesting departure from London.
Sunday night's 11:25pm flight was an interesting experience as Lufthansa has no seat-back screens or on demand entertainment in economy class. There were only 2 movies shown during our 13 hour flight, Fantastic 4 and Goal!. We managed to sleep for quite a bit of the flight, determined to accustom ourselves to London's time zone (8 hours behind Hong Kong) before our arrival.
Departure from Hong Kong was in clearer conditions than our foggy landing on Wednesday, with the plane flying along Lantau Island, and turning around Hong Kong Disneyland, providing interesting night aerial views before we got above the clouds.
From Hong Kong we flew over the mainland to Guangzhou, then north via Moscow, before turning south over Warsaw and Prague before the approach to Munich.
Upon arrival in Munich we noticed that our connecting flight to London Heathrow was delayed by 30 minutes to 7:50am. During our extended stopover we utilised the wireless Internet access at the terminal, to check up on London and upload another video to the blog. When we boarded the German immigration authorities questioned my passport as a small rip has developed on the photo page, however they decided to let us through. None of the other immigration officers have blinked an eyelid about the rip, which was developed in Hong Kong prior to travelling to Macau.
We had to catch a bus out on the tarmac to our 737-300 for the flight. The short walk from the bus to the aircraft steps was a big wake-up call, with Munich's -10°C weather and chilling breeze freezing our bones.
Onboard the captain informed us that the aircraft was delayed arriving from Dresden, and a different aircraft could not have been put onto the London service due to fuel rationing at Heathrow meaning that an aircraft with a higher fuel capacity was needed so that it could be loaded with enough fuel for both the outward and return flights without needing to be fuelled in London. The fuel rationing at London is a result of the fuel fires near Heathrow that occurred a few weeks ago.
We had a good view of continental Europe as we flew north over Brussels before flying over the Channel and descending into the thick cloud lingering over London. This flight had no entertainment whatsoever, so we slept a little more, looked out the window and ate our complementary "rye bread with a huge wad of cheese and tiny bit of lettuce" sandwiches - very German.
Immigration at Heathrow was a breeze, with the queue for EU, Swiss and British passports being far more numerous than the line for all other countries.
This time we chose to travel to London on the Heathrow Express, a regular (non-Tube) train service using above ground rail lines, powered by overhead wires. We were given a proper London welcome by being informed that the "Express" part of the journey was not going to happen due to a track circuit failure somewhere along the line. The slower speeds did allow me a better look at the lines on which we were travelling, and the numerous passing trains also travelling the route. Of note was the Old Oaks Common depot complex, housing many First Great Western franchise trains, as well as the Eurostar maintenance facility in this area.
Arrival at Paddington station was easy and convenient, as this is the closest station to our hotel, which is just 50m down the road from the station's Praed street entrance.
In order to get used to our new time zone we did not sleep at in our room but instead headed out on the Tube with our recently purchased 3 day Travelcards to Waterloo station. Here we walked along the Thames to the London Eye, which was closed when we were in London last year. The Eye is the world's largest observation wheel, but considering that we have never heard of any other "observation wheels", this would not be a hard record to hold.
It was not a very busy morning so we were able to buy our tickets for our "flight" (it is the British Airways London Eye after all) and head to the "boarding gate" straight away. We hopped onto the first "pod" for our 30 minute journey around this giant spoked wheel.
The view offered from the highest point is a far-reaching panorama of this old city. It certainly appears to be the highest vantage point in central London. It is also well placed railway-wise, being next to Blackfriars Railway Bridge and very close to Waterloo station, which is serviced by many regional trains and the Eurostar.
Once back on the ground we were once again on the Tube, this time headed toward Temple and Australia House.
At Australia House we enquired at passport services about the rip in my passport. Due to the long wait of around an hour, they advised that I call the next day between 9:30am and 12:00 noon, and someone should be able to answer my query more quickly that way.
Next it was off to Leister Square for lunch. As we did last year, we decided to have lunch at the Pizza Hut all-you-can-eat pizza, pasta and salad bar for around AUD $14 each. To save money we headed across the square to Maccas for drinks and a McFlurry each.
We went to the Odeon Empire Cinema (1 of the 4 Odeon cinemas at Leister Square) to see the 2:30pm session of Jarhead. The session was in the main auditorium, which us the definition of an old traditional picture palace. The auditorium was huge and had been done up nicely with lights changing colour along the side, and a nice, large curved screen.
The film was funnier than I had anticipated, and the coolness of the auditorium made up for any weaknesses that the film had.
By the time the film was out it was already dark and we were feeling pretty tired, not having a proper sleep for over 24 hours. As such, we headed straight back to the hotel to bed without any dinner.
Yesterday we woke late and enjoyed the surprisingly good free breakfast at the hotel, including croissants, bread, fresh fruit, yoghurt, cereal, milk and fruit juice.
After filling ourselves I rang the number that passport services had provided yesterday. After being on hold for about half an hour, my call was answered and the operator said that because the rip didn't go through my photo or any information, it didn't sound too serious and should be fine to continue to use until the end of the trip.
The first place we visited yesterday was the British Library, which is housed in an interesting semi-Chinese looking building opened in 1998. There was an interesting exhibit on the history of printing and printmaking, offering insights into the different printing methods and how slow old printing methods were. One interesting fact we learned from this exhibit was that capital letters are called "upper case" because they were kept in the upper drawers for the type setters to find to layout on a page for printing and the non-capital letters are "lower case" because they were kept in the lower drawers.
The special exhibit was about the Nobel Prize, its history and the winners throughout the years. There was a nice mention of our 2 winners in the category of medicine in 2005, from UWA for their research into mouth ulcer causing bacteria.
In the library shop there was a lot of merchandise celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth in 2006. There was a great book of the complete set of Mozart's chamber strings pieces, each page being a copy of his original manuscripts, showing his messy writing and corrections. I would have loved a copy, but 90 pounds is a little out of my budget!
From the library it was off to Oxford Street for lunch and a little retail therapy. It was quite astonishing to me that we managed to spend more than 1 hour in Borders and HMV's largest store in the world. We didn't buy anything in Borders, but at HMV we shared in the purchase of a 3CD set of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, sung in English, for only 14.99 pounds (on sale!). This HMV also featured one (out of 24 made) of the original paintings of the dog sitting in front of the gramophone, the HMV logo, in the classical music section.
From Oxford Street the tube took us to South Kensington to visit the British Science Museum. The museum was surprisingly free to enter, and offered a large collection of articles, new and old. Some exhibits were looking a bit old and tired, such as the telecommunications exhibit, which claimed that sending letters made in the typewriter was a modern practice. The marine and diving exhibit was also a little tired and smelt a bit funky.
These were luckily outweighed by the coolness of the energy exhibit, featuring a huge 3 storey "energy ring" that was made up of a ring of LED displays, creating a constant ring of light, bouncing words and strips around it, with particles flying around and white blocks "bouncing" off each other. I know it probably doesn't make sense, but it was pretty cool, so we'll leave it at that :-P.
Also undeniably cool was the presence of not only the oldest surviving locomotive in the world, Puffing Billy, but also the presence of the original Rocket, made by Stevenson himself! If these 2 gems, along with Stevenson's later Columbine locomotive, aren't enough to get you excited, we also saw the 3:30pm session of Wild Safari 3D at the IMAX cinema. The movie is basically a hunt for the "big 5" animals of South Africa put into a 40 minute 3D movie. We saw lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, cape buffalos as well as the odd giraffe and zebra.
We stayed at the museum until close at 6pm before heading home (once again by the Tube) and having the worst Burger King that we've ever experienced. The burgers were cold, bread stale, restaurant dirty, and even the fries tasted weird. We didn't each very much and didn't feel very hungry after that experience.
Whilst I've been typing this blog on Charles' laptop, we've been watching "Inch Loss 2006: Australia", where some fat British people have been in Perth losing weight! It's kind of weird seeing these people back home and figuring out where they are. Today they're at Royal Perth Yacht Club, yesterday they were at South Perth Foreshore. So if you see some rotund Poms out and about back home trying to loose weight with some cameras following them, you'll know what it's about!
Today is our last full day in London and after updating the blog we hope to visit some more museums and browse a few more stores before departure early tomorrow afternoon, on the Eurostar of course.
Keep on checking, the next update will be from Paris.
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