Walks, art and tourist sites

Day two in London.......We started off the day with the Borough Markets = a gorgeous food market under a really big old train bridge. It was awesome! Lots of organic foods, amazing bright flowers,and fruit from all over Europe....And some of the most massive wheels of cheese ever! I couldn't help myself and bought tub of these bizarre clear berries - you could see right thru the skin and see the yellow seeds inside...Apparently they are called whitecurants...They had a strange flavour - very bitter like lemon...But really refreshing.

Ant spotted the stall that Jamie Oliver goes to when he gets strange types of mushrooms ( no I don't mean the magic type) they were awesome looking things, many looked more like toadstools, the type that your mother would tell you to stay away from.....There was some bizarre fungus amongus

we then walked thru old tunnels, along cobbled streets surrounded by fantastic old buildings, so beautiful....Walked down long the Thames to the globe theatre...A reconstruction of the Shakespeare one.....They rebuilt it without one nail or screw apparently......And its the only thatched building in London.....All this info was passed on to me by ant, our guide!

we then wa;lked to the Tate modern and chanced across an exhibition of the work of freida khalo....She is so amazing...I had only seen a small amount of her work before, but some of these paintings were absolutely amazing, so glad we came across it and it was well worth the money.....

this as followed with a beautiful lunch at an old pub in a gorgeous little old cobbled alleyway.....vego food is really easy to get over here too - all the stuff from the shops has suitable for vegetarians printed on stuff that's ok for us- so no reading fine print incidents! And its so easy to get vego food out as well.....Everything has been so yummy

anyway I digress

we then headed to big Ben - along with a million other tourists! I was totally stunned by the sheer size of it - how did they make stuff like that back in the old days? It and the house of parliament is really intricate and beautiful...And surrounded by ' bobbies' ! There was also a huge group of banners protesting the war in Iraq which was awesome to see

we then ducked into the Tate Britain to see my favorite painting of all time - 'the lady of shallot' by john William Waterhouse....It was such a great moment to sit in from of it - its totally massive...with a gigantic wide wooden gilded frame...We noticed details we had never seen and marveled at the huge brushstroke..I studied it for quite a while and we moved on


we then dragged our totally exhausted feet to the tube to head home.....But there was some signal failures, so the tubes were all stuffed up, and running late, so it was totally packed full.....Quite the experience!