When I asked my wife, what her dream-destination would be, she did not have to think very long about it. "RONDON"!! it was. Which loosely translates to us non-japanese as "London"...
Well, since London is only about 90 Minutes away by plane and everybody was keen on going there, we decided to spend a long weekend in London - sorry - Rondon.
Our first destination within London was the Museum-Ship "Belfast". It is conveniently located in Downtown London. My daughter has - like me - a bit of a "faible" for this kind of stuff so why not?
It is possible to visit the entire ship on all decks. One would not imagine from judging from the outside, but its a fairly big ship inside. Kitchen, Mess, Hospital, everything one needs to be blown out of the water by a german u-boat is present.
If you go inside the A-Turrent in the front of the ship you can even "enjoy" a kind of show where they are simulating a firefight inkl. smoke and sound etc. My wife was less impressed ;-)...
upon leaving the ship you will pass a souvenir shop (surprise!) where i had to buy one of those T-Shirts you will never wear again at home.
Well, I wore it a couple of times (inside the house) and once we moved into a new apartment it served as "painting uniform" - which didn't help its popularity later on.
I recently lent it to my daughter - only to never see it again. Fare well Belfast!
After having lunch in an "original English pub" with some fatty fish and lumpy chips (yea - just around the corner there was a branch of "Jamie Oliver's Restaurant" but of course that was not "English" enough. So we had to go to "fatty-fishy's" ^^).
As mentioned, Belfast is very centrally located, just near Tower Bridge. So we crossed the River Thames over Tower Bridge in order to come to the Tower of London.
Now, if you are in London in Spring, you are not exactly alone there, right? There will be some other tourists who want to see the Tower. That should not come as a massive surprise, right?
But the masses that we encountered (it was not a holiday such as "Easter Holiday" or the like - an ordinary weekday) did surprise me a bit.
Fairly alarmed by the queue outside I started to gently mention the remote possibility of maybe having slightly longer queue at the "Crown Jewel Room" entrance. Just to prepare the wife for an eventual disappointment.
Upon arriving to the queue my wife quickly decided that it would be a "no go" - saving us at least 3 hours standing around doing nothing. I love my wife.
After this exhausting visit I had to have a coffee. Thank god there was a "Starbucks" around the corner where we could have an overpriced and "not-strictly-diet" latte macchiato. Tall, which means small - which kinda makes sense I guess?
That was our first day in London. Mind you, we arrived around 11:00 by plane, so that was quite a packed day. For dinner we went to a Japanese restaurant around the corner of our hotel. Which was quite good, compared to fatty-fish-lunch ;-)
Follow us in the next part where we we visit "Sherlock Holmes" and some other old masonry of which I have forgotten the names long time ago.
Take care!