London Like Lightning

     Well, our return to London was lightning fast - we only spent two nights there. We only went back because we had to pick up our brand new shiny credit cards. We arrived fairly late at night after the long trip from Glasgow and had to catch the tube several stations to get to our hostel, which was in the funky, multi-cultural area of Bayswater. We were staying in a mixed dorm because it was ridiculously cheap, and we figured for two nights, it didn't matter. The hostel was quite funky with London themed murals spray painted onto the walls, a fantastic DVD collection (well, it doesn't compare to Andrew's but whose does?) and cheap internet.

           We decided to have some fun with our one day in London, so we went and collected our credit cards (credit cards! real credit cards! scary!) nice and early, then we went wandering, mostly looking for presents for the multitude of Andrew's relatives who have birthdays in September and the coming months. We found the wonderful shop Octopus (a lot of their products come from this mob http://www.pylones-usa.com/indexpylones.php there's supposed to be a virtual tour but I can't find it)

           On the way back to the hostel, we followed Andrew's whim to visit Portobello Road. It wasn't a weekend so the market wasn't really there, but there were lots of funky little shops, selling antiques for the most part, but all sorts of weird and wonderful things. There was one strange bloke who yelled at us for going in his shop even though the door was wide open and there was no indication that the shop was closed.

           From there we went back to the hostel and started wrapping gifts, only to have Andrew realise that he'd left our niece Jade's present at Boo's place last time we were in London, so we had to organise go round there to pick it up. Fortunately, there was no problem with that (though it was a bit of a hassle for us) and we finished the day with dinner at a little Italian restaurant where the food was far too salty but the atmosphere was fantastic.

          We checked out of the hostel the following morning, posted the presents and a few other things back to Andrew's place and hopped aboard a coach to Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare Country!