Day 7

We woke up decently early and went up for breakfast in the lounge which was decent. After breakfast we walked around Hyde Park and it was pretty nice. We stumbled onto the well known Serpentine lake and some sort of winter carnival. We didn’t spend too much time in the park as we were on our way to Kensington where our next destination was the natural history museum. Here we saw a large dinosaur exhibit / a very detailed human body exhibit (much more detailed anatomy-wise than you’d see in the US) / a bug exhibit. We were slightly disappointed by the museum as a whole – it was free though so that helped.

After the museum we stopped for lunch on the way to Kensington Palace at this amazing pub / thai place - Churchill Arms. The menu had a lot of typical Thai dishes and they had 4 levels of spiciness – mild / spicy / hot / very hot. I chose a spicy and after eating my mouth was on fire – I finished my beer, Lora’s beer and the second we left the first stop was to buy a bottled water. Both of our dishes were excellent. We decided to skip the Palace while eating and instead went to the British Museum where the highlight was the Rosetta Stone. We also visited 2 amazing exhibits on money and clocks – these museums were a nice departure from the typical artsy museums we’d spent a lot of our time in Paris in.

This was all we could handle so we went back to the hotel to rest before New Year’s Eve. We didn’t have a solid plan but we had heard that the Soho area was a good place to go. Lora was worried we’d end up walking around aimlessly finding every place packed solid – I was more optimistic. We found a place rather quickly called the Three Greyhounds and settled in there. After a few minutes we commandeered a table but had no chairs - 30 minutes or so after that I wrestled away some stools and we were in for the long haul. At some point 2 British couples came over to our bar height table to rest their glasses and we struck up a conversation because one of the girl’s heels was broken (we later found out that the older lady and the younger guy were mother and son – we were shocked because she looked like she could have been his older sister – she aged well). One of the guys was using super glue to put it back together. I had to tell them to slow down when talking at times because even though it’s English here the accent threw me off a few times – Lora and I both love English accents. We talked and laughed for the next few hours there and then they asked us what our plan for new years was. We told that that we didn’t have much of a plan and were probably just going to stay there. They thankfully invited us to go out with them – about 15 minutes before midnight we left the bar and made our way to Trafalgar square where the fireworks could be seen. The crowd had to have been about equal to Times Square in NYC. We were unsuccessful in getting all the way to the square due to the crowds but we got close enough to see the fireworks anyways. At one point the entire crowd began to sway as if in some massive pushing contest. We left the masses for a nearby bar that played a mixture of 80s and 90s music – we were in heaven. I was beyond drunk at this point and Lora had switched to water before we left the first bar. I had now decided it was dancing time and for the next 1-2hrs Lora and I danced the night away – taking breaks every once in a while to chat with our new friends, refill our beers and play the slot machine in the corner. All in all it was an amazing way to bring in the New Year and we made some new friends at the same time. At about 2am we’d had our fill and decided to head back to the hotel. The trains were free all night but we had no idea where we were at this point so we asked the nearest police officer how we could get to the Underground. We made our way back and the trains weren’t nearly as packed as we had anticipated.

Happy New Years 2009!