Homeward Bound

5 June

By Tuesday, 5 June, our holiday had essentially come to an end. We were due to return to London for one last night before getting on a plane to go home. We had a relatively early train, so we checked out at breakfast and went straight to the train station. Brugge train station is very easy to navigate and so we found our train without any problems.

From Brugge we took the train back to Brussels, where we arrived about fifty minutes before our Eurostar train back to London was due to depart. We went straight to border control because we knew it would take time as we were leaving the schengen zone (a group of European countries who allow free travel between borders - border control only applies when you are leaving the zone and entering a country not in the zone. Every country we visited was in the schengen zone, except the UK). We had a pretty long queue to wait in, but the staff were efficient and after asking a few brief questions about our travels (how long have you been in Europe, why are you going to London, where are you going after that) we were through. Then we had to queue to get up the escalators to the train platform, and after a bit of a mix-up about where we were sitting (the train came in the opposite direction to what was expected, so our carriage was down the other end of the platform) we were on the train. The people in our carriage took a long time to be seated, so a lot of us were stuck standing for the first ten to fifteen minutes of the trip while people messed around with luggage and seats.

The train ride was fairly uneventful and we arrived in London at about 12, realising after a text message from a friend in London (Sean, who we had met in Rome) that we were arriving just in time for the final festivities of the Queen's Jubilee weekend. If we'd had nothing else to do we would have been able to make it to somewhere along the procession route to see the royal family, however we had to get to Greenwich and check in to our hotel. By the time we recharged our Oyster cards which we'd kept from the last time we were in London, got the train out to Greenwich and checked into our hotel, we decided it was probably too late to get a good place to see the procession. So we just watched it on our TV in the hotel room!

For our last night we had chosen somewhere a bit flasher to stay - a 4 star hotel in Greenwich (which we still got a decent price on through a third party booking website). It was possibly the most comfortable bed we had the whole trip! Unfortunately I had booked it when we thought our flight the next day was leaving at 1pm, so would have plenty of time to get to the airport. However due to Michelle's scenario, we discovered it had been moved to 9:45am, so we would have to leave early to get to the airport on time. If I'd known it was an earlier flight I would have booked a hotel at the airport!

That night we met up with Sean for dinner. He took us to an english pub near Trafalgar Square which served cheap but yummy meals. Again, we stayed up late chatting for hours, but not as late as we had in Rome as Sean had to work the next day and we had to be up early for a flight and hadn't finished packing yet!

The next morning we were up early to head to the airport. The previous afternoon we'd used an online journey planner to figure out what trains we had to take to be at the airport by 8:45, an hour before our flight was due to leave. Nothing we had told us how early we had to be there, but if we were going to get there much earlier we would have had to wake up at 5! In hindsight we should have allowed more than an hour, but we'd only needed an hour when leaving Australia so I didn't think it would be any different flying out of England.

But of course, did our train get us to the airport by 8:45 as the journey planner said it would? No, it was slow, and only got us there minutes before 9. And then of course we realised that the trains come in to the South Terminal, and Vietnam Airlines operates out of the North Terminal, so we have to catch the light rail to the North Terminal. Fortunately we got to the platform about a minute before the next train came in so we didn't lose too much time doing that. We got to our check-in counter 40 minutes before the flight was due to leave, and of course it was a mad rush - check in had technically closed, so the airline staff rushed our check-in, gave us priority passes and directed us to take our baggage round to the oversized luggage drop-off to be fast-tracked to the gate. Our priority pass got us straight to security where there were only about two other people going through and we arrived at our gate just as they were commencing boarding.

London

Well we are nearly at the end of our time in London! Our days have been pretty packed which means at the end of each day we've been getting back to our room exhausted and pretty much gone straight to bed, which explains my lack of blogging so far. That and the dodgy wi-fi in our room.
On Sunday (our first full day in London) we decided to check out the Tower of London. This happened to coincide with the London marathon which meant our train in the morning was very full, but otherwise just meant we could hear the cheering all day.

André and I got into the Tower on a two for one deal via daysoutguide.org.uk (I think- can't really check at the moment because I'm posting from André's phone). Basically you just show your national rail ticket with the two for one print-out to get the discount. At 19 pounds each this was an excellent discount.

During our day at the tower we followed a Yeoman Warden's tour (we had Mark - very amusing fellow), had a tour of the tower itself, saw the crown jewels, and explored many of the other exhibits in the complex. I had no idea how large and elaborate it is.

 We spent most of the day there before heading to Tower Bridge in the late afternoon. Fortunately we had great weather all day seeing as a lot of the day was outdoors, except for a bit of drizzle between the tower and the bridge.

Monday was the Harry Potter Studio Tour. The day started a little stressful as we were running late for our ten o'clock timeslot, but it ended up not being a problem as they were happy to just let us in. I think the allocated timeslots are just to space out the arrivals and they don't really care if you arrive a bit late.

The tour was fantastic. Only the first little bit is guided, into the great hall (yes- the actual set they filmed on for ten years!), but after that it was all self paced.

We saw many of the original sets that they filmed on- the great hall, the Burrow's kitchen, the Gryffindor common room and boys' dormitory, Umbrige's Ministry office, and, among others, Diagon Alley! We also saw costumes (including multiples of one of Harry's costumes, in various states of destruction), and props.

The second half of the tour focused on the technical side of things - blueprints from the art department, prosthetics, animatronics and last but certainly not least, an enormous model of Hogwarts which you've possibly seen online. The pictures online don't give a good impression of the size. It must be about 4 or 5 meters tall and around 7 or 8 metres across.

It's the actual model they used for filming (reconstructed in that room!). We spent the entire day there, before having a pub dinner that night.
Yesterday was sightseeing- Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace (we really just watched each set of guards march down the streets to get a closeup view, rather than get half a view of the changing among hundreds of other people outside the gates), Covent garden markets, and had fish and chips at a cafe in Hyde Park for tea (where we watched squirrels!

Today was very rainy so fortunately we had planned to spend the day in museums. Most of the day was at the British Museum, then later in the afternoon we saw the exhibits at the British library. Now we are off to find some dinner- it's 8 o'clock and would still be broad daylight except it's still very overcast. Hopefully it won't be so long before I can update again!

Below:  our  room in London and  André's  coq au vin  that he had for dinner in London one night.

A Long Trip

Well we have arrived safely in London! After about 32 very long hours, including an 8 hour stopover in Ho Chi Minh City Airport, we landed at London's Gatwick airport at 7 this morning.
It first started with Michelle's flight from Canberra being delayed by two hours. This meant she got to the international airport ten minutes before our flight out of Australia boarded. Fortunately the Qantas staff member who checked André and me in was very helpful and got Michelle checked in as soon as she arrived. (Our Vietnam Airlines flight was code sharing with Qantas and Michelle's flight was also with Qantas).
This then set us off on our nine hour flight to Vietnam. They fed us two hot meals, each meal consisting of the warm dish, a bread roll, a salad, a dessert, a drink, tea or coffee and wine. The seats were not terribly comfortable when upright but when reclined were fine. The lady who checked us in arranged  our seats so that we had four seats between the three of us which was great. Michelle and I were able to snooze a little and watched some movies (Abduction and Puss in Boots).
After eight hours in Ho Chi Minh City airport, we left on our next flight at midnight. Again Vietnam Airlines gave us a warm meal before we spent the next ten hours attempting to sleep. I think I may have got about six hours total. Breakfast was yoghurt, fruit, bread roll with jam, cold meats with salad, juice and tea or coffee.
Overall I was pretty happy with the service on our flights. The interior of the planes was a little shabby, with some non-vital items duct-taped together. But the food was good, the staff were friendly, the flights ran on time, and the seats were reasonably comfy.
Once our plane landed, we got through passport control, collected our baggage and got the train into London it was about half past nine. We found our hotel with no problems (two minutes walk from King's Cross Station) and were able to drop off our bags even though we were too early to check in. So we took a train into the city and spent a few hours looking through St Paul's Cathedral. There are a lot of steps to the top of that dome! We then found a coffee shop for lunch and headed back to our hotel to check in (but not before spotting two squirrels in the park!) So now we are in our hotel planning for tomorrow and taking much needed showers!