Monday morning finds me waking up in Hanwell, West London. 

Less than twenty-four hours before, my darling French host Sophie had very kindly driven me from her home in Saint-Aignan to the tiny airport in Tours.  Tours airport is so small that there is only one flight in and one flight out per day.  We were the first members of the public to arrive that morning, and the young lady running the café asked if we might wait outside for a few more minutes while she finished the vacuuming because it would be noisy.  So cute.

I had no trouble finding my gate.  There were only two, side by side.  Most of the people on the flight seemed to be from the UK, and the strangest part of it all was being surrounded by people with English accents.  I realised how accustomed I had become to hearing French being spoken, or English with a French accent.

The final part of my trip is here in the UK with a dear London-born Kiwi friend, who has returned to visit family.  Excitingly, our trips to Europe have coincided and we are spending eleven days together before both returning to New Zealand.

I am staying with my friend in her childhood home, the home she was born in, and it is bonkers to walk around the streets and catch buses and trains with her as she points out the places of her past.  And because she does return “home” fairly regularly, these places are still very much a part of her life.

Since arriving on Monday, the days have flown by in a Monopoly board whirlwind, catching buses named E1 and E11 and trains/The Tube/The Underground (still working out which is which) that travel on different coloured lines – some connecting, some not.  Fortunately for me, I have the best English tour guide a girl could hope for and she had an action-packed itinerary planned for me.  Oh, the sights I have seen here already!

My tour guide thought she should start me off gently, so took me to a south-west area of London called Richmond.  The streets were lined with beautiful old buildings and bustling with people.

“It’s a Monday.” I said to her.  “Why is it so busy?” 

“Well, first off” she replied, “there are nine million people in London alone, whereas New Zealand’s whole population is only five million.  And secondly, this ain’t busy love.”

We ate our lunch on the bank on the Thames River, and I had my photo taken next to a statue of Virginia Woolf.

There were black London taxi cabs and red telephone boxes, old English pubs with funny names and flowering baskets, and the weather even became overcast and rainy (seems you are right, Clivey.)

Richmond was just a warm-up for the following three London Days.  As we got off the train at St Paul’s Underground Station on London Day Number One, I was told to brace myself.

London was busy and full.   People walking quickly, buses, taxi cabs, bicycles and spandangled tourist-seeking tricycles, all heading somewhere with determination.

But the most remarkable thing to me was how close all the famous sights were.  Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Tate Modern Gallery, the Shakespeare Globe Theatre and the London Eye – all seemingly round the corner from each other.

We spent a special couple of hours visiting Saint Paul’s Cathedral.  I’ve visited several cathedrals during my time in France, but Saint Paul’s is the biggest so far.  It was breathtaking and quite an experience to stand in a place where so many famous events have taken place.

Five hundred and twenty-eight steps up a narrow winding staircase led us to marvelous views over all of London.  The ascent wasn’t too bad, but the descent left me feeling quite wobbly!  Nothing that a coffee and pastry couldn’t fix though.

A walk through more streets lined with beautiful old buildings and a stop at another very English pub.  Then it was off for a saunter through Harrods Department Store.  Oh my hat!  (And my hat was not purchased from Harrods; I can tell you that much!)  I felt very much out of place, particularly as my mouth is relatively normal looking, whereas to blend in at Harrods I would need to possess an over-sized Botox pout and false eyelashes to match the lips.  Plus, my face may be starting to sag a little but at least it doesn’t look like it’s made of plastic.  Is that too nasty?  My apologies.

London Day Two included buses, trains, shops, a trip to Covent Gardens, dinner with a dear friend of my Dear Friend at another pub and finished with the Moulin Rouge show at Piccadilly Theatre in the West End, which was spectacular. On the way to the theatre, we passed through Leicester Square, where the premiere of the new Downton Abbey film was being screened. The area was blocked off but we could see a big screen showing the Downton stars being interviewed outside. If it wasn’t so uncool to say that it was cool, I would tell you that it was indeed pretty cool.

Lest I felt that Moulin Rouge and a dab of Downton weren’t colourful enough, London Day Three brought colour and culture in every shade and from every angle.  Mind you, even just a simple walk through a London train station brings a ton of that too.

The colours of the houses in Notting Hill were just as I’d imagined.  Pinks, purples, yellows and blues; all with contrasting doors and lots of white trim.  I hadn’t known about all the shops though; they spilled out onto the foothpaths in market-like stalls.  I loved the Bohemian vibe of the goods they were selling, and the atmosphere was busy and buzzy.

We lunched at Mercato Metropolitano Mayfair – a huge, bustling food court located in an incredible building which was formerly St Mark’s Church.  It was quite sad to know that it was no longer functioning as a church, but at the same time it was a beautiful place in which to dine, and I loved my first experience of a mango lassi.  Delish!

My UK Top Tour Guide had surprised me the day before by telling me our third London Day would include seeing the principal actress of West End’s Evita stand on the balcony of the Palladium Theatre and sing to the public below.  In my ignorance, I had presumed it was to be a crowd-pleasing extra; maybe some kind thing that the star did before the show itself, which I imagined would be later that evening.  This would have been exciting enough.  It was only as we were waiting in the crowd below the Palladium Theatre balcony that I began to understand this was to be performed as part of the actual show.  My Guide explained that the balcony performance would be filmed and shown in real time on a screen for the theatre audience to view.  Evita would be instructing the people of Argentina not to cry for her, and we, the people looking up from the street below, were to be her people.  It was wonderful.  She was wonderful.   The costume, music and song – all wonderful.

I was still on a high as the crowd began to disperse, but there was no time to rest as Liberty London, another famous department store, was just a few metres away.  My dear French Sophie had said she loved Liberty and would I please make sure to pay it a visit, so off we went.  For some reason I had expected a Bath and Beyond type store, but it was far more than that.  The prices may have been on the high side (I’d seen a nice mug that I thought was priced quite reasonably at four pounds something, until I put my reading glasses on for a closer look and realised the actual price was forty-four pounds something…) but the whole store had such a creative vibe, with gorgeous old wooden floors, wonderful staircases and walls covered with ornate wallpaper in beautiful shades.  The goods on display were extremely lovely but somehow not pretentious (well, maybe the large Christmas reindeer and bear both with moving heads and carrying price tags of nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds each, may have been a little on the pretentious side pricewise, but they themselves looked very kind and friendly indeed).

The next port of call was a blues bar.  Yes, I know.  It’s just as well I eat my English Weetabix each morning. These London Days are not for the faint-hearted! ‘Ain’t Nothing But The Blues Bar’ is a long narrow building in a long line of other old buildings (nearly everything is gorgeously old around here).  The lighting inside was dim and moody and the clientele was a mix of grungy, tattooed youngsters and sensibly-clad oldies.  It’s my favourite kind of place.  As we approached, my guide was telling me about the band she’d last heard playing there, which was mostly made up of really old-looking peps including a lady who looked like she could be your nan.  And what do you know?  The very same band were playing that evening. 

They were so good.  I could have stayed for hours but it was time to start making our way back to Hanwell.

Our very varied day was rounded off by a Tube ride to Ealing Broadway where we picked up a Tesco’s microwave meal for two, which we then took home on the bus and ate in front of the telly.  Perfect!