I apologize for taking nearly a month to submit a follow up to a blog post about something I did over a month ago now. I promise that from this point forward I will not let things like the wonderful tropical weather, nightly organized basketball & hockey games, 5L $10 pitchers of beer, a beach a mere 5 minutes from my front door, and general excellence of the surroundings get in the way of sitting in an uncomfortable Chinese desk chair in my concrete cube and typing.
Honestly though I've been busy! They make you do this thing called "work" while you're here and it gets in the way of having spare time. When you combine that lack of time with my vast fountains of lazy it gets really tough to find time to write about doing totally awesome stuff that I'm lucky enough to get to enjoy. So consider this my pledge to not break the last pledge that I already pledged to not break and therefore the frequency of my blog posts to increase. I don't recommend holding your breath.
Anyway - diving right back in to part 2 of the London trip, hanging a right at the St.James park sign takes you down what would've been a lovely park had it not been winter and had the Olympics not totally destroyed the grass. They were investing pretty heavily in trying to ensure the greens recovered and had staked off nearly all green space to prevent us peasants from disturbing anything.
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| It is still very strange to see such green in January no matter where you are. |
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| Walking further down the trail brings you to the water feature central to St. James park whose banks include a pigeon poop farm and various confused squirrels. |
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| This fellow was upset that I neglected to ask it's permission before snapping it's photo. Shortly after this it let out a rather pathetic "HONK" to let me know who was boss. I had goose on the plane - pretty sure I won. |
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| A good mix of diseased winged-rodents in this photo. |
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| A very interesting looking duck. I think. Colorful food is always tastier. |
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| This photo screams "seasonal affective disorder" or "England" to me. |
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| Swans are like the T-rex of the touristy bird slough world. People are always taken by their so called "beauty" but the reality is they are vicious trained burderers (get it) that other birds are careful not to run afowl of (that's 2). |
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| The goal was to make it to Buckingham Palace and hopefully catch the changing of the guard. The reality was I was 30 minutes late. Damn. Next time! |
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| This is the greenery surround Buckingham Palace. On the left you'll notice a very confused bush. |
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| The Palace - surrounded by deadly high traffic roads that have apparently been designed to take out as many Japanese tourists as possible. I swear I saw at least a dozen nearly get run over trying to get a good picture by standing in the middle of live traffic. |
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| Looking back on St. James from Buckingham. It is really quite pretty - even in January. I bet it's a stunner in the summer. |
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| The Australian gate was a let down - it contained no poisonous snakes, spiders, or Fosters beer (which is also poisonous). |
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| ***Insert wildly inappropriate Princess Diana zombie joke here*** |
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| If you look closely you can spot the most majestic of English touristy type awesome. |
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| Of course I was talking about guards in funny hats not any sort of gold work. |
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| To the right of Buckingham was this totally awesome gate - behind which was what looked to be a totally awesome park. |
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| Turns it out was the Canada gate! Awesome. It would look better in a nice thick coat of Oil. :) |
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| Shameless tourist self shot also a horrible North Face ad apparently. |
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| A view from across St. James of the London eye sore. Quite possibly the ugliest thing to ever happen to tourist London. |
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| Walking back down the opposite side of the park I was taken by the greeness, definitely on my list of places to go back to in the summer / fall. I bet it is spectacular. |
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| Awesome houses / embassies / otherwise that line this side of St. James. |
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| A very surprised looking Pelican - I presume he was blown away by his fellow pelican's ability to rotate it's head around Linda Blair style. No pea soup was harmed in the taking of this photo. |
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| One of thousands of morbidly obese St. James park squirrels. This little porker was one of the smaller ones but the only guy I caught on camera. I think PETA should protest the tourists contributing to the squirrel obesity rates. |
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| This was quite honestly the most exciting part of my entire 8 hours spent in London. I actually stood in this spot in disbelief for a good long while. I had NO idea that this was how the tastiest vegetables in the world were grown. For some reason I had this image in my head that Brussels sprouts grew in a potato/pineapple hybrid fashion. Instead I discovered that they grow on incredibly creepy looking alien tentacle type things. Tasty. |
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| This house on the water was originally built to house the St. James park bird keeper. I'm sure his legacy of pigeons is without compare. |
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| Beautifully coloured duckbird thing. Again - I wonder if the red ones are spicier. |
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| And finally - a Giraffe in the South African airport. Why? Because Giraffe's are awesome - that's why. |
