The London Eye and other adventures

We've had a lovely Bank Holiday Weekend with a visit from a friend for a couple of days. Yesterday we set out to see the last day of the Tate Modern exhibition, Global Cities. She's a geographer, so it was particularly relevant and we both took lots of photos. Had a refreshing watermelon and ginger juice. Quite a hot day - nice, but I wish I had worn a dress!

On the way to the Tate we had visiting a very interesting to a small glass monument that we hadn't seen before. It was part of a Geocaching challenge. This was my introduction to geocaching, and although it was a virtual cache rather than an actual one with a box or something, it was great fun. Geocaching is a bit like a technical treasure hunt, where someone hides something then you have to find it. There are objects hidden all over the world. We were going to try and find some more but decided we didn't have time. Will look forward to doing more next time though!

As always, it was nice to walk along the south bank, past the street entertainers, hot dog vendors and a carousel tomake our way to our main destination - the London Eye. We got our tickets, and it did not take long to make our way along the queue to the pods. Stepping onto the moving pod was the first challenge, but we managed and them began our ascent. It was great! At first I mostly took pictures looking up into the sky at the other pods, but as we moved further up it was great to see the London skyline appearing and then the rooves of London. We took lots of photos, and wandered around the pod, simply loving being up in the air, taking photos of each other with clouds behind us, or looking down at the buildings beneath us. The sun began to set and I took some fuzzy photos of the sun. It was a lovely half an hour. (The only slightly annoying thing was when we were about to have our photo taken in the pod, a lady in a wheelchair spoke to me and I turned slightly, just when the photo was taken. However, it's a great photo of H, it looks like it's his photo, he is hosting us in his pod!)

We then made our way to the Palace of Westminster (in order to find another cache, but, alas, we didn't make it), and enjoyed the views of the now lit up Houses of Parliament and the London Eye. Then we got on the tube to Angel, and visited Sedir, fast becoming one of our favourite London restaurants. I had taramasalata and bread - yum! - followed by Islim (marinated lamb wrapped in aubergine with tomatoes), which came with rice. Yum yum! Then baklava and ice cream for pudding! Mmmmmmm! H had chicken livers (delicious) followed by lamb cutlets, rice and salad, then chocolate cake (the only let down - probably because it's not traditionally Turkish! I think H had been bouyed up by that delicious hot choc fudge cake we'd had in Scotland ...). Our friend had prawns - huge in what she said was a tasty dressing - followed by grilled lamb, rice and salad, then baklava. She said she couldn't think of the last time she'd had a meal in which every course was good, with no let downs or complaints. She even had the Turkish coffee. The waiters were very friendly too, joking especially with H when he didn't finish his three huge lamb cutlets, that the dishwasher man was huge and wouldn't be too happy! He also read our friend's fortune in the sludge in the bottom of her coffee cup, and said that she will be rich with five husbands and twelve children!

All in all, a great day out.

Today we visited the Notting Hill Carnival. Unfortunately my friend and I had to leave a little early, but H stayed on and I'm looking forward to seeing his photos!