Week 29 in London

Week 29: 19 – 25 October 2015

This week was onto the final few days of British Summer Time (aka daylight saving time), before the clocks have to be turned an hour back. We’d been warned that once BST ended, the night sky descends over the city at around 4.30pm :(

Post Iron Man and Brendan continued to walk the 3.8km home from work, partly for the exercise and partly because its actually quicker than taking the bus.

On Thursday night, Roslyn had a dinner event at the Houses of Parliament as part of the American NFL International Series games that are played in London. People of significant wealth such as team owners and other top clients were in attendance and so it was quite a lavish spread, with delicious traditional British food. London’s Houses of Parliament lying beneath Big Ben are simply stunning – Roslyn was lucky enough to get a tour whilst she was there.

Friday night, and Roslyn went for dinner and cocktails with Mel at Brixton, while Brendan caught up with Shaun for a boozy evening down the road from our house at Clapham Junction.

Once we arose from our sleep-in on Saturday, we wandered over to an area of Clapham Junction that we hadn’t been before for brunch at a well-regarded café, Ben’s Canteen. This may seem like a very broad generalisation, but most of our experiences eating at pubs and some cafes in the UK have suggested to us that the Brits have a pretty bland flavour palate.

Apparently Ben’s Canteen is Australian-inspired, and maybe that’s why this café is different. Brendan had an ‘Eggs Pig Out’, it sounded a bit unusual - pulled pork on toast with poached eggs and hollandaise sauce. But. It. Was. AMAZING! Paired with an Aussie Iced Coffee (iced coffee with Milo on top) and this brunch was probably one of the best meals we’ve had out the whole time we’ve been abroad.

Sunday was the Rugby World Cup semi final game of Argentina vs Australia. Considering that Brendan had drawn out Argentina in his office sweep and is also the only Australian at work, the outcome of this game was going to be win-win either way. We went to the nearby Clapham Grand, which dates back to 1900 and was historically a music hall and theatre. The internal layout and design pays clear homage to its roots, and makes for an interesting modern bar and nightclub.

With a massive screen set up on the stage, there we were, 2 Australians in an English pub, drinking Mexican beer (Corona’s) watching Argentina vs Australia. Very multicultural.

Highlights for the week:
- Last week of British Summer Time
- Roslyn went to an American NFL International Series dinner
- Tour of the Houses of Parliament
- Friday nights out for both of us
- Saturday brunch at Ben’s Canteen
- Rugby World Cup on Sunday at Clapham Grand

Week 28 in London

Week 28: 12-18 October 2015

We made the journey to Sutton, on the outskirts of London, on Tuesday night for a farewell dinner with our friends Gabby and Jarrod. Without having told their family or anyone else, they’d packed up their flat and booked tickets to fly back to Australia the next day. Dinner was at The Moon on the Hill, a Wetherspoon pub (see previous post for more information on what this means).

The following evening, Wednesday, we had a more upmarket cultural experience out at a Broadway theatre show. We saw The Kion King at Lyceum Theatre, and although Brendan had already seen in a few years ago in Sydney, there were minor differences. Today's show in London has been updated slightly to make it more relatable for children of 2015, and is just more "British" than the one Brendan had previously seen.

On Thursday, Brendan had to take part in his work's Knight Frank Day of Giving event for charity. Right across the UK, each Knight Frank office had their own charity fundraising event and his office had chosen to do a team Iron Man. 2.4-mile (3.86 km) swim, a 112-mile (180.25 km) bicycle ride and a marathon 26.2-mile (42.2 km) run. Luckily it was split up between the 18 people in the office so they only had to cover these distances cumulatively. Not everyone was willing to participate however, so there were still significant distances to be covered. Quite daunting!

The swim was fairly straightforward, the 5 people who were brave enough to get in the water had to complete 8 laps of the lido (English word for an outdoor swimming area) in the Serpentine (essentially a big duck pond, with questionable water hygiene).

Next it was onto the bike ride. Due to the informal setup (i.e. nothing was actually planned, we just turned up as a group and started doing an Iron Man...) the group of us wound up on hired Boris bikes cycling around with no real idea of where we needed to go or the distance that we'd covered.

The run was next and Brendan had worked out that between the 9 people who were running, they only needed to cover about 4.7 km each (and that was all he’d prepared for). But much like the bikes, nobody was tracking how far they’d gone and by the end he’d completed 7 km in 45 minutes. Not particularly quickly but still, an achievement for someone who is far from an athlete.

On Friday evening we went across to The Big Chill House at Kings Cross for Aussies in London drinks. The next morning, Saturday, was quite a cold and windy day. We stayed at home for quite a while and once we left to get lunch, wished that we hadn’t ventured out without coats.

On Sunday we went over to Greenwich so we could get a typical touristy photo standing on the meridian line. The main line is strategically positioned inside the courtyard of the Royal Observatory, which attracts a £9.50 entry fee. We didn’t end up actually going in, but still managed to get our photo on the line that we found outside of the courtyard, on a concealed walkway. The Observatory sits atop a hill in the 74 hectare (183 acre) Greenwich Park, and affords a spectacular outlook down the hill towards the National Maritime Museum, and across the River Thames to the rest of the city.

We decided to head over to Oxford Street to see the Christmas decorations and start our Christmas shopping. On entering the tube station on our way there, we saw a film crew set up and most of the escalators closed as part of this. There were signs warning that there was filming in the area and by entering we were giving permission for them to use footage of us. They didn’t however have signs warning that there would be a lifeless looking body sprawled out on the floor at the bottom!

Highlights for the week:
- Farewell dinner in Sutton for Gabby and Jarrod
- The Lion King at Lyceum Theatre
- Brendan taking part in an Iron Man
- Aussies in London drinks at The Big Chill House
- Greenwich Park
- Stood on the meridian line
- Saw a giant ship in a bottle outside the National Maritime Museum
- Oxford Street - saw Christmas decorations and started Christmas shopping!

Week 27 in London

Week 27: 5 – 11 October 2015

On Monday Roslyn started her new job at London & Partners, in one of the modern ‘More London Riverside' buildings, with a 6th floor view straight out to Tower Bridge.

Fast forward to Saturday and we went over to Borough Market, one of London’s largest food markets. Parts of the Bridget Jones’ Diary were filmed around the markets, in the movie Bridget can be seen strutting through these markets with the ingredients for what later becomes blue soup (http://bit.ly/1GODfCo). The building portrayed as the exterior of her flat (actually a pub) as well as the restaurant where the fight scene takes place (http://bit.ly/1M0QG9N) are both just outside the main market halls.

With plenty of delectable options for lunch, Roslyn went for a duck confit sandwich while Brendan was slightly more adventurous and discovered a venison burger – surprisingly good!

Once we’d made our way through the markets, eaten lunch and bought chorizo and cakes, we wandered up to the ‘More London’ precinct where Roslyn works because Brendan had never been there. We crossed Tower Bridge, moseyed around for a while and then decided that going to the cinema would be nice, something we haven’t done since departing Australia.

We jumped back onto the tube and went across to Hammersmith, grabbing dinner at The William Morris pub while the Australia vs Wales Rugby game was on. We finished dinner, Australia won and off we went to watch The Intern, at a cinema that had clearly not seen renovations since the mid 1990's.

Side note, oddly in London nearly all the cafes, restaurants and pubs seem to be chains. Nicholson’s and JD Wetherspoon are 2 of the biggest pub groups, The William Morris being a Wetherspoon pub. The strange thing is that while each individual Wetherspoon pub has its own unique name, architecture and internal fit out, they all run a near-identical menu. This results in some of the charm of being in an old English pub being lost, and they just feel a bit soulless. Regardless of whether these mass produced pubs are culturally beneficial or not, the other good thing about Wetherspoons is you can get a meal with a drink for under £10 (that’s very rare in London)! The other advantage is that once you’ve been into one Wetherspoon pub, you can go into any other pub in the group and know what you’re going to order and how much you’ll pay even if you’ve never been to that particular watering hole before.

Highlights for the week:

- Roslyn’s first week at London & Partners
- Borough Markets, sites of filming of Bridget Jones’ Diary
- Venison burger
- Checked out Roslyn’s new office in the ‘More London’ precinct
- Walked across Tower Bridge
- Dinner at The William Morris pub in Hammersmith during Australia vs Wales game
- Went to the cinema and watched The Intern

Week 26 in London

Week 26: 28 September - 4 October 2015

We said servus (goodbye) to Munich on Monday and after a stopover in Geneva, Switzerland, were back in London for a short working week.

Roslyn was onto her final week at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and her friend Tennille from Griffith arrived on Thursday to stay for 2 nights. She brought with her an abundance of snacks from Roslyn's family. The 2 of them went to Roslyn's farewell drinks on Friday evening, starting at the pub next door to the office and eventually ending at a bar in trendy Shoreditch.

On Saturday morning, Tennille got her belongings together and was set to meet up with her parents later that day. We went along with her to the hotel they were booked in at over at Kensington. It was less than glamorous, apparently not that cheap and one of the only places available - the Rugby World Cup had resulted in inflated prices and limited rooms London-wide.

After dropping the bag off, we walked up to Shepherds Bush and reminisced along the way as we walked past one of the properties we looked at before finding our current house. That particular property was advertised as being in Notting Hill (a significantly better area) and featured photos that weren't even of that flat. Boarding a train, we went across to the Old Spitalfields Markets. 

After some lunch, we went across to Westminster and strolled around the Parliament Square area, including the perimeter and one of the central courtyards of Westminster Abbey. From there, we crossed Westminster Bridge over to Southbank and promenaded along the waterfront. We made our way down to the meeting place where Tennille met up with her parents.

Later that night Australia defeated England in the Rugby World Cup, meaning the local host nation was now out of the competition. Just minutes from our house, fans who had been watching the game spilled out onto the street and attempted to scrum a car stopped at traffic lights. We didn't witness the incident and only read about it a few days later, so aren't sure whether they were English fans trying to do a better job than their team, or just drunk Aussie bogans. 

On Sunday we went for a stroll up to Clapham Common where there was a dog show happening, so puppies running around everywhere. We had lunch at one of our other potential Christmas dinner venues, The Windmill, which adjoins the common. Being a pleasant day, it was nice to sit outside and enjoy a snack from their burger shack in the beer garden, before we continued up further to Clapham High Street.

Highlights for the week:

- Roslyn's last week at Royal College of Psychiatrists

- Tennille came to stay

- Roslyn went to farewell drinks in Shoreditch

- Old Spitalfields Markets

- Looked around the outside of Westminster Abbey

- Promenaded along Southbank

- Australia defeated England in the Rugby World Cup

- Dog show at Clapham Common

- Burger from The Windmill

- Walked up to Clapham High Street

Munich, Germany

Saturday 26th September 2015:

On Saturday, we made our way out to Heathrow Airport for the first time since our arrival almost 7 months ago. We'd booked our Oktoberfest weekend through Topdeck, however went for an option where we had to get our own way to and from Munich.

Having flown many a budget airline, we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of service offered by our carrier, Swiss. Attentive and friendly cabin crew, comfortable leather seats, ample leg room and good food including complimentary Swiss chocolates.

We landed at Munich Airport and headed to the train. As it turns out there are 2 routes between the city and the airport. One of them is a fairly direct path into the city centre (S8), while the other moseyed through the countryside before looping back around to the city (S1). Unluckily for us, we didn't learn about the S8 until we were already aboard the S1.

We arrived at the camp site, Campingplatz München Thalkirchen, around 4pm. Camping, because we were too late (and too poor...) to be able to get a hotel or even hostel accommodation. Fortunately the tents were already set up for us, so all we had to do was drop our bags off and hunt out some food.

The Germans are producers of some great beers and certainly enjoy a drink. Subsequently, they also enjoy a decent feed. Large meal servings generally consist of big hunks of meat, pork and duck being some of their favourites, plus carb-loaded potato dumplings. And as we'd already discovered in Berlin, it's delicious.

Through the woods we wandered until we reached a hotel, Gasthof Hinterbrühl, and got stuck into some roast pork and a Vienna schnitzel (veal). As lame as it was, by around 7:30pm we were wrecked yet we hadn't even been to the beer tents, so we retired to the tent for an early night.

We woke on Sunday before 7am, and kitted up with our Lederhosen and Dirndl to catch the 7:30am shuttle bus to the beer tents. We were sort of expecting standard event marquees, but these temporary "tents" are much bigger and more permanent looking structures. It seemed ludicrous to be lined up with a hoard of other people for beer before 9:00 on a Sunday morning, particularly when you think that there are 16 "big tents" and numerous more "small tents". Surely you could just drop in whenever throughout the day?

We'd been advised however that the early start was necessary, because the beer wenches won't serve you unless you are at a table, and in previous years some tents have reached capacity and stopped allowing entry by 11:30am. Fortunately we struck up conversation with another group in the queue and we made an alliance that once the doors opened, we would marathon sprint for a table together. By 9:30am we were getting stuck into our first beers (Radler for Roslyn - half beer, half lemonade).

Oktoberfest is more than just a festival of beer, dating back to 1810 when it started as a celebration to honour the wedding of Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen. Over time, the celebrations have moved forwards to September due to the better weather. It has since grown to become the world’s largest fair, with plenty of food stalls and carnival rides in addition to the beer tents. Statistics from the Oktoberfest website say that over the course of Oktoberfest 2015, there were 5.9 million visitors who consumed 7.7 million litres of beer.

We spent a number of hours in what is probably the most well-known tent, Hofbräu Festzel, counterpart to the famous Hofbräuhaus which is open in Munich year round. This tent holds around 10,000 people, and had become very busy by the time we eventually left.

It seemed to be occupied by a significant number of Aussie's and Kiwi's, and got pretty messy pretty quickly. Early on, the first few blokes of the day stood up on tables and downed their 1 litre steins to cheers from the crowd, and after a while a few girls had a turn as well. A few more beers in, and most of the people that stood up to scull were merely pouring the beer down their faces, clothing and onto the tables and floor below. This escalated to girls standing on tables sans-beer and making out with each other. By this point, the tent was occupied by plenty of liquored up bogans and they loved these table top performances. The security guards were less convinced, and it reached a point where anyone that stood on a table was promptly removed.

Since we really only had the one day, we decided to make a move and headed outside to check out the rest of the fair. Bypassing through the Löwenbräu tent, we returned to the camp site to change out of our costumes before returning to Marienplatz, the central square of the city. The impressive New City Hall dominates the skyline with its bold gothic architecture, and tall tower housing the Rathaus-Glockenspiel. It chimes and figurines re-enact stories from Munich’s history each day at 11am, 12pm and 5pm.

We noticed that Duloc, the animated kingdom of Lord Farquaad from Shrek, has a resemblance to Munich. From a distance, some of them look like they aren't even real and other like they are built out of Lego. We aren't sure whether that is just coincidental or if the producers of Shrek based it on the city. Unfortunately as we were without a guide and only had limited time, we were unable to learn the historical significance of much else. 

We ended the day with a Bavarian feast at a nearby restaurant, roast duck, 2 different kinds of roast pork plus dumplings. We were unable to finish and subsequently the waitress made us feel like we were weak and inferior.

Once again we were back at the tent and asleep fairly early. Real party people we are. We awoke the next morning (Monday), packed our things and transited back to Marienplatz for a wander around the markets, before returning to the airport.

Highlights: 

- Stopover in Geneva, Switzerland

- Camping at Campingplatz München Thalkirchen
- Strolled through the woods
- Oktoberfest, contributed to 7.7 million litres of beer being consumed
- Hofbräu Festzelt, counterpart to the world famous Hofbräuhaus
- Passed through of Löwenbräu tent
- Marienplatz, similarities to Lord Farquad’s kingdom from Shrek
- New City Hall with Rathaus-Glockenspiel
- Peterskirche (St Peter’s Church) and Petersplatz (St Peter’s Square)
- Ate pork knuckle, roast duck, Vienna schnitzel, wursts and potato dumplings

Week 25 in London

Week 25: 21 - 27 September 2015

This week we were getting our lederhosen and dirndl ready for our trip to Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany.

On Tuesday, Roslyn had confirmation that she had got the job she’d applied for at London & Partners. As the official promotional company for London, the new jobs marks Roslyn’s return to the tourism marketing industry, and the short turnaround time has her starting on the 5th October.

New to London, our new housemates Lauren and Adam weren’t going to miss out on Oktoberfest. After only a week and one day in their new abode, on Thursday they boarded a Topdeck bus bound for Germany where we would also be heading on Saturday.

With her existing job, Roslyn had one of her last events and travelled out to Cambridge for Friday afternoon. Brendan met up with our former Contiki traveller Shaun, and had burgers and beers (preparation for Oktoberfest) at Belushi’s in Hammersmith.

Highlights for the week: 
- Confirmation of Roslyn’s new job
- Lauren and Adam left for Oktoberfest
- Roslyn had an event in Cambridge
- Brendan went for drinks with Shaun
- Departed for Munich!