London Dungeon Oxford Street

Finally made it to the London Dungeon - finding out all about the traumatic history of London, horror stories and more horror stories. I managed to snap a couple of pics but in the end it is very dark throughout so the pics are not all that great.

My favourite part of it all was the demonstration of all the torture instruments. The best being this little cage - I want one for Christmas and it can stand at the back of my classroom. Great way to keep the kids under control me thinks. Might need more than one though. We also snuck in for a haircut by Sweeney Todd himself but luckily he was caught before he had a chance to turn us into meat pie filling.

After our morning at the London Dungeon, we madce our way to Oxford street to do a bit of shopping. The Christams lights in Oxford street are beautiful so took pics of some of them.

Calais

Daytrip to Calais and oh what alot to learn. My first lesson was that there is not much to see in Calais. Unfortunately I did not realise but the trip to Calais is basically a trip to a very big shopping centre. What makes it worse is this shopping centre seems to be in the middle of space - I don't mean outer space I just mean space.


It is still a pretty cool shopping centre though. The second lesson I learned is that it seems this long journey that I made to do some shopping for a day in France seems to be a normal Christmas time adventure for most English people. It was like being in London but in France - MADNESS. I even bumped into one of the girls from school.

As I said earlier it is a nice shopping centre and if I were a parent I would go there just so that my kids had something to do while I got on with the shopping. Had they had loads of Christmas entertainment for the little 'uns.

After I had finished all that I wanted to do I took a stroll through the supermarket to see what I could see and I noticed that all the employees rolled around on rollerskates. I also noticed that they had a very large selection of Fanta. These may be strange things to notice and even stranger things to take pictures of, but the truth is I was desperate to find things to photograph. I got on the bus in the morning and soon relaised that I had left my camera at home. How dumb can a person be - go touring without a camera. No problems, I decided to buy a disposable camera on the ferry. You can imagine after making the effort to buy a disposable and relising I was just going to a shopping centre. Understand my desperation?

Last lesson I learned for the day - the ferry's are a bad option in miserable weather. We got to the docks only to discover that they had been closed for ages and we had to wait for the Dover ports to be opened again. Apparently the winds were really bad we finally borded at 11 pm or something crazy and I only got home at 3 am in the morning.

In the end even though it was a disappointing trip I still gained alot out of it including cute little Christmas decorations.

Brugge

Going to Brugge for the day starts with a bus journey to Dover, then a ferry crossing to Calais, from Calais it is another bus trip to Brugge - ALOT of travelling but glad I did it.


The day started off with beautiful blue skies so it was a great opportunity to take a pic of the famous whit cliffs of Dover. The air was still cold though so I didn't stay out on the deck but instead retreated indoors after my photo shoot.

The ferry crossing was very rocky and it made me feel like I couldn't walk so after stumbling my way through the duty free shopping I found a seat - made it feel more like a rocking chair rather than someone trying to push me over, MUCH better.

A day of shopping in beautiful Brugge. Belgium is apparently famous for chocolate, beer and lace. I only knew about the chocolate but that is probably cos I am a little biased towards chocolate. According to the tour guide there are pubs that sell up to 300 different types of beer. Can you imagine going for a night out and trying one of every beer in the pub? Even if you settle for half pints - thats ALOT of beer.

Brugge started off as a major port town but over the years it started losing its "business" to other ports in Europe. It eventually became the poorest city in Belgium, looking at it now you would never guess because in 20th century it beacame a popular tourist spot. It has lots of canals and is apparently known as Venice of the north because of all these canals - I am not too sure how Amsterdam lost out on this title.

Maybe it is just because of the Christmas season but just walking into the town centre I got an amazing feeling of Christmas spirit. I have probably just seen too many movies but with crisp cool air chilling my cheeks and my nose and my warm coat wrapped around me I could just imagine sitting inside with a log fire - listening to children playing outside in the snow and carolers singing songs. Definitely not a typical South African Christmas, but somehow snow seems more Christmasy.


They definitely have the most amazing Christmas decorations this side of the equator. Was walking past a shop and in the window a saw a decorated Christmas tree and there was snow falling down over it. Went inside to investigate and it is a tree that works a bit like a chocolate fountain. It has a "pool" of little poystyrene balls at the base of the tree and the polystyrene gets pumped up the centre of the tree, out the top of the tree and hence falls down on the tree as if it were snow. Looked really cool, its a pitty it was a bit big to take home.

The Christmas markets were great too. They were selling lots of winter woolies and of course Christmas decorations. My first purchase was a nice cup of Belgium hot chocolate to keep me warm. In the centre of all the stalls the had an ice rink - just like the movies. All these people were ice skating outside in the middle of the square.

After walking around the markets 4/5 times trying to decide what I should or shouldn't buy - I started running out of time and had to make quick decisions. It also decided to have a bit of a downpour on my head and since I forgot my brolly I decided to make a quick purchase of a funky hat. I know these hats look really dumb on me cos I had already tried on 20 different ones but it was serving a purpose; keeping my hair dry, my head warm and my ears warm.

The downpour was a short one but not long after leaving Brugge it started coming down again and pretty much persisted all the way home. It made for an even rockier return ferry but didn't get sea sick so all was good. Took a pic on my way back to the coach showing the heavy cloud cover.