Day 23: Saturday 19 April 2014

Caught the Eurostar train from Lille to London this morning.  Its a great trip, you spend about 30 minutes travelling through the French countryside, about 30 minutes going through the tunnel under the English Channel and then about 30 minutes travelling through England to St Pancras station in London.  The train gets up to about 180 mph (and whatever that converts to in kph) but there is no great feeling of speed.  And of course your journey ends at a station in the middle of the city and not at an airport in the middle of nowhere.  High speed train Melbourne to Sydney anyone??

While I am talking about public transport.  Some of you may have heard of London's Oyster card, it is the equivalent of Melbourne's Myki card, with one small exception, it works!  In a transaction that took less than 2-3 minutes I bought my card for $5 from the man at the counter at the local station and had it loaded with $25 to use on either trains or buses.  (I don't have a pound symbol on my keyboard so I will use $ instead, & Andrew I know that the pound symbol is hidden away in the ASCI symbols somewhere but I can't be bothered looking for it).  Anyway back to the Oyster card, at the end of my time in London I take the card back to the station and get my $5 back plus the unused amount on the card, what could be simpler than that, and how much did we spend on Myki.  The other thing about the Oyster card is that they encourage people to use it quickly so that passengers move through the turnstiles quickly and efficiently.
  
Anyway, after checking into the Copthorn Tara Hotel, just off the Kensington High Street I decide it is time for the tradition pint of bitter and cod and chips for lunch, so off to The Goat pub. After two pints of London Pride and cod, chips and mushy peas for lunch I was ready for a bit of a walk.

Copthorn Tara Hotel - Kensington

This brings me to another early observation about London.  Walking along High Street, I heard hardly any English being spoken, I still could have been in a foreign country somewhere.  The barman who served me in The Goat was Sicilian, the staff at the Copthorn are either Asian or Eastern European.  Another pub I went into I was served by a young Pole.  A few years ago all the laboring and service jobs were being done by Poles, I get the impression now that it is Eastern Europeans that are doing this sort of work.

Deluxe Suite - Copthorn Tara Hotel

Squirrel in Hyde Park

Lady Di memorial fountain, Kensington Gardens

I ended up walking through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park and being a nice afternoon, although a bit coolish, on a bank holiday weekend there were lots of people around.  I ended up at Hyde Park corner where there are a number of TGW and WW2 memorials.  The combined Australian memorial for TGW and WW2 is there, it is very well done with a sweeping wall with the names of all the towns that Australians enlisted from, in both wars, etched on it.  Whilst I was there there was some maintenance work being done on it and some witches hats were in the way of a good photo.  Anyway,  the guy doing the maintenance offered to move the witches hats for me, turned out he was from Mitcham in Melbourne and had been in London for four or five years working on and maintaining the Australian memorial.  He was cleaning the memorial in preparation for the Anzac day services in London.  He was telling me that the Anzac day services in London have been getting bigger over the last few years with 3 - 4,000 attending the dawn service there last year.

Bomber Command memorial - Hyde Park Corner

Walked back to the hotel, past the Albert Hall and Albert memorial and had a couple of drinks in the hotel bar.  Cold and wet outdoors so had room service for dinner and a reasonably early night.