Those of you who have been paying attention to the blog will know that we've had a bit of a tough time in Morocco. Those of you who have really been paying attention will wonder how they missed this post the first time around, you didn't, I changed the date on it so it would be slightly more temporally accurate for posterity. It's new.

So let's roll back the clock a few weeks to our ten days in London after we returned from Edinburgh. I apologize in advance if this is not a gripping narrative, but the memory has gone a bit hazy in the last week and to be honest we just didn't do all that much.

We were primarily occupied with finishing The Baroque Cycle, largely because we didn't want to lug the books on another flight, but also because the events in the final chapters of the book take place in London, and we had a great deal of fun - Ok, a reasonable amount of fun - tracking down the modern sites mentioned in the early 18th century setting of the book. We have been reading this trilogy since sometime in September, around when we started our trip in Serenity, and we've each had our own copy of the book, so it was like our own little dorky bookclub. So we spent a lot of time during those ten days sitting in pubs reading our books. Which is quite honestly a really pleasant way to pass a frigid wet London day. We didn't actually wind up accomplishing our goal, we finished the books three days after we got to Morocco, but the heavy beasties are now out of our hands and on their way home with our rugs. Where was I going with this exactly?

Right, tracking down the sites, this will be of interest to pretty much Alex Scherer, who is the only other person I know dumb enough to have started reading this 3000 page monster. The really pleasant surprise of this hunt was our trip to the London Fire Monument. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, its a massive enclosed spiral staircase with a tiny platform on top, that offers some really stunning views over London. Its also a quarter of the admission price of St. Paul's Cathedral, for essentially the same panorama. We also made the obligatory visit to the Tower and paid rather close attention to the prisoner grafiti that we now have a much grander appreciation for. During our entire time in the UK, we went to a ton of "historical" pubs, but the one that actually gave us some historical context was The Town of Ramsgate which saw the capture of Judge Jeffries aka The Hanging Judge, which was an actual historical event that the author borrowed for the narrative.

Slightly less successful was our trip to The London Museum, which is at the end of The London Wall Walk. Perhaps I'm being a bit too critical, the museum itself was actually very interesting, lots of interesting bits about The Royal Society, the Plague, The Fire, Dickens, Romans &c. Go there, you'll enjoy it, its free. But by no means attempt to arrive there via the Wall Walk unless you happen to have GPS coordinates for all the various bits of wall. We made it all the way to Site #3 before we lost the trail. Granted, this really wasn't our fault, the site was hidden by construction. We asked a nearby hotel concierge if he could help us find the fourth site, he happily obliged and sent us a mile in the wrong direction all the way to Whitechapel. I'd have been seriously miffed if there hadn't been a couple of good pubs on the way. Having decided that the wall completely defeated us, we just hopped on the tube and went straight to the museum where we enjoyed ourselves. As I said, very good, very overlooked museum. Go there, free, &c.

Alex S.: We also paid a visit to Crane Court off Fleet Street but there's not much there.

We did manage a few Non-Baroque Cycle activities as well. We went to Spitalfields Market, and saw an enormous amount of junk that we plan to buy for a tenth of the price in the actual places where they're made. But we did avail ourselves of numerous dining options while we were there. Our first stop was an American owned BBQ joint that makes reasonable BBQ, but the grilled french duck breast is the real winner on the menu. We also had Paprika Chicken at the Hungarian food stall, also excellent, but especially since it was served on top of a big ol' piece of fried bread. Since it was so frigid out we had a few cups of hot mulled wine at the cheese shop and later we met my parents (who were there for a week) at a really good world cuisine chain called Giraffe - think Rainforest Cafe, but tasty.

By far, the best value for the tourist dollar is the Fuller's Brewery Tour, which for 6 quid gets you a full brewery tour followed by a 5 pint tasting. We had a blast. Hi Dieter and Fritz!

Hogmanawhat? Hogmanay is what they call New Years Eve up in kiltville. Its one of the gigantic New Years Eve bashes around the world. As a fan of Edinburgh in general, it was something I had wanted to do for some time, and the timing was going to work out well for this trip, so off we went.

Now those of you who know us are probably thinking, "New Years Eve bash? Heather and Matt are not bash people." You would be correct, but Hogmanay somehow made it onto my To Do list. I figure I was going to have to go to a giant New Years street party at some point in my life and this one seemed most suited to my tastes, I definitely don't think I could deal with the Times Square crowds.

Edinburgh was twice as damp and darker for about two more hours of the day than London, but it was also about 15 degrees warmer, so it was a reasonable trade. We really didn't do much else in terms of tourist activity while we where there because we do intend to visit again in better weather. So we spent our time sampling scottish delicacies. I got Heather to try Haggis, and now she has to have that "No, I swear, Haggis really is good!" conversation too. The chip shops also make a Cheese-in-burger fried thing that she liked a lot. For those of you who haven't heard of the infamous scottish chip shops, this is where the deep fried mars bar comes from, the height of candybardom, and indeed, scottish cuisine.

Speaking of tasty scottish things, I bought a few souveniers at Cadenhead to drink upon my return to normal life. And since they do custom bottling right from the cask, we also got a small supply of 15 year old Springbank to drink during the Hogmanay street party.

The street party itself was one of those over-hyped events, but I'm glad we went all the same. We got there early so we could find a spot with a nice view and a fence to lean against that was near enough to one of the stages that we could hear the Scottish Dixie AC-DC cover band without having our ears blasted out. And we basically stood there for two hours trying to figure out the perfect balance of whisky to drink to keep us warm, but not make of have to go find the porta-potty. Fortunately there were some friendly South Africans standing next to us (Hi Stephen and Lisa) so the time passed a bit faster.

The fireworks themselves were apparently better in days of yore, because they had a show that was seven times bigger than it is today. They used to shoot off all the fireworks over the castle, but now they have extended it to shows on all the hills around town. The castle itself is a really scenic place for fireworks, I think its a tad unfortunate they've spread it out so much. The other detractor was that we wound up in the smoke cloud from the fireworks, so we really didn't see that much of the show anyhow. But overall, it was definitely worth the experience, we certainly had never been to one of the big New Years bashes before and even if we did think it was a tad over-hyped, we still had a lot of fun and are glad went. Most importantly, we can now be fairly certain that if extended an invitation to New Years Even in Times Square, we know what our answer will be.

You know a country is serious about its holidays when even the chinese carry out places are closed. We managed to enjoy ourselves anyway in part due to the good grace of Tom, and partly due to the two of us having done some actual planning. Oh stop gaping, its not THAT much of a shock. As for Tom, he is an old friend of mine from High School whom I seem to bump into every five years or so, and he has, quite generously, given us his flat in West Hampstead while he is away for the holidays.


So we've been watching season four of 24 on Tom's plasma television and eating a bunch of Christmasy English food we stocked up on from Harrod's. We have become rather devoted fans of the local puddings. So far sticky toffee pudding is far and away the favorite, but gingerbread, saucy chocolate and christmas puddings have also performed commendably. We haven't just been eating pudding however, though I'm not sure why not, we also had a duckling apple and Calvados pie, a few wedges a quiche, and some scotch eggs. I found a spicy apple and sage jelly to go with my scotch eggs and pie, but Heather would have no part of it. Breakfast has been chocolate criossants, and butter criossants with strawberry jam and clotted cream. We have, in short, not been suffering.


So to catch you up on the major events of the past week...


1. We went out to dinner for our anniversary at Trader Vic's and had really good food, some fantastic drinks, and the worst possibble service imaginable. OK, I suppose it could have been a bit worse, the waiter could have actually hurled food at us or bludgeoned us with spoons or something, but it was as bad as it could have been without us pressing charges. We did the next best thing, we filled out the comment card. That'll show 'em!


2. We went to Westminster Abbey and visited Darwin and Newton and other notable entombed folk. Then we watched a woman who refused to eat anything pass out a bunch of times. That was sort of fun.


3. That's actually about it. Heather was feeling a little bit under the weather for a few days so we took it easy on the tourism front. We went for a few major walks and watched the shiny lights on Regent street, which included a pilgrimage to the Apple Store in SoHo, which has the best free wifi in town.


We're planning on venturing outside today as we've run out of food and have finished watching 24. Hopefully we will also get some of our itinerary hashed out for after we leave Britain, so expect an update on that soon. I'm sure some of you who thought we were headed to South

America first are very curious to hear how we ended up here and what we are planning next. Hopefully we'll have an answer soon.