France & England... for work... - Page 5

There be dragons here.

Nice colorful sky in the early morning.

You can kind of see Tower Bridge off in the distance, and the Shard to the right.

St Pauls. I like this photo, the stairs on angles in the foreground make it a bit interesting.

This is where cars are brought to justice.

St Pauls from front on, with the early morning sun that has already been in the sky for about 5 hours by now.

In the evening now, and despite still being in central London, here is a modern block of apartments. I had no idea such things existed. They have nice metal rails for birds to perch on.

One of the fancy sandwich / salad cafes where I had dinner recently is Pret a Manger, every now and then you see a special vegetarian only branch of the same store. Interesting idea, the only time I saw something similar was vege only Subway stores in India.

Regulations around car washes seem to be a bit lax in London, just some dudes with drums of chemicals running down the drain as they scrape grease and toxins off filthy vans. I looked up if I was spelling lax right, I am, its a relaxed way of saying relaxed.

This part of London could pass as an Australian city, modern taller buildings. Not enough trees to be Australia though. Actually not a single tree at all!

This is Liverpool street station, busy, free toilets!

Children have constructed this fish out of plastic bottles. Once the exhibition is over they will take it down to Dover and float it out to sea to see how far it goes before it disintegrates and becomes delicious sea plastic.

A Japanese / Chinese house has fallen onto this bridge!

London bridge, in the news today. It has a lot of pedestrian protecting furniture now. The crowd going across here is immense.

I was a bit closer to tower bridge in the afternoon than in the morning. It is further east than I remembered.

A very strange fountain. It looks like a used bit of filthy shade cloth floating in a puddle. But no, its cooper I think.

A Britishly pompous concert with roaring gaiety broke out. Featuring the Wizard of Oz theme complete with whistles and bells.

Now check out my healthy dinner, from yet another casual sit in restaurant chain! Vegetarian sushi / gyoza. Really nice. They have thoughtfully provided self serve GOCHUJANG, so I added Korean pepper sauce to vegetarian sushi.

Regents Park has a whole series of different areas, this is the formal area.

Here is more formal area, that dude up ahead is Japanese and I think he was talking to himself.

The non formal area is a large open grass area that you are allowed to walk on. It felt wrong to walk on grass after getting yelled at by commandos in Paris protecting the grass.

The boat pond. It was very bright this afternoon despite forecast of epic rain.

More pond. You can rent deck chairs by the hour, or buy a season ticket for 120 pounds! BARGAIN.

Blue green algae.

Queen Mary's rose garden. Apparently she still visits once a month to do an inspection.

Dinner was again healthy and vegetarian. The soup is a Thai lentil concoction, the salad is Mexican fiery something with sweet potato. I therefore ate Thaixican.

NON BINARY.

Tonights random street for no apparent reason.

Looks painful.

When you have no bins in your city, you have piles of bags. They make for a beautiful modern art installation on every corner.

This is a university. You are allowed in and can wander about without getting shot at.

And here is where you can line up and pay 5 pounds to appear in a spot where they filmed Harry Potter. Over 100,000 people a day do so, generating half a million pounds of revenue into J K Rowlings wizard empire per day (figures may be completely made up).

My walk from the tube station to the new stadium was a couple of kilometres, in the rain. Because why would a 62,000 person stadium need access to public transport? On my way I passed a shop cat. He was very sleepy.

Here is the stadium, unlike Australian stadiums at literally has houses attached. On all sides! Very weird.

I was baffled by the lack of room around the stadium.

I was early, so the cafe in the giant Sainsburys in the car park provided a spot to sit. Avocado on toast, 2 pounds! They do not grow avocados in England. We grow them in Australia, which must by why Avocado on toast costs more than a house deposit in Australia.

I broke various rules by taking this photo. The real grass soccer pitch is on wheels, and slides out of the stadium in three sections. Under it is a fake grass pitch for American Football games (NFL) of which they only play 2 a year. They constructed all of that for 2 games a year. The gantries over the pitch are heat / grow lights to help the grass grow.

Now we jump forward to the early evening, and this is in an area where 7 laneways meet at a pole that drunk people use to urinate on. I believe its called 7 dials.

Many pubs and shops in London are decorated with similar fake floral displays. This guy is phoning the royal sunflower appreciation association to report a licensing breach.

Inside the multi level Harry Potter store. Everyone is taking selfies with huge selfie pole stick things. I take a discrete photo without getting in the way of anyone and of course, some dork in a wizard costume that works there tells me in ye olde English 'pardon me fine sir, but cameras are not permitted in our magical establishment', to which I retorted, 'fine, then watch me disappear'.

Heres some Chinatown, its just like it was ten years ago but now has bubble tea.

More Chinatown, theres also a huge number of betting shops and a pizza shop.

The horror! The horror....!!!! Everything is orange and deep fried.

They still give out these free horrifically bad for the environment advertising newspapers at every train station in London.

The busiest part of town. Leicester Square, with its German cuckoo clock liberated from the Nazis of Switzerland.

Now for some photos of the M&M's store. I still dont understand it.

More M&M's.

Another busy part of town at Piccadilly Circus. Everything is a circus.

Random shot of grey identical uninviting buildings with big red buses. One of the red buses is green.

My dinner tonight was back to Leon, my favorite chain in London. Tonight I had Moroccan meatballs with rice and salad. Very nice. Right now I am eating my usual kilo of fruit salad. I dont know what to do tomorrow, I suspect it will be raining. Might be museum day. I am not paying $170 to take a train somewhere so I can stand in the rain and wait to come back again.