London II

Three trips in three weekends. Last up is London. Since my folks were leaving from London, they headed down there for their last few days, and we met up with them on the weekend.

We caught our favorite 7:45 am train out of Nottingham and got to the hotel around 10 am to drop off our stuff.

First stop, London Borough Market, one of the largest and oldest food markets in London. I'm going to have to stop there every time we go to London from now on just to try all the food I saw.

There was a gorgeous nursery called The Gated Garden...

Bread for days...

Very descriptive store names..

Old signs...

 And desserts everywhere you looked...

Yes, I did buy one of those meringues and it was delicious and I wished I had bought eight more.
There wasn't much space to stand and eat all the food available, but there was this open area with some surfaces to put your plates (multiple).

It's where we ate this...

Which was absolutely amazing. Chicken laksa and we also had some salt and pepper squid - so good. But like I said, so much looked really tempting. I fully intend to come back several times. And buy a meringue each and every time.

After we ate, we headed to the Imperial War Museum. My parents hadn't been, and Lyle and I needed to do WWII.

Street art along the way

The WWII exhibit wasn't nearly as good as WWI, disappointingly. But still plenty interesting, and the Holocaust exhibit (which was separate) was quite good. And awful, of course.

For dinner we ate at Punjab, a North Indian restaurant in Covent Garden. We ate there three years ago, the last time we were all in London together. It was as good as we remembered!

No one beats London when it comes to flowered store/bar fronts.

Right?

The next day we had to catch a 2 pm train back to Nottingham. We ate breakfast across from the hotel (which we were briefly trapped in when the power went out and the ground floor exit doors from the stairwell were locked), and then took a walk to Hyde Park to find Peter Pan.

Along the way we saw the Princess Diana Memorial Garden.

And the upside-down tree, which is actually a weeping beech and the branches naturally grow downward, creating a lovely little tree hiding spot. Sorry I didn't take a picture of the outside, but this is inside the tree.

Finally we found Peter Pan, with all his rabbit and mermaid friends.

Then we went back to the hotel to get our bags and headed out to the British Library, which is right next to the St. Pancras Railway Station.

I'd been wanting to go there for awhile, but we only had time to walk in and take a quick look around before grabbing some food in the cafe and heading to our train. My parents stayed and walked through the permanent exhibit and also did a tour, and they said it was worth it. So we'll be doing that when we go back as well.

Look at all those books! My parents learned those are movable stacks, so all of those books are accessible (if you have a good enough reason).

That was our second trip to London. We did some new things, and I added plenty to do for our next few trips. Looking forward to going back!