Bludgy London day

After canning our plans for Plymouth this weekend because the weather looked like it was going to be nasty, we wound up with the most stunning summer day on Saturday (although apparently it was still horrible down in the south-west where Plymouth is so it's all good). Mark and I basically drank our way around London. We started with the most miraculous of all things - good coffee in London. Kudos to Mark for finding the place - this great tiny little place at Neal's Yard near Covent Garden. There were only 3 booths up the back of the place, but it had the best vibe - coffee sacks and pastries everywhere, and funnily enough it seemed to be run by Aussies! Don't you love that - the only good coffee we can find over here is made by Aussies... Here's a pic of me pretending to drink coffee and not laugh while Mark takes a photo of the place. :)

Then we kept on wandering, and after getting our first pastie this London trip (so amazingly good, although still not as good as yours Mum. Although the chain you buy them from is called "The Cornish Bakehouse", which Dad would be disgusted at.), we did a quick visit to Temple Church. This was the church they visited in The Da Vinci Code, when they were looking for "a knight interred" (it was a red herring - they should actually have been at Westminster Abbey). It was kind of funny - there were these amazing stained glass windows at one end, but the stone effigies that they look at in the Da Vinci Code are at the other end, so all of the tourists go to the other end and take photos of them. Here's a pic of what I thought was actually worth seeing - one of the windows. You can't see it properly because the camera (and potentially my photography) aren't good enough, but most windows seem to have quite big chunks of glass, whereas this one has so many little pieces it's almost a mosaic - the effect when you're there is amazing.

Then we wandered along the Thames and went to the Waterloo Bridge second-hand book market (I can't stay away from books - it's useless to try), and then went into a couple of the big old boats moored along the river, which are now restaurants and bars. We sat around and drank wine for a while floating up and down on the tide, then pub-crawled our way home - 'twas great! Edie, you'd be proud of us ;) And then just to top it off we went out for more drinks with some friends in Islington that night - that's a lot of drinking for one day!