James managed to get the four of us, James, Helen, Abby and myself centre court tickets for Saturday. It was great to wake up to a bright sunny day after the weeks of overcast, rainy weather. Because of the previous bad weather, we were going to get to see both the Womans final between Venus Williams and Marion Bartoli as well as the mens semi final of Roger Federer vs Richard Gasquet on centre court.

Wimbledon really is a great venue, modern, spacious, well set out. This is the last year that the centre court will not have a retractable roof, so it was good to see it before that got placed ontop.

I was pretty amped to see the two matches as Federer and V.Williams are two of the top players in the world at the moment. So we trucked on up about 10:30 to see the mens semi - the first set was very close and a really good game, but Federer still managed to take it out. But with a little momentum he simple rolled over the French kid in straight sets after that. Final score: 7:5, 6:3, 6:4. I was starting to get a little sun burnt at this point, yes sun burn in the UK - it is possible! So we went down for some pimms in the sun and a bite to eat.

The womans final was always geared up to be a one horse race with Venus vs an unknown challenger. Venus really did have Bartolis measure from the go and the final score was 6:4, 6:1

This afternoon, Tom Kat and I meet up at Westminster Abbey to make our donation and discover another one of London’s main tourist attractions. No cameras allowed inside unfortunately, so you will have to go see it yourself if you really want a look. But it is pretty good, although I wouldn't go back.

It takes about an hour to stroll through the nocks and crannies investigating tomb stones, crypts, sarcophagus, etc. There was a lot of interesting stuff, none of which pops into my mind right now. My main interest was Isaac Newton’s spot after reading about it in the DiVinci Code. Again, not quite as the book nor the movie depicted it to be. If you’re on a tight time line in London, don't go, but if your not - its another must check off item. Afterwards, we simply got a quick bite to eat before meeting some friends for a drink at the local Camel bar.

Given my new amount of upcoming free time to do touristy things, on sunny Sunday Corde, Ela, Tracy and I drove across to Windsor Castle, the Queens preferred home. Ela, has only been driving for about a year was easily flustered so it made for an entertaining journey across central London. This is by far the most impressive castle I have seen in the UK. It is exceptionally well maintained and is obviously lived in and still used.

Unfortunately the Queen was out Sunday, and not available to entertain us. But we were well entertained with the free (well included in the entry price) portable audio guides which detailed the history, important features etc of the castle. What I didn’t realise was the fact I had picked up the kids version, and I still didn’t realised for about an hour into the tour when. Only when the guide started to play eye-spy and I was trying to compete with Corde to find the objects and he didn’t have a clue what I was on about. So little Tommy, on the audio guide was leading me astray.

After the castle tour, we trekked across Widsor town to Eden college, just to have a peak at where the other half learn the three R’s. bah – It’s just another college.

Upon returning from Wales on Sunday afternoon, and after a wee snooze, I left Aaron at home studying and headed up to stay with Caroline in Clapham. A relatively quiet Sunday night (it was a Bank Holiday on Monday), and we were all ready to go on Monday morning off to see the sights and sounds of the Notting Hill Carnival.

We picked up Nat and Shan on the way, and headed off to watch the parade. Some of the floats and costumes were awe-inspiring, some were average, but I've included a few photos of the better ones in the gallery. We had some Jerk chicken and Rum punch and wandered the street finding more parades, music, food, and dancing - a very cool atmosphere.

Rounded out the day with a BBQ at Nat and Shan's before heading home to mentally prepare for work the next day. I'm now even more inspired to go the Rio Carnival, but it's in Feb, so can't go next year - maybe 2007...

So as some of you may or may not know, Aaron's birthday wasn't that long ago (3rd April) and he's reached the big quarter century (ooh's and aah's from the crowd). Deciding it was something inspiring to celebrate, I sent an email out to everyone we know in England (OK, so it was like 10 people) expecting them all to come out and celebrate with us. In the end, there was me and Aaron, and Nat and Shan - but it didn't really matter.

We spent the afternoon at Madame Tussauds pretending we were in the same league as some celebrities, and generally having a good laugh. A few of the photos can be found here.

From there, we headed to Shepards Bush Walkie to meet Gerry (the guy in charge of organising 14(!) of us into getting to Monaco to see the F1 Grand Prix. Then to dinner at Wagamama's (a Japanese noodle bar).

All and all I think Aaron enjoyed his birthday, and thanks (from him) to those that sent cards, pressies and emails.

Countdown is on now til we head to Monaco (only 31 sleeps) and til Corde arrives (15 sleeps).

Have a great ANZAC day and hope to hear from anyone that cares soon...

We went to a live performance of Romeo and Juliet today at Shakespears Globe. It was very good, and managed to gain my full attention for 3 hours. For a Sunday matin'ee, it was surprising full. A full house in fact. So another touristy thing you couldn't do at home, ticked off the list.

A couple of the Wellingtonian girls we met on our castle trip, Amy and Caroline who live in Milton Keynes, came down to London for the weekend to check out the sights. They brought Amy's boyfriend, Aaron, with them so that made for a confusing evening.

We meet them at the London Eye at 5pm. They suggested it, but it is something we've been meaning to do for ages. After about 1/2 an hour in the cue (and our tickets were pre-booked), we made it to our pod with the 32 other people that would be taking our 'flight'. The 'flight' took about 45 mins, which was long enough to see the sights without getting bored.

Amy has the same SLR digital as Aaron, so they were both in their element swapping lenses and discussing settings. Think that Amy has decided she wants a zoomy lens like Aaron's for her birthday (on Tuesday if anyone's interested).

After that we headed to Covent Garden for dinner, then were going to go for a drink when it was suggested that we go see Trafalagar Square and a few of the other sights that the others hadn't seen.

We ended up checking out St Pauls, the Millenium Bridge and Shakespeare's Globe. Amy, Aaron and Caroline were off to Jamie Oliver's restaurant for lunch today, so we expect a full report sometime soon.

Just to make sure we weren't missing out on anything, we decided to follow the droves of Londoners that head to Brighton for the weekend for a bit of sunshine. The alterior motive was that one of Aaron's friends from school in Thailand, Helen, is living down there and they figured it would be a good time to catch up. Brighton is about one and half hours and £10 by train from our place, so we had no excuses.

From the memories of Brighton at home I was thinking of a lovely sandy beach, but this one is very stony and not quite as inviting. However, it had a kinda similar atmosphere where everyone seemed very laid back and outside a cafe enjoying their lentil burgers and organic smoothies.

We headed along the beach to Hove (a town that Brighton is basically joined to) in search of Helen's place, and from there we headed out to have lunch then to pound the streets and soak up the atmosphere. The afternoon involved a bit of walking, a bit of chilling out on the grass listening to a band, then back to the beach (where by this time the wind had come up and we just about got blown away.)

Aaron and Helen spent the afternoon talking about people I didn't know, but it filled in some background on people I am to meet in the next few months (so you guys we are coming to visit - be warned...)

We've just got back now, and Aaron is in the process of packing for a week away in Leeds for work (staying in the Hilton, no less) where he'll be running an assessment centre to decide whether all the people that have been fired by his work are to be re-hired or not.

An extra note - HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM!
It's my mum's (Karelan) birthday tomorrow (well today in NZ time), so I just wanted to say 'Happy Birthday' and I hope you have a wonderful day! I'll leave the embarrassment there, and not mention how old she is. BTW, mum you're pressie is on the way, I'm just not sure how long it will take to get there.

I am doing this from memory, as I wasn’t on the ball enough to write this when we toured the tower last weekend? Could have been the weekend before…

We headed off to the Tower of London, as all good tourists do. It is a building of immense history. I think this one building has more history than all of New Zealand. It stretches back to 1078 AD. The building as it stands today, is effectively completely original, obviously each monarch and ruler throughout history has added their own tower, extra wall, moat, extra bedroom for the family…

Our trip started with an hour guided tour by one of the local Beefeaters (pictured left). They are members of the royal guard, but double as tour guides at the Tower of London, he was a fantastic speaker and gave us such in a good history of the site (not that I can remember all that much now). From the be-headings, traitors, builders, royals, and much more

The crows are very menacing, back in the day, one of the kings was told that if the crows left the Tower of London, that this families reign would fall. He made it law that there will be at least 6 crows on site at all times. It is still law. So they clip some pet crows’ wings to keep them about. There are signs all of the place telling people not to get to close as they will take a finger if given the chance.

What I didn’t realise before going was that there was a large museum inside the site. This is very interesting and obviously focuses on the Towers history. There are also the previous kings and queens family Jewels. ‘The family jewels’ as you know them are the gear of the current monarchs, but some of the previous crowns, jewels, sceptres etc are housed and displayed at the Tower. No photos allowed =(

On the whole, it a very worth while place to see. The amount of history is very overwhelming, especially when you are reading the words craved into the stone walls over 500 years ago by rival royal family members being kept in the prison towers to rot. We were even treated to a demonstration of old school fighting.

Well we were a bit on the slow side on this one, but when we heard the word ‘free’ infront of the word ‘concert’, it was decided that we definitely should go! Unfortunately you had to apply to get tickets about a month in advance, so I thought we’d missed out. However, I applied for a couple of competitions online, and was very excited to get a phone call 2 days before the concert.

They packed ~80,000 people into ‘The Mall’ infront of Buckingham Palace and what sort of concert would it be in London if it didn’t rain. We were a bit delayed in getting in as they wouldn’t let Aaron’s “professional camera” in so we had to go find a train station locker to leave it in, but thanks to being just a little bit pushier than most we managed to make our way to about 20 people back from the stage.

The concert was pretty good all in all with a number of boy bands we hadn’t heard of as well as a few we had. The list included: McFly, Jamelia, Baby Spice, Rachel Stevens (originally from S-club 7), Kelly and Ozzie Osbourne, James Brown (!!!), and the rocker from way back, Rod Stewart.

We were updated throughout the afternoon with the Olympic Torch’s progress through the London streets, and some of the artists pre-recording songs which were later passed off as live on TV (while we stood and watched the presenter preen himself in the camera). It was kinda cool to actually see the Olympic Torch arrive on stage and for the cauldron to be lit, and London made a really big thing of it as they are vying for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Aaron: Did someone say gerbil

Making the most of the tube strike on Tuesday 29th June, Katy (my boss) and I headed off to Wimbledon for the evening. The tube strike started at 6.30pm, so we left work at about 4pm to meet Katy’s friend, Emma, at the station at 5pm. Walking from the station to the grounds, we were definitely going against the flow and were a bit worried we’d missed all the action, but the mob were just on their way to the station before the tube strike kicked in.

For someone that isn’t that into tennis, this was quite an experience for me, and I was wide-eyed as we walked past the hundreds of people camping on the footpath for tickets to the Tim Henman game which was on Thursday. That was real dedication! (especially since there were only about 40-50 tickets available for this match.

Ground admission after 5pm is only £8 (which gives access to courts 2-19), and they resell tickets for Court 1 and Centre Court of people that have left for the day for only £3 with the proceeds going to charity – so that meant we ended up sitting in seats that other people had paid £48-53 for the evening. In order to save ourselves from the wildly expensive, but very famous, Wimbledon strawberries and cream, we’d visited the supermarket at lunchtime and had a picnic feast packed.

Wimbledon has a fantastic atmosphere and a really nice setting with people chilling out on the grass watching matches on screens and wandering between the 20 different courts. Most of the games while we were there were mixed doubles, so the only big name we ended up seeing was Lindsay Davenport, but some of the games were fantastic with really close battles!

The games finished about 9.30pm (when it started getting too dark) and I headed to the nearest overground train station (1/2 an hour away) in order to get home.

Struggling to think of something to do on Sunday, out flatmate (Kate) suggested we go down and look around Greenwich, it is only about a 20-30 min walk from our flat. The weather was a tad 'iffy' so as we arrived in Greenwich it started to rain, so we dove into an undercover Sunday market. Just your normal array market goods, over priced junk, which as Kate said before we left, "You'll regret anything you buy". We did not buy anything.

As the rain slowed to drizzle, we made towards the Thames. There is a tunnel, which links Greenwich to the Isle of the Dogs. It was made about 100 years ago which is quite impressive for an under river tunnel.

Once we had walked under the river, looked around and come back under the tunnel, we had a whirlwind trip around the Greenwich navel museum. We are going to go back to have a good look around. It was getting late and I really wanted to see the Royal Observatory, which is basically the home of all time. It is situated on sizeable hill, which gives good vistas of the surrounding areas. There is a lot of history in the observatory regarding time and navigation. It was interesting to read some of the history of time and stand on both the East and Western hemispheres.

On Tuesday (last week - Yes, I am getting slack. But we are getting the Internet in our flat in a week) We decided to take in yet more of the local sights and sounds. We started with Shakespeare’s Globe. Obviously, we have all heard of the famous playwright, but I for one, knew very little about him and the Globe. I was very surprised to find that the Globe was a reconstruction and only 8 years old. It is the third globe, the first being destroyed by a live canon on stage firing and igniting the building, the second was in London’s great fire due to the straw thatch roofs.

The current one was built about 300 years after the second when an American actor came to London and went to pay homage to Shakespeare but found that there was no building, no monument, only a plaque on the ground. So he decided to rebuild the Globe, it is a fully working theatre (they put on plays twice a week) and built completely by the old methods, from tools to using wooden dowels instead of nails. They even got special compensation from the City Council to install a thatch roof (which were made illegal after the great fire). All and all, a very impressive building, and a great place to go and see.

We tried to go see St Paul’s cathedral, but it was under-wraps. They are doing renovations, which are meant to last until 2008. So it was a real let down, we couldn’t see the inside either as there was to much scaffolding and plastic wrap.

Marble Arch was next. We didn't have a clue why it was famous, or a stop on all the tour bus routes, but we jumped on the tube and headed their anyway. We discovered that it used to be the main entrance to Buckingham palace, then moved to be the main entrance of Hyde Park, and now resides in the centre of a large round about. Wasn't all that exciting.

We have JOBS! It is good to know we will both have an income and slow down our spending of New Zealand dollars. I have 3-6 month contract at the Environmental Agency (Government Org.), I can't really say what I do (its top secret, so secret no one has told me what I'm meant to do. And I've already started!). Carmens jobs looks a tad more promising (i.e. interesting), she starts on Wednesday at a large Oil company. I will let her fill you in what she is doing, as I wasn't really paying much attention when she told me. :+) We are earning £10 an hour (+ travel, + food allowance), so its pretty good. To be honest we can't see what everyone complains about, living costs aren't outrageous over here. It is VERY expensive to visit or go on holiday, but once your earning, rent + bills + food is going to cost about £100 a week each. Which leaves about £200 a week for travel, entertainment, saving etc. PLUS when we leave the country we will receive 10% of everything we earned from National Insurance.

We started Saturday by meeting Carmens Aunt, partner and couple of their friend at Green Park, next to Buckingham Palace. It was of course the Queens birthday. And they hold their annual 'Trouping the Colours'. Unlike in New Zealand there is no public holiday for her birthday here. The 'Trouping' consists of a parade of a few hundred soldiers all dressed in old ceremonial military costume, i.e. plate armour etc, all riding horses, pulling old canons with some of the royals in tow. They pile out of Buckingham palace in file, do a parade around some streets and then go back, before Queenie stands on the balcony and does the royal wave to us minions. We got to see her and the rest of the misfits, before watching a demonstration of how quickly the cavalry could dismount, undo and arm the canons and fire a few rounds. Of course I took my camera, with the full intention of taking hundreds of photos, but managed to forget the memory card rendering it useless =(

After the Trouping, in true English style, with nothing to do, we followed our group of people to a pub. The general conversation goes along, person 1: "what shall we do now?" person 2: "I don't know" anyone else: "lets go to the pub". This seems to be the trend no matter what company you are with. So we caught a tube to Covent Garden, this is the Art centre of London, apart for the fact it is infinitely larger. Many loony people doing acts, trying to make people laugh, children cry and generally entertain the masses, all in the name of begging for money. After partaking in a few drinks at 'The Punch and Judy' pub established in 1778, we strolled down to watch the D-Day celebrations at Leicester square.

As the evening drew closer, we remembered one of flat mates had 'booked' the lounge and kitchen for a curry party he was throwing for some of his friends. We feared both his friends, and the after curry bowel rebellion. SO looking for something to do, we strolled towards the West End in search of a production to watch. There are approximately 30 different productions on at any one time, we they all generally start at 7:30, and it was nearing 7 we couldn't be to picky. We went for the first and cheapest one we could find, Fame. Our tickets cost us £15 each and we were in the restricted viewing area. The tickets only cost a tad more then a movie in this area of town which were going for £10. There were about 10 - 15 seats from the good seat area which weren't filled, so as soon as the curtains drew back, we were off down to some of the best seats in the house. These tickets were being sold for approx £50 each. So we had a fantastic evening. The show was very good, and was much more entertaining than a movie.

Just a quick note to keep you all updated... By the way - I hear it's getting cold in NZ? We had a sweltering 32 degC yesterday, but have been warned that the brief spell might be the only summer we get.

Went to the Rugby 7's at Twickenham on Sunday, and managed to drag Gary along, even though he wasn't that keen on rugby. Unfortunately he came out a whole lot keener about rugby after England beat us in the final, and took the 7's World Cup. The day was overcast but warm, and there were a few people dressed up, but not as many as I would've thought. It was definitely good to see lots of NZ flags waving in the crowd.

We moved into our new flat in London on Monday night. It's really nice, as are the flatties (Kate and Richard). We even have a backyard complete with our own wildlife (see pic). Still getting used to figuring out where everything goes in the kitchen, but it is definitely nice to come home to a space that feels like it's your own. The room has a bed and shelves, and Kate's promised us a wardrobe and some drawers, so we're on the look out for things like lamps and linen at the mo.

On the job-front, I went for a 4.5hr long interview yesterday where they asked lots of difficult engineering questions that I know that I used to know the answer to. Got a couple more interviews tomorrow, and then it's just a waiting game (which will involve temping to keep the money rolling in). Aaron has got a 3 day temping job at the moment being an office slave for a marketing research company, and an interview on Monday. We will keep you informed.

Contact details:
We now have a cell phone and an address, but I won't post them here as we'll get every freak and his dog harrassing us. If you do need to get in contact with us, or may need to in the future, send me an e-mail and I'll send you the details.

Well, as some of you loyal 'slowlane' watchers may have noticed, 'slowlane' has been a bit under the weather lately and you haven't heard much from us. It all has something to do with the web-hosters and a lot of big words I don't understand, but Aaron's got us up and running again.

The problem is that we don't really have any news... we are in the process of waiting to hear back from jobs while we outstay our welcome at cousin Gary's place in Staines. Hopefully, (fingers crossed) we'll be out of here and into a flat this weekend - however, we don't know whether it will be in London or somewhere else until we get a phonecall today. Vague enough for you?

Meanwhile, we are still on holiday I guess, but itching to get money (I mean jobs) and a flat and unpack! The advantage of not having jobs is that we can have a bit of a look around while we wait. I've managed to show Aaron a few of the things I remember from when I was here 5 years ago (strangely enough, not much changes in England in 5 years) and we've just about got the tubes and trains sorted (next step is the buses).

Aaron: We have managed to see a little of London. One of the many museums, Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the underground, and a few other places. Nothing here is to daunting, and things don't actually appear to cost THAT much. Well it wouldn't if we were earning pounds and not spending dollars. I must say however, that british weather is as bad as they make it out to be. Although it hasn't really rained since we have been here, it has been overcast almost every day.

We are planning on going to Twickenham this weekend to watch the England league of the World 7s