An Awful Lot of Walking to do

Today was quite a good day actually. James and I deemed it our "walking day" and our first Pub Crawl day. James and I woke up, had breakfast at the hotel then set off for the day.

We decided to take a nice Sunday stroll through Kensington Gardens.

We saw the Peter Pan Statue:

And we saw alot, and I mean ALOT of birds, geese, pigeons..... the birds barely had anywhere to go on that pond because the pond was half frozen over.

(note the two different textures to the lake. One is smooth and one is choppy. The smooth one is ice). By the way, today it ranged from 1*C to 8*C (That's 33 - 46*F). I didn't mind. James kept me warm.

After Kensington, we went to Camden to do some vintage shopping. It was quite good. There were TONS AND TONS of shops and stalls.

Think China Town, but about literally 10 times bigger, with all sorts of variety shops. There were food stalls, lolita shops, punk shops, sex shops, tourist items, vintage clothes, off furniture stores, smoking paraphernalia shops....I swear there was so much incense and old smelling clothes James and I probably inadvertently got high just walking through there. Then, around 4-o-clock we went and found a pub to sit in, eat and watch the Chelsea football match (Chelsea is James' favourite football team in the English Premier league).

After that, we went further into the center of London to get ready to take the Jack the Ripper Walks Tour. We got there early, so we went across the street to another pub to have another pint.

The Ripper tour was amazing. for £8, we got to walk around the east of London for 2 hours and hear stories about how the ripper case worked, and exact locations where events had transpired. Our tour guide was Donald....the same Donald who wrote a book on the Jack The Ripper Murders...a book that James has in his collection, so needless to say James was excited to have an expert show us around. And it was WELL worth the £8. Towards the end of our tour we were shown a bit of the street and a pub which originally was the Ten Bells, the 'whore pub' of white chapel. Jack the ripper had once set foot inside that building.

So naturally after the tour James and I doubled back and had a pint in the "Ten bells" which is now called something else but I don't care. it was originally the Ten Bells. :) Picture from inside the Ten Bells:

After that we took the tube to Kings Cross to look for Platform 9 and 3/4. Unfortunately there's alot of construction going around so we couldn't see it. :( So, we decided to go to a chippy to get food and then hit another pub before going back to the hotel. We had a pint and played "Pub Quiz" and "1 vs 100" on a game machine. A waitress at O'Neil's Pub took this for us:

Once we were done at the pub it was about midnight and apparently the tube stops running at midnight on sundays....and our hotel was WAY out of the zone....sooooo it looked like we had to either pay to get a cab or walk loads of miles. We took a cab. Cost us about £30, but it was an experience and we needed to get back to the hotel.