Julie's Boggle

Once you actually live in a place, it’s not that often that you get a chance to see it through tourist eyes again. But for 3 days last week, I got to join my sister and her fiancé (Coffee and Bob as their internet buddies know them), in seeing the sights of London…

They were really lucky in having some fantastic weather. Although you’ll see from the beanies that they were finding it cold, we didn’t have any rain all week, and lots of blue skies.

We got through quite a lot I thought. Certainly enough to wear out my feet several days in a row! I dragged them through most of the western parks (great swan-sightings in Kensington Palace Gardens), and down to Buckingham Palace and the Mall, and in turn got taken through lots of toy stores in search of novelty games.

Tom joined us on Thursday for a true tourist day-out to the Tower of London. We’d never been before either – mostly because our visitors tend to feel a little faint when they do the maths to convert the £16 adult entrance fee into South African Rands (R15:£1 last week). But Kris and Wayne were keen, so we finally got to see it.

It was quite interesting, and the entrance fee did include a guided tour from one of the yeomen warders and a look at the Crown Jewels. I hadn’t counted on seeing anything interesting in there, but I’d forgotten that they have one of South Africa’s greatest mineral treasures on display: Cullinan I. Also known as the Great Star of Africa. A seriously impressive chunk of carbon, now part of the Royal Sceptre. (One can only think that the Transvaal government was trying to curry some serious favours with the UK monarchy when they gave that one away!)

I don’t think our guests truly felt that they’d seen as much value out of their hard-earned £32 entrance fee as they would have liked, but we made up for it by eating in that night, followed by a rousing round of a great new game, Killer Bunnies, that Kristy had picked up at our favourite west-end store, “Playin’ Games”.

Friday we took in the 3-D IMAX, and an intense tour of all the interesting bits of Harrods.

Then Saturday came, and we sent them on their merry way back to SA.  Safe in the knowledge that we had done our duty by them, in introducing them to some of the best chains London has to offer: Starbucks, Pizza Express and the Fine Burger Co.