A gun rack... a gun rack. I don't even own A gun, let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack. What am I gonna do... with a gun rack?


This gun rack is part of the Armoury at Tower of London - read on for more details....

This past week has been a bit quieter as we were both pretty exhausted from Paris.

We had a very quiet Friday night - Damo went for a couple of quiet ones after work, and then we just went out to the movies and saw You, Me and Dupree.

(*Damo speaking*) I thought it was average to OK at best. Not a complete waste of time, but I'm not sure that I left feeling as though I had been completely entertained....

Anyway, as some of you will no doubt be rushing off to the cinemas to see it, based on my history with movie critiquing, we'll try and keep this blog post relatively short.......(*End Damo speaking*)

Saturday we got up and did a few chores around the house, and got ready to go into the City. We caught the tube in, and got out here.....


....Piccadilly Circus

After this we went to Carnaby St, and checked it out - it lacks a bit (more like a LOT) of the zing as portrayed in the Austin Power films (Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Elvis Costello and Mr Burt Bacharach) - it was ok, and there were some cool little bars, but the shops were excessively overpriced, and not anywhere near as unique as we would've expected.


This is what we were expecting!

But not what we got! We didn't even get to see Heather Graham or Mike Myers! ;-)

We didn't get any photos when we were there, but Damo works relatively close to it, so he'll go in one day just to snap a few piccies, not that there's that much to take photos of anyway!

We wandered around that area for a number of hours, went and did a bit of other shopping (but didn't buy anything) and then we ended up heading home - we didn't get up to much on Saturday night, but still stayed up pretty late so that we could call home and wish both of our dad's a Happy Father's Day - and a Happy Father's Day to any of you other dad's out there that are reading this - hope the young one's looked after you well for your day!


It's Father's Day in June over here, so it wasn't even possible to get a Father's Day card anyway!

Got up on Sunday and decided we'd do a bit more sight-seeing, so we decided that we'd go and check out the Tower of London. It was excellent - we'd seen the outside of it plenty of times before, but we'd never been through it until now! It was great - we both enjoyed it immensely.


The tower bathed in rare sunlight (even though it's supposed to be Summer over here....)

It was very weird standing on the same spot where people had been executed and tortured and stuff - We got escorted around by Beefeaters (Yeoman Warders) for a guided tour and our guide was hilarious.


This is what the Beefeaters look like.

We went into the Chapel there, and we also followed the exact path through the Tower of London that all of the headless corpses follow after they were beheaded. We checked out the Torture Chamber....




(Yep - that's right - this is a rack...)

and also saw heaps of Armour from King Henry VIII....




(and Damo with a replica of it....)

...and we also checked out the Crown Jewels - they were fairly impressive, that's for sure. The chapel was amazing - the Yeoman Warder spoke about how at one time in the 1800's they decided to do a refurbishment on the church, which included ripping the floor up because it was sinking, and they ended up exhuming 1500 bodies from there - they were able to positively identify 33 of them - some of them from hundreds of years before then!!!! They mentioned that there was a sarcophagus in the middle of the room, and they opened it up and instead of finding bodies, they found the church's font (the thing that holds the holy water). Pretty sure that Anne Boleyn might have been buried beneath this church, also!

All in all, it was a great day, and comes highly recommended to any of you who might get the chance to travel over here - there's no rush though - the place has been there since the 1000's when it was commissioned to be built by William the Conqueror....

After we'd finished here, we caught the tube from Tower Hill tube station to Temple tube station - holy crap - what a shit hole of a place that is - We walked out of the tube stop, and thankfully we weren't dressed up much because there were beggars by the truckloads - heaps and heaps of them. It was fairly dodgy, that's for sure - Damo ended up helping a fella in a wheelchair get up the hill and then we ended up wheeling him to wherever he was going (Sardinia St, near Covent Garden) - he said he was having a bad day because they'd run out of food at the place near the tube stop..... The place where we ended up taking him to looked pretty dodgy too, but we left him to it - didn't really fancy heading into the middle of all that again, if we didn't really need to.

We did all of this on our way to Covent Garden, where we decided to go for Tapas and a couple of quiet glasses of vino. There was a really cool reggae band playing a heap of Bob Marley songs, and we were just sitting there listening to that and enjoying our meal - it was sensational.


The Reggae Band


The restaurant

We headed home not long after this, and walked in the door, and we got a phone call from Tory saying "I'm having dinner in a restaurant in your street! Come on down!", but even though we were both exhausted, we did anyway. We went there and Damo had a beer and Nikki had a green tea. It was a very strange place, but we were told that the food was nice, so we'll possibly consider going back - especially because it's only a few doors down from where we live....

We got a photo of the people that we went out with!


Tory's on the left.

We got home pretty late, and we're buggered today, but it was a good weekend anyway.

Vale Steve Irwin....

I'll post my proper update soon, but just thought that I'd add a special post to bid a fond farewell to Steve Irwin.

Crikey, mate! I can't believe it's happened! Poor bugger, though in all truth he probably didn't even have a chance to know what had happened, but in reality, his poor family.

Anyway, the news reaches far and fast - I heard about it first thing this morning our time.....

I guess it won't be long until the joke factory starts churning them out.

Here's a start though. ApparentlySteve managed to find those crocs in the sewers in NYC....

We've just returned from a long weekend in Paris. We had an absolute blast. Contrary to what we had heard from most people, the place wasn't that dirty, the people weren't rude, and it was amazingly picturesque and pretty. You can't help but feel a bit overwhelmed by the history on occasion, that's for sure!

We caught the Eurostar (train) over there through the Channel Tunnel, and it was quite quick and good - we unfortunately didn't get to see the countryside though as we travelled at night. It was a bit frightening at first when we got there as this was the first time that we've been to a country that speaks predominantly another language (well by ourselves anyway - when we were in Kenya we had Pascal's amazing family to help us....), so negotiating our way through the Paris Metro system was to prove to be an interesting experience....

We were standing in Paris Gare du Nord train station, trying to work out how to buy tickets for the metro, when a helpful man came over to us and starting speaking to us in English and it was quite a relief as he tried to help us with the ticket machine - he then goes on to insist that we owe him €61 (euro) for the tickets that he just bought for us (trying to claim that they would do us for our 3 day stay.... Damo said "No way mate - we haven't got anything like that sort of money on us" and it was then that we worked out that he was trying to scam us..... The very first thing in Paris - Nice!!!!

Anyway, we didn't get taken, we did end up working out how to buy our tickets and travel to Madeleine, and we also managed to find our hotel with minimal difficulty, so everything worked out fantastically.



The hotel was nice, and it was a mere couple of blocks from the Champs-Elysees and also from Place de la Concorde. It was also right near a huge church called Madeleine (Church of Mary Magdalene). Brilliant location.


Madeleine


Place de la Concorde


Champs-Elysees....


.....and again with Nik

We spent much of the first day trying to work out where we could buy breakfast (Petit Lejeuner) on the Champs-Elysees and wandering up and down trying to work out the best place to convert some of our money. We also went into a few shops (Damo says "thankfully not too many!!!") and generally had a pretty good day. We made our way up to the Arc de Triomphe (sp?), took about a bazillion photos, and then purchased our tickets to climb it - apparently it's 50 metres high, and 284 steps to climb it.


...Arc de Triomphe at night

After we'd finished with this we went and found a little cafe and had some lunch. We wandered back down the Champs-Elysees and bought a crepe with nutella off a street vendor and sat in a beautiful park while we ate it and relaxed near a fountain.


The fountain.....


Damo and the crepe.....

We were pretty shattered after a late night the night before, so we decided to go back to the hotel for a nanna-nap in the afternoon, and then we got up later on and decided to go out for dinner. We ended up in a little place called L'imperial on Rue de Rivoli (which is not far from The Louvre), and the food was amazing - Nikki got Onion Soup (otherwise known as French Onion soup when you're not in France ;-) ) for entree while Damo got Foie Gras (Pate), and Nikki got a steak with bearnaise sauce and Damo got a steak with mushroom sauce and frittes (fries). It was soooo good - we had a couple of glasses of Champagne, and also a nice red with dinner (I think it was a Bordeaux). The atmosphere of the place was lovely, and the waiter was amazing - we've definitely never seen anyone as efficient anywhere else in the world - which I guess means that they live up to their reputation.

The next day we got up and decided that we would go and check out the markets out near Bastille - this was a great move, as they were pretty much food markets, and it was far enough out of the touristy area that we more or less almost had to converse in french - which was heaps of fun - they spoke enough english, and we spoke enough french to get by. This really felt like what you would do if you were Parisienne, and we really enjoyed this heaps - a bit of a break from the usual touristy stuff.


The markets....

After this, we went and had a coffee in a little cafe and spoke to the family for a little bit. Then we jumped on the Metro and headed down to Montparnasse which had some art markets down there, and, after getting lost for a little while, we went and had a look through - they were actually a little disappointing, and we later read in the lonely planet that they've sort of sold out - they used to be good, but not so much any more....

We had a look through them anyway, and then we went and had Lejeuner (lunch) in a small creperie on a side street off Montparnasse. It was amazing - it was an entire street filled with creperies - anyway, after looking at a few of the menus and being able to discerne little, we ended up deciding on one, went in, sat down, and then realised that there were better sounding crepes in a different restaurant - so not wanting to cause a scene, we waited for the waitress to vanish, and then we did - just up the street. This would have been fine, except that Nikki had left a book behind on the table, so we walked into the restaurant that we wanted, and then a moment later, the waitress comes into this restaurant to hand us the book..... not at all embarrassing....!!!!!

Here is a piccie of the one where we ended up having lunch.



The food once again was sensational, but it was smothered in butter - we could both feel our arteries hardening just looking at it.....

We went from here, to the Louvre and we were going to go in, but decided that it was a bit late in the day, and that it might be a good idea to go to the Eiffel Tower for sunset. We were at Place de la Concorde, but decided that a stroll down the banks of the Seine on the way would be nice. And it was.






This bridge is the famous one off the Nescafe ad on TV - I think it might have been black and white and used to have some french music in the background....

We walked to the Eiffel Tower, and it was amazing - the Eiffel Tower (Tour d' Eiffel) really is an amazingly impressive structure.

Our first pictures.....


and then


The view from the top (the white thing in the sky is the light that goes around on top of the Eiffel Tower - a bit like the Stefan Skyneedle in Bris.... except a bit more powerful I think.)


I hung my camera off the side to take this one....


We were at the Eiffel Tower for ages - it was about 23:00 by the time that we ended up leaving the general area, and we decided to walk home - we ended up strolling down the Champs-Elysees past the Arc de Triomphe on the way home, and we were starving - we ended up finding a place that was open, and we got some dinner - it was about midnight by the time that we got there, and the food was lovely. We watched all the people walking by, and ended up strolling home.

Woke up the next day, and it was pissing down! We were pretty shattered by this point in time,
so we slept in a bit. Got up and packed, went to check out, and the chick at the counter tried to rip us off by about €30. Damo was having none of it though, and ended up having a bit of an argument with her, and she relented and accepted the initial quoted price. (Damo says "I would've gone off my rocker if she hadn't - it was expensive anyway.....")

We put our stuff in a cupboard/small room and then headed off for the day - went to the Madeleine Church first off. This was a very impressive church, and due to the gloomy weather, made it feel quite eerie.

We lit a candle and put it in front of Joan of Arc.


This was a photo of the church in general - it was huge!


We then decided to head to the Louvre - we walked there, and then by the time that we got there we realised that we'd left the laptop in a fairly unsecure location, so we ended up walking back to the hotel to get it again.

On the way back to the Louvre (again), we were walking to the Place de la Concorde, and as we walked past the Hotel de Crillon, noticed that there was a crowd gathered, and barriers in place. We stopped to find out what was going on, and apparently Madonna was about to come out of the hotel (or so we were told.....). Anyway, an hour and a half later, she did. Nikki has got a video of it, and I've got a photo of her car speeding away with a police escort.


Madonna is in this car - ohhh I can all hear you say...... ;-)

After this we headed to the Louvre. The Louvre can't even be described, because it would be longer than the rest of this post (which is already huge......). Needless to say that we saw a few of the key items - Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo etc. etc.

You were not meant to take photos of Mona Lisa - we got one anyway! :-)


We also got plenty of photos of Venus


It was all pretty amazing - it's quite strange being there though - you know that you are very much in the presence of greatness in many ways, and even the Louvre itself is a work of art, but it's like your senses get overwhelmed - sort of like you can't see the forest for the trees. There is so much amazing stuff that it all sort of blends in to one.

We were there for about 3 or 4 hours, and I think we managed to skim through about a quarter of it, and this was certainly not paying much attention to much at all. We definitely will go back though.

The Louvre




This pretty much saw the end of our France trip. The Eurostar home was a lot slower than it was meant to be and it was delayed by about a half hour, so we didn't end up getting into London until about 11:30 and then we had to catch the tube home - we walked in the door at about 12pm, so needless to say that it was an absolutely exhausting weekend. We certainly walked a lot though!

Paris Gare du Nord


All that can be said of Paris is that, if it is at all possible in your lifetime, you must go there! We both thought that it was an amazing place, and the history of it is such that it is almost scary - buildings built in the 1300's etc. Very full on! We had an absolute blast!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you read the sign on the building in the background of this fella, that's where we're off to this weekend!!!!!!

F R A N C E ! ! !

It'll be our first trip out of the country since we've been here, and we can't wait. It's a bank holiday long weekend over here, and we leave on the Eurostar on Friday night and get back on Monday night pretty late. The Eurostar is a pretty rockin' looking train - and it goes about 300km/h, so it'll be honkin' too!



Can't wait!!!! We've got our accommodation booked, and we'll be staying in the Madeleine district which is very, very near the Champs-Elysse and the Louvre.



Don't know if you can make out this map very well, but there's details of the main attractions, and also where we'll be staying!!! It looks great - we can't wait!

Damo went out in his lunch break the other day and these are some of the things that he saw:


Buckingham Palace


Beefeater


Damo in Green Park (funnily enough, it was green....)


Modigliani exhibition (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Modigliani for details - I like the bit that says "Sick most of his life, he partook of alcohol and drugs, and was a philanderer; he died at the age of 35." heh heh!!!!


Puttin' on the Ritz!!!!!! This was on Piccadilly.

Anyway, not bad for one lunch hour during work. This is the view from Damo's office windows:


You can see London Eye on the horizon and Big Ben is just to the right of it. Not too bad!

Anyway, Damo had to go out to Sunbury yesterday afternoon for an interview, so he's just waiting to hear back how that went. It was an absolute mission to get there, and took about 2 hrs. The company is moving to near the Piccadilly line, so it shouldn't be too bad.

It's been a great week in London this week - the weather has been a bit more like we were expecting - cold and raining - which is funny considering it is meant to be the middle of summer....

Going home to pack for France tonight (got to go to Tory's house on the way home to drop off her SW4 ticket). We were meant to be going to SW4 (see http://www.londontown.com/LondonEvents/SouthWestFour/d62ce for details of the line up), but France ended up taking precedent on a long weekend for us naturally.

It would have been awesome though - Carl Cox, Paul Oakenfold et al.... Oh well. There's all sorts of festivals and stuff happening over here all the time, so hopefully we'll get to another one soon!

Hope everyone is well over there! We're thinking of you all!

This entry is going to be fairly photo-less as there is very little that we took photos of on the weekend just gone.

We ended up catching up with Trav and Nic again on Friday night for Nic's birthday. We went to a pub called "The York" right near Angel tube station, and then we went out to some other place that was a pool bar/club/pub afterwards not far from there - we had a great night, and ended up tying one on. Pretty much everyone was exceptionally inebriated, and we had a hoot of a night.

Even though in the last entry we were saying that we didn't want to do that on Friday night, it's what's ended up happening.... *Oops*

Subsequently, Saturday morning was a bit of a write-off, but we woke up and got ready and went to the Borough High Street markets again (went for a bit longer this time, and picked up some fresh fruit and vege's - they're heaps better than the ones that you buy at Tesco's...), and we met up with Tory there, and she ended up coming back to our place afterwards and we were meant to be going to a bbq at a friend of her's place up at Willesden Green (right near Trav's place actually), but we ended up helping her out with her Resumé, so by the time we were finished with that it was about 9:30pm and we couldn't be bothered any more, so we rented a movie and stayed home.

Woke up early-ish on Sunday and spoke to the family on the phone for a while, then we headed off to High Street Kensington to get a couple of things then we jumped on the tube and headed across to the other side of London to go to the Spitalfields markets (which is right near Nikki's work) - they are exceptionally cool - quite bohemian and you can get some excellent stuff there - it's not particularly cheap though, but is good.

Damo had a phone interview on Friday and got a call-back on Monday saying that they want to meet with him on Wednesday afternoon, so that was pretty good news.

Things have been interesting over here with all of the UK going to the critical terror alert recently. Thankfully, they caught the pricks, and also thankfully, we haven't had enough money to go anywhere!!!!! Damo read on BBC news that they had lost 10,000 bags in all of the chaos, and apparently there was pretty much looting going on at Heathrow....

We've both been paid (our first UK pay - WOOHOO!!!!) recently, so that's a bit of a breakthrough! I think we're meant to be planning our first trip abroad very soon, and the most likely destination is going to be France. Oui Oui, Merci and all that!

Damo went to a pub the other night with some work mates to a place called the Willow Walk near his work, and had a few quiet drinks and found a very cheap place to get some very decent grub. No doubt we'll be back there at some stage.

Nikki went over to Tory's house on this night and caught up with her - she'd had some dramas getting back here from Australia as she was on a flight in the middle of all the security crap that was going on, was sick, and I think she wanted someone friendly to talk to, so Nikki went over there and looked after her. This is Tory (obviously the one in pink at the front):



Forgot to mention that this photo above was taken on our first weekend in the UK - we went down to Brighton to check it out and hang out on the beach (or rocks).....



and



We'd heard from a bloke at the 3 Kings the other night that we picked a pretty difficult time to try and get work because every one goes on holidays when the weather is good, so you never hear back about jobs and stuff, and he said he was surprised that work turned up as quick as it did. Ah well - guess that was good news....

Nikki got stuck on a tube this morning - she was in between stations, and was stuck there for about 45 mins - it was absolutely mortifying, because she's a little claustrophobic, and after a while with no ventilation the air started getting very hot and stuffy, and then the driver announced that they were going to evacuate the train, but nothing happened for 15 mins - absolutely horrible! Bloody tube! Not far from here....



Damo went to Buckingham Palace at lunch time today - his work pretty much almost backs onto it, so he went and watched the Beefeaters standing there for a while. Would've taken a photo, but didn't have a camera with him. Funnily enough, we didn't even get a piccie of Buckingham palace from when we went there on Tory's Tours either! Damo will have to slip over there one lunch time and get some!!

And while that might all be nice, we're missing this already....


(Piccie taken at Coolangatta about a week before we left to come over here)

We've been invited to catch up with Trav and Nic tomorrow night (Friday), so that could be on the agenda for this weekend - not sure what else yet, but due to a big Friday night, last weekend was a bit wasted, and we're determined not to do that again!