Heatwave

Wow, it's been a busy few weeks since we arrived, and it's all taken place in the blistering heat and hideous humidity of London's record heatwave. Temperatures outdoors have been in the high 30s and the subways have been even worse, pushing upwards of 45 degrees. Believe you me, it is not the best experience to travel to job interviews in a suit, on a crowded subway carriage, in this sauna-like miasma. Yuck!

Nonetheless, we are determined to try and enjoy the heat as we know it will be all too brief, with an interminable winter to come. However, we spent the last week in a crappy little hostel room with no air conditioning and a broken fridge. We bought a fan from Sainbury's, and in order to get any rest at night we were having to sleep under wet towels. It's one thing to spend a day in the sun when you know you can cool off at home - quite another when your home is hotter than the air outside!

We've now been on three of the famous "London Walks" - guided walking tours with different themes. The first two were less spectacular than advertised, but the most recent was quite interesting:

Darkest Victorian London - a pretty good guide who does nice impersonations, but there's little to see as the city has moved on so much since then. Most interesting was the concrete builder's yard that hides a plague & pauper's burial pit with over 15,000 corpses.

The British Museum Walk - not a bad overview of the British Museum's highlights, but hampered by the massive crowd that turned up and the 'summary' nature of the information provided. Better to just see the museum for one's self, as everything is written up in detail. It was a nice surprise to find many of the 'missing pieces' from our travels here, including a large collection of the frieze decorations from the Parthenon - not to mention the Middenhall Treasure from the Roald Dahl story with the same name.

Eccentric London - quite interesting. Learn the background to a random assortment of monuments and statues around Embankment. Many good stories, but funnily enough, none are those described in the pamphlet...

In other news, we also spent a day at the Tower of London with Connor, went shopping for work clothes, celebrated Anna and Andrew's birthdays with a nice big combined evening at the pub, and did another pub walk with Ian, Nerida and Alison through Spitalfields. Also, congratulations to Anna on finding a job!

Here's an extra picture of us with Alisha at Anna's birthday drinks...