London leftovers

One last post on last year's London adventures with some photos that fell through the cracks.

While I have been fortunate enough to travel all over the world, I had never stepped foot in the United Kingdom before. I always wanted to go to more 'exotic' places, but I can't overstate just how wonderful living in London was. Well technically, KLS' tells me that we were living in Greenwich, near a wonderful park and with easy access to London. The diversity, the ease of getting around without a car, the beautiful countryside, the local culture, and so much more made it such a great city for us. Given the chance to live in that fabulous flat along the Thames and take a ferry to work on the company dollar again, we'd move back to Greenwich in a heartbeat. We definitely shared some of our favorite experiences while living there.

On the flip side, KLS said living in central London was too noisy and the sheer number of people was overwhelming. She was miserable there. The expat that we had inherited the flat in Greenwich from had moved there from the same residence in central London as KLS . Before he found the flat, he was looking for ways to get himself deported to get out of his employment contract with no penalties because he was struggling with big city living. I guess it just depends on your day to day set up.

The National Portrait gallery beside Trafalgar Square on a rare sunny day.

This might be a photo of the National Portrait gallery on a sunny day, but it is actually a photo of the Clockwork Lion's bum made out of clockwork machinery.

A close up of the Clockwork Lion, a temporary animatronic lion in Trafalgar Square that is meant to draw attention to the countdown to the actual cats' extinction.

White Hall Gardens where KLS and I shared a few wonderful lunches along the Thames River. The building in the background is One Whitehall Place at the Royal Horseguards Hotel, which was the first building in London to be fully illuminated with electrical lighting.

A clever way to collect money from passerbys while building elaborate sand structures along the Thames.

This luxury tree house was built along the South Bank as part of a contest and advertisement to get people to vacation in African countries.

A view from the South Bank.

KLS' after work pub carried beer that is brewed in Steven's Point, WI, just 15 minutes from my mom's house in central Wisconsin.

As Americans, we might still have a lot to learn from the British.

The leftovers of KLS' amazing Spanish jamon (ham) party.

This one is for my sister who can call her dog with the big crinkle a chip bag makes.

This dusting of snow in Greenwich Park in front of the Royal Observatory before ultimate frisbee pickup is the only snow that I saw in London all winter.

All Saints' Church in Blackheath.
At the start of our stay, KLS and I would take a local train to a regional train to get to the market. By the end of our stay, we learned, we could just want 1.5 miles through Greenwich Park to the same market. Maps are your friends.

The view over London from the Royal Observatory - central London on the left and Canary Wharf on the right. You can see the top of our apartment building on the left side of the picture on the near side of the Thames.

The best cake that KLS and I had on our visit to London. Yum, yum, yum!

The very end result of opening a wine bottle by placing it in a shoe and smacking the base flatly off a hard surface (about 25-40 times).