Gigantic Gherkin and Glorious Greenwich

So I succumbed to the peer pressure and signed up for facebook. for those of you who don't know, facebook is a social networking site similar to myspace, except more professional looking. anyway, I found that my good friend Ed is living in London with his wife. this was about a week and a bit ago and since then we've had a couple of dinners together, played about 5hrs of network computer games together and generally had a ball catching up. Last Tuesday, to celebrate a new contract that he got after nearly 2 months of unemployment we went out to dinner with his sister in law and two of his previous work's colleagues:



So we all got together again this weekend and went first to the Gherkin in the city and then to Greenwich. A lot of famous buildings in the city and around London were having an open day (happens a couple of times a year) so we planned to see the Gherkin, but when we got there we found out that we had to buy tickets online and that they were all sold out anyway. so we consoled ourselves by having coffee and taking artsy photographs of the building.

Afterwards we took the DLR to Greenwich and went to the markets there and then to the observatory. Very cool really.

Here's an slide show of the Gherkin shots and also the photos that we took of the city and around the observatory. All these photos are high quality so you can click on the box below and it will take you to the photo so you can download it and print it out if you want to :-). as with the previous ones, click play to start it and you can pause and move back and forth between the photos at your leisure.

View Album

Get your own

if all you see above is some white space - we've been having some problems getting the slideshow to display so click here and it should take you to the website where you can view the slideshow.

Also today, while we were walking from the Gherkin to the tube station, literally hundreds of Harley Davidson's drove past with a police escort. in the middle of the formation was a hearse. it was a funeral procession for a Hells Angels bikie gang member who was murdered on the M25 a few weeks ago. it was quite an amazing thing (and noisy). the line was hundreds of meters long and 2-3 bikes wide. the police cordoned off side streets as they went past. We've never seen anything like it before.

Ed has also introduced us to a very nice Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. the dumplings they hand make are absolutely delicious. we've been there twice now. Ed has also taught us how to make fish ball/dumpling/wonton noodle soup. it's very easy really. we're even going to try making our own dumplings!

Last night we also went to see a stand up comedy routine with Ed and his sister in law (his wife Di is in Australia for a friend's wedding). It was Debbie and my first stand up comedy club that we'd ever been to. it was pretty funny, but also very rude at certain points so we actually left at the halfway point. Ed said that it definitely wasn't the best he'd been to. We were all kind of apprehensive that, being Australian, we'd be picked on, but it was ok; there was a bunch of Americans in the first row ;-) it was funny, he asked everyone where they came from and people generally said "Australia", "Scotland" etc. but the Americans said "Florida" or "California" rather than their country, assuming that everyone knows that those places are in the USA. it's funny..... guess you had to be there..... many "americans think they own the world" jokes followed.

also that night we went to an ice cream place that specialised in making deserts out of ice cream that looked like main courses. we unfortunately didn't have our camera with us at the time, but basically we ordered a spaghetti bolognaise made out of ice cream! yum yum!