So next is... LondON

Did you know that the mayor of London's (or is that the Mayor of London Transport?) slogan is LondON? How lame is that? One of the biggest cities in the world and that's what they come up with! I mean, you would kind of expect it from HamiltON, but LondON? Honestly, who throws a shoe?

Anyway, the day after the wedding I flew from Eindhoven in Holland to Stansted in London. I apologize for the lack of photos - I left my camera with Adrian in Holland. I will put some other random photos at the bottom though. I took the express bus to Golders Green (Stansted is quite far away from the city centre - the bus took an hour) where the lovely Sandy (my uncle Steve's partner) picked me up and delivered me to Grandpa and Grandma's, where I was to stay for 4 nights. I have to say, I felt a strange sense of patriotism once I was on British soil, almost like I was 'coming home' in some way. It was quite surreal. My only explanation is that I have adopted some of that feeling from my Mum, and how she must feel when she goes back.

Anyway, it was lovely seeing my grandparents. They are both amazingly well - Grandma is 91 and I think Grandpa is 87 (? - correct me if I'm wrong Mum). Grandma is quite slow and can't stand or walk for long so Grandpa does all the cooking and cleaning and helps Grandma upstairs at night. She has lost a lot of short-term memory, but still has her sense of humour, and mocks herself for forgetting things. A short conversation in the front room while I was there:

Grandma: Doug, how many years have we been married?
Grandpa: 66 years now, my love. [again, Mum, correct me if I've remembered that wrong.]
Grandma: *contemplative pause* It's a bloody long time, that, isn't it?
Me: I've been married for 9 months, Grandma.
Grandma: Huh.

That's what they're like. They're so sweet. When I got there, I took a trip upstairs just to survey the rooms and breath in all the memories I had made there: the time Grandpa banged his head on the shelf when very drunk one New Year's Eve, listening to White Town's "Your Woman" with Anna on the portable stereo, saying goodnight to Dad and him quacking in response (yes, he went through a phase of quacking), sneaking into Grandma and Grandpa's bedroom to try out the exercycle they bought for Grandma, the stomach bug that made me spew all over the toilet floor, moaning about the lack of power in the shower head, watching squirrels out of the back bedroom window, waking up to snow and petrol fumes from the nearby motorway, waking up to Grandpa up a ladder banging at the piping with a hammer to loosen the frost. I smiled, inside and out: everything was exactly the same, and in such a good way.

So the next day I decided to explore with an all-day bus and tube pass. It makes it so much easier, because you can go the wrong way and not have a plan and then get back on the opposing tube/bus and go back to somewhere cool you saw along the way! Except I ended up in Berkeley Square, which is a really fancy finance district where all the cars parked on the road are German sedans/ powerful convertibles/ large jeep-style/ limosines. So I was surrounded by stressed businesspeople under umbrellas with a cellphone in one hand and a smoke in the other (how did they hold those umbrellas???), when I realised that I hadn't seen a bus stop in 40 minutes. After a slight panic that I was stuck in stressed-businesspeople-district forever, I saw a bus stop on the horizon.

I ended up getting lunch at about 3.15pm then ambled down to the Marble Arch tube station where I started my journey back.

Tune in for more LondON next time!
A crazy beetle we saw in Potsdam

Seems like a normal street sign? Look closer and check out how rural pig-farming Germans number their street (singular intentional).










This one's for you Nathan - check it out! This gives you the accepted tonnage for trucks and TANKS going over a bridge. Note that not only do they give tonnage for one tank, but for all those very frequent occasions where there are two tanks crossing a bridge at the same time in opposite directions, you can only have 4oT. Just so you know!

These are on most bridges around the place but some don't have those cool little icons.


















Adrian in the Saab convertible on the way to Osnabruck zoo
Me in my element in the children's petting area of Rheine zoo
the cutest kiss ever
swinging! In the playground at Rheine zoo

"Beware - Berts and Ernies in this area!"