London 7-10/9

While waiting for someone to buy the van, we have tried to get out and about a bit in the last few days. We spent Sunday afternoon exploring our local neighbourhood in Fulham, we had dinner at a gourmet burger bar on the high street before catching a movie at the local theatre. We saw 500 Days of Summer, which was quite funny with a great soundtrack. I gave it 6.5/10 as did Kirsten. On Monday we headed into central London to Trafalgar square and the National Gallery. We spent a number of hours there, it’s an excellent collection and considering it is free to get in they have some amazing artists displayed there: Turner, Van Gogh and Renoir to name a few. We had a good feed at the UK chain Pizza Express, something else we wanted to cross off our list and it was lovely. On Tuesday we had another day in central london, starting with an obstetricians appointment, we are happy to report that everything is going well with the pregnancy and that Kirsten and the baby are in great health. We have also been given the okay to fly for the rest of our trip so that is a great relief. We went out and had lunch in Regents Park where a whole heap of people were out enjoying the sunshine. Next up we headed near to Soho to pass some time before going out to dinner. I continued my sampling of UK ales, and had a Doombar Ale (from Cornwall) in a local pub. While walking around we came across a 1960’s fashion photographer’s showcase at small gallery (featuring amazing shots of Twiggy, Marianne Faithful, Jean Shrimpton to name a few). The photographer was on hand to answer any questions, we had a brief chat about film over digital while perusing all the photos. Sadly everything was priced beyond what we could afford but we were both glad we’d ducked in to have a look. We had a resrvation for dinner at Murano, a restaurant in the Gordon Ramsay stable. The decor was quite understated and posh which made the selection of a huge lighting centrepiece near the middle of the restaurant a little unusual. No such hesitations on the service or the menu though, everything was absolutely fantastic. We had three courses with some lovely wines to match, it was a great experience. We saw Gordon himself cutting through the restaurant so it must have been his protege Angela Hartnett doing the cooking that night. My main, grilled Halibut was fantastic and all the little extras we were given and the lovely mix of food was well worth it. It was really quiet in the restaurant and even though we had dressed in our nice duds we felt a bit out of place. I suppose we are used to the rowdiness of the local pub. We finally sold our van a day and a bit before we were due to fly, so we were able to have a celebration/catch up dinner with our good friend Nikki at our temporary local, the Fulham Mitre. The van sale also left us free to head back into London on Thursday where we did a bit of shopping and sightseeing amongst the crowds on Regent Street, Carnaby Street and Soho. That night we had a quiet night and packed for our early flight on Friday morning.