Seeing in 2011

On Wednesday we drove into London to spend a bit of time with my friend Nic. Before we left we paid a visit to Ben & Anna's to meet wee Poppy who is around 4 months old.

We had a lovely time with Nicola. On Thursday we did bit of a tourist day in central London. We ticked off lots of the 'must-see' sights including Big Ben & the houses of parliament...

Westminster Abbey...

The London Eye...

St Paul's Cathedral...

Tower Bridge...

The horse guards...

and Buckingham Palace...

At the Queen Victoria monument I ceremoniously handed over the 'gift from NZ' bronze lions to Nic. Yeah I know, I'm bit of an idiot at times...

We briefly popped into the Tate Modern to see what the installation in the turbine hall was. At first it didn't look like much, but it was actually the sunflower seed exhibition by Ai Weiwei. It is basically 5 million 'sunflower seeds' that are actually hand-crafted from porcelain. The scale of it was pretty impressive.

Nicola lives in Blackheath so Friday morning, New Year's Eve, we walked to Greenwich park & had a really nice wander around. The Royal observatory was fascinating, with lots of info about time. In the pic below you can see the Prime Meridian.

We also walked around the old Naval College, including the very impressive Painted Hall where Nelson's body lay in Sate before his funeral.

Our initial plan was to head back Reading way for a house party at Claire & Mike's place. Unfortunately they returned from their trip to Paris with some nasty food poisoning & had to call the party off. Instead, we stayed an extra night with Nic & saw in the new year from a roof-top terrace of an apartment near London Bridge belonging to one of her friends. We had an amazing view of the impressive fireworks being set off from the London Eye. Unfortunately we left the camera downstairs so didn't get any pics of the actual fireworks! However we took the pic below & the video after the event.

Yesterday afternoon we drove back to Claire & Mike's, bringing Nic with us. We had a very nice pub meal & when we got back, after a few more drinks, decided to pretend it was New Year's Eve all over again, as Claire & Mike were a bit too poorly to appreciate it the first time around!

Today has been very chilled, we didn't get up to much. Tomorrow we will drive back up to Will's parents & spend another couple of nights there. Then it is back to Bearwood on Wednesday night, ready to fly out to Hong Kong for a few nights with the bro on Thursday.