Covent Garden Food Market

Everyone knows how great Covent Garden is, yes? It's full of nice shops and amazing musicians and I could quite happily sit there people watching forever.

But what everyone might now know (I didn't) is that every Thursday, a food market pops up.

It seems to be quite a good/popular one, too, because they were filming with that Gizzi Erskine woman whilst we were there.

We didn't pay much attention to that, though. A frappucino and a slice of cake had us happy.

And we still managed to see some fabulous musicians, too...

So whilst Covent Garden is always fun to go to, make an extra special effort if you're there on a Thursday. It's definitely worth it.

Madam Tussauds

So, what have we been up to since our last update?

Well, we used our two-for-one vouchers to go to Madam Tussauds! We hung out with actors...

Absolutely rocking ginger queens...

Scientists...

And then more scientists...

And artists...

And superheroes...

And more superheroes...

And even more superheroes...

And then we nipped up the road to Baker Street, where I was photographed outside Sherlock Holmes's place. Awesome.

June 9th 2012

Something we're discovering about London is that there's lots of free things to do if you look for them. Garry was looking around on the Internet and found this — The London Green Fair — at Regent's Park. We walked up and had a look round.

Chickens!

These guys were weaving sticks. Not entirely sure why.

Herbs to buy. If we had had space I would had bought them all.

Garry and his brolly

Big chicken. Not entirely sure why.

Regge band

Stalls selling lots of very pretty, very expensive things

SO many different types of food

Eco-friendly stalls with The City behind

Iron Man! *boo domp chish*

Garry and I

The main reason we'd come, however, was to see an 80 piece Dutch Wind Orchestra who were absolutely brilliant.

Regent's Park itself is lovely even without the festival. And there are lots of dogs, which is always a good thing in my book. Will be spending quite a lot of time here when it's sunny, I think. Especially since we only saw a small slice of it.

The park

June 8th 2012

I was reading a local paper when I saw that there was going to be a biscuit festival in the centre of town. A whole festival for biscuits. AMAZING.

It was held at the Brunswick Shopping Centre, which is almost directly opposite Russell Square station. When we got there, two very excited people called Gary Baldi and Connie Crumbs were dragging people up on stage for contests to win biscuits.

In the adverts I'd seen for the festival it promised...well, a lot more than it delivered. I imagine that because it was a Friday it wasn't as busy as it would be on the Saturday. However, there was a biscuit decorating stand...

Garry had a vanilla biscuit smeared with red wine buttercream and sprinkled with nuts, meringues and a dollop of caramel.

Mine was far simpler — a lemon biscuit with vanilla buttercream and caramel. It looks a bit like an egg here.

They were, admittedly, very nice biscuits but there wasn't a great deal to keep us occupied here so we went for a wander. And that's how we ended up at Camden Lock.

This is a 30 minute walk or a 10 minute bus ride from our house and it is, quite frankly, amazing.

It's a total labyrinth of stalls selling everything from food to clothes to toiletries to stationery to artwork to second hand books to vintage items, all in some really quite beautiful settings.

I couldn't take many photos inside here as many of the stalls have "No photograph" signs on them, but it used to be a stables and each stables is made into a little stall selling beautiful things. It's incredible.

The only problem is I am really, really not cool enough for Camden Lock. I'm going to have to come back with several more piercings before I feel like I fit in...

There will almost certainly be another post on Camden Lock at some point. I just didn't have enough time to see it all and I missed so much out — I think it needs a whole day devoted to it.

How to get there

The British Museum

Okay, okay. We do want to get to know London properly, i.e. see all the lovely little hideaway places, and not just live on the beaten track. However, we haven't done many touristy things in London before so we want to make sure that we get the best of both worlds. And today was most definitely a touristy day.

Does the British Museum need an introduction? Probably not, but just in case — it's considered to be one of the world's greatest museums for history and culture. It has about eight million things in its permanent collection and is generally a bit fantastic.

I don't need to say much more about it, so here's a selection of the photos we took today.

World's oldest recorded porn

Such a beautiful room

No idea what this is, but I like it

The ceiling is amazing

Garry

Discobolus

Me

Statue on the stairs

Model of Olympia

The place was so big we couldn't see everything — definitely worth a few trips.