London!

I had a perfect mini-break in London and the PP's sister was the perfect travelling companion. While people were sweating back in Austria, we enjoyed nice and moderately warm weather and only experienced two or three 5-minute intervals of drizzle. I probably should not mention this here for fear of you snatching away the last room next time I visit, but we stayed at a really nice and reasonably priced B&B near Victoria Station - the nicest hotel I've experienced in London. As the PP's sis had never been to London, we did some touristy stuff (Buckingham Palace, the Tower, St. Paul's cathedral, a boat trip to Greenwich...) and visited the better-known holy grails of shopping, such as my absolute all-time favourite, Liberty, and, of course, Harrods:

obligatory "anonymous shopper" photo

I did not buy anything at Harrod's, though and although MC has asked for a "haul post", my purchases aren't that exciting and mainly consist of clothes (from GAP, Uniqlo and the Burberry outlet), tea and tidbits from Paperchase, another of my favourite shops. If money had not been an issue, I would have bought half of Liberty's!

Apart from many sandwiches at Pret (I so wish they had a branch in Vienna!) I had traditional fish'n chips at Canteen in the lovely company of an old friend. I have to search my old posts to find out whether I've assigned her a blogname... don't think I have.

On Sunday, we explored Hyde Park, where this veiled lady feeding ducks caught my attention:

Speaking of parks - I once more got proof that a spot of rain does not keep the British from anything, least of all an impromptu park bench picnic:

I won't include any pictures of London sights here, you know what these look like, right? Sometimes what was going on in the vicinity of those sights was equally interesting anyway, such as a fashion shoot with Big Ben as a backdrop:

We saw dozens of identically sized elephants all across town (a nice change from the usual cows and bears I've seen so far) of which I liked those two best:

London is not a place where I'd want to live permanently, but it's the one city I get "homesick" for when I haven't been there for a while. And it definitely isn't the same with l'Italiana no longer living there.