London trip - Sightseeing

Last week CJ was on another bsusiness trip (shock!), this time to London, and for the first time I was able to join him for the weekend and we turned it into a trip for both of us.
I am loving this being in charge of my own time thing... I am bummed that we were not able to o this kind of thing sooner. His trips were always falling on the beginning of each month when my busiest time at work was. And since his flght and at least part of accommodation would have been covered, this would have been a perfect way to see a lot of places. But we still have time to go on trips before we're tied up with the little one.

He came to London on Wednesday and I flew in late Thursday night. He was there for this huge worldwide trade competition called World Skills, I will come back to the details later.

While he was still working on Friday I went to check out the Museum of London at Docklands which fearures a really neat exhibition about the history of London with special emphasis on commerce, trade, transportation and development of the Docklands areas, from Roman settlement times through today. I spent good few hours going through all the different floors.

After CJ's work was done we checked into the hotel where we were spending the rest of the weekend and set out to walk around and see the sights. The hotel was very centrally located, right next to Hyde Park, and we could pretty much walk to everything within Westminster and Central London.

We watched the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace - it is only done every other day in the Fall and Winter so we were lucky it was scheduled for Saturday.

We followed the guards back to their Guard House and took more pics on the way...

Then we went to check out Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. It turned out it was a day of protests of all kinds. All along the road leading to the HoP and where Downing Street is (where the Prime Minister lives) bands of protesters for every cause imaginable gathered. We saw groups representing anything from angry Mothers to militant separatists, to anti-Afghanistan groups. There was police everywhere, side streets were literally lined by dozens of anti-riot police vans, cops in bright yellow vests were everywhere surrounding and separating each group. Crazy.

After that we walked to Trafalgar Square where more protests were taking place - just out luck I guess.


We walked through the National Gallery.

Then had lunch at a cool pub.

We also hit up Piccadilly Circus.

Both of us have been in London before and we have seen those places before, but I had to go take pictures for the blog right?...
As the last point of the day we decided to go see a movie. Getting a movie in English is next to impossible in GVA, plus stuff is SOOO expensive here. And CJ has been wanting to see the Rise of the Planet of the Apes for a while, so that's what we did.

Then on Sunday we went to check out the other Museum of London, this one next to St. Paul's cathedral, and more focused on the city itself and its significance throughout the ages. Really neat.

Then we walked to St. Pauls...

Then over to see the London Eye... we skipped the ride for this time as we were starting to run out of time.

And finally we headed back to the hotel to pack.

It was a really cool trip.