We visited Harrods, earlier in the day. I've never been before and I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed not to be greeted by a butler as I entered the store. Instead, I was barked at by a gorilla posing as a security guard. He didn't like the look of my back pack. It's amazing the reaction I get when I carry a back pack. I've actually been chased by an over excited shop boy in Delhaize because he thought I was going to stuff it full of goods without paying. Personally, I think it's a bloody cheek, what makes a back pack wearer more likely to steal than someone carrying a large shopping bag? It's discrimination, pure and simple. In Harrods, a back pack is regarded as a weapon of mass destruction. I actually think that some of the drunk old rich women, tottering around the store, would be more dangerous than my back pack, but there you go...
Harrods is a strange place. It's half chique boutique and half Las Vegas casino without the slot machines. Last year, we stayed at the Luxor, in Vegas, and Harrods is like a down market Luxor! My fiancée tried to buy something in the HUGE cosmetics department and they didn't have any!
After leaving Harrods, we had a choice. Natural History Museum or Tower of London? We chose the Tower. When we bought our train tickets, the nice lady who served us, gave us a booklet with saving coupons in it and one of the savings was buy 1 ticket and get the other free for the Tower of London. That was a saving of £17! The booklet can be used until the end of September, so anyone going to London this summer should look out for it. The Tower was also closer to the Pie and Mash shop than the museum.
Anyone who finds themselves in the vicinity of the Tower can't help but notice the huge posters covering scaffold around parts of the building. The posters promote the Dress to Kill exhibition and it's well worth going to see. The exhibition shows off Henry VIII's armour and weapons and the some of the pieces on display are quite stunning. We gave the Crown Jewels a wee body swerve, the queue was of Disneyland proportions and we had both seen them before. One of the other 2 for 1 tickets we had was the Tower Bridge exhibition. The famous bridge is right next to the Tower of London so we hurried along to it before it closed.
The £7 entrance fee was a waste of money. For that you get to have your back pack go through an x- ray machine, your photo taken in a shameless money making operation and then a walk up to the top of a tower. At the top is an empty room with a screen which shows a 5 minute documentary. Once you have your breath back you can walk across to the other tower, which should have been exciting but...wasn't. In the second tower you get to watch another documentary and then walk back to the first tower and down! true, you get a nice view of London's skyline, but you get an equally nice view from ground level. We were too late to visit the room where the mechanism to raise the bridge is kept, it may have changed our minds about the place but we were very unimpressed with what we had seen. We left, glad we had only payed £7 and not £14.
One of the nicest and cheapest things to do in London is just go for a walk along the Thames path and just let the history of the place flood over you. Doesn't cost a penny!
Joggers!
I can't end this post without talking about the pedestrian equivalent of bike riders! Normally, I have no opinion about joggers but is it wise to try and jog amongst the thousands of tourists that walk the streets of London? Dodging in and out of people and occasionally bumping into me...them! No, I don't think it is. It can't be fun for them, it must really break their rhythm up and it's certainly no fun for the innocent walker having a strangers sweaty arm brush up against your own unsweaty arm?
We always have a great time in London, it's a fantastic place. A final word if you are thinking of going. When you go on the Underground be sure to take a newspaper with you as you will need one to leave either on the seat or the shelf behind the seat.