March 20 - Going to London
Wonderful. Im off travelling again. Its about time ! Ive been looking fwd for this trip for quite some while. This time im going to visit one of my best friends Mariann in Wokingham, close to Reading in Berkshire outside London.
Around 2pm I left my place to go to the airport. Jorunn and Tor had picked up the cat so he could stay with them till I was back.
Weather wasnt exactly what Ill rate as nice. Icy winds and snow in the air, but once at airport all was good !
The flight was great and I landed at Stanstead at 6pm. There I got my train ticket to Reading and bought a UK Sim card for the use while I was there.
I hopped on a train and started arranging the SIM card and connecting. It didnt work as expected though and I soon had to contact the guy sitting on the seat next to me. He was an irish bloke on his way to visit his girlfriend. He was most helpful and helped me around.
At Liverpool station I had to change to metro and at Paddington I had to change to train to Reading.
At Reading Mariann came to pick me up at the train station. From there we went to her house where Mathias was waiting. We made dinner, chatted, had some wine and watched a strange documentary. Learningful indeed. Hehehe. It was great to finally meet up with Mariann again :D

March 21 - Reading and Dinner party

Vacation... SOOOO good. I love it. Finally I got to sleep in.... Wooo. How can you not like that?
Mariann came down around 10:30ish (thats actually sleeping in for me) and we sat and chatted on the couch in our PJs just relaxing. It was snowing outside, heavy winds and really cold. This morning I finally got to try out all the new underwear I had ordered from figleaves. Of course not in the living room though. Hehehe. We kinda got inspired from this shopping bless and we decided to go to Reading for more shopping !
Mariann had some things she wanted to trade in but we also had quite a good time to look around and have fun just searching for new treasures at the mall. :D GIRLS. I know what you are thinking.
I fell in love at that mall. I really did !!
Not in a guy though... as you may think. But in the most beautiful sunglasses I ever seen.
BVLGARI Sunglasses model 652B brown. They were sooo beautiful with their flower swarowski crystals. Just soooo expensive. My new love cost more than my rent pr month. Thats sad. 500 GBP for a pair of sunglasses is not possible for me. That means that I have to let this love affair go. But I will not give up on us so soon !!

When we were done at the mall we went to pick up groceries to prepare for a dinner party at Mariann and Mathias place. One of Marianns collegues from Denmark with wifey and 2 kids were coming over for dinner. The kids Bertram and Robin almost sounded like Batman and Robin. Hehehe. But apart from that they were incredibly well behaved and the parents were great too. A friend couple of Mariann and Mathias, Paul and Elena were also there and we had a wonderful night with great food, great conversations and good drinking :D
When all the guests had gone home Mariann, Mathias and myself sat down watching a DVD, The Kingdom. I knew there was SOMETHING known to it, i just could not put my finger on it. Hahaha. Whadda you know? Halfway through the movie.. Guess what.. I remembered why it seemed familiar. I had already seen it while it was screening on movie theaters.
Well, I do have a few problems with my short term memory though so I may be able to blame it on that. Hehehe. But it was a good movie. Although you might not think so since I had forgotten about it, but I liked seing it even after I remembered having seen it before too.
Soon it was bed time and I fell asleep like a child.

March 22 - London Zoo and meeting CSers

We woke up around 10ish again and thankfully no hangover. We had breakfast and prepared for a day outside. What we did not calculate was the weather. None of us brought enough clothes for such a cold day. It was supposed to be spring, Flowers were blooming on the trees and grass was green. Its not supposed to be snowing with temperatures below 0C and crispy wind to make hell freeze over.
The trip to London was done in an hour. We made sure to stash up on something to eat, pineapple and diet chocolate mousse. Yummy. Almost noooo calories. Can it be true? Awesome. How many Es are there added? Hahaha. And they say its healthy. But.. The taste was great !!!!

So. We were on our way to check out some stores down by Regents park (where Mariann and myself was at Toast New Zealand festival in 2006 to see Dave Dobbyn live) but as we arrived to the tube system we saw this poster announcing the opening of London Zoo just yesterday. The posters announced lots of tropical animals, amphibians and reptiles. I was thrilled. Mariann was in for the idea. We headed to Regents park first and almost froze to death as we went out from the tube. Hehe. Ok. I already said that we did not bring enough clothes for the climate. We should have had gloves, hats, thick jackets and good shoes. We only had each our scarf and thank God we brought that !!!
Scarves are actually pretty decent gaments with high level of usage. We draped the scarves around our heads and looked like two old grannies... Hehehe. We laughed so bad, one could have thought we were drunk !!!! But it relieved us a bit from the cold.

As we arrived London Zoo it was still blowing but snow had stopped and sun showed up behind an opening in the clouds. Throughout the day sun showed up every now and then.
We started off in the aquarium, moved over to the reptile park where I had lots of fun watching species like gaboon pitviper (5 cm long fangs), lizards, frogs like the Blue Poison Dart Frogs and the most venomous little animal on the face of earth, the Golden Poison Dart Frog. I have NO idea why these creatures fascinates me so much, but they do.
I was fascinated.

We moved on to the Butterfly garden, the bird garden, the monkey area and mainly did the whole tour.. it was really cool. The sun peaked out again and turned the day into a pretty nice one. I enjoyed seeing all the wonderful animals a lot. Day flew by and suddenly the Zoo was closing and we were missing out on the shopping. We took a cab to city centre where we were going to meet up with a buttload of CSers that had celebrated the International Free Hug day in London. We met them at a bar called The Red Lion, a microbrewery at 14 Kingly St, Westminster. As we found the other CSers I was attacked by someone giving me a Huge hug whereas I was thinking.. Strange, but it is free hug day after all... It was only after I saw who it was that I was even more surprised. It was Hector. He attended the New Year party I arranged in Oslo and was here totally on a surprise. He had planned on skipping the pub meeting but checked the meeting details and saw that I was attending and decided to go too!!! It was really nice.
There was a lot of fun going on and I met a few interesting people but got to know Chris (organizer) better than the others, as we had exchanged several emails about the event previous to coming to London, and had lots of fun. It was awesome to be indoor again and not out in the freezing cold.

All in all it was a wonderful day and Hector and I agreed to meet on Tuesday to go sightseeing and with Chris to have dinner on tuesday night. Mariann and I went back to Reading, but we stopped for MacDonalds as none of us had had much to eat during all day. Finally we got food. Hehehe. Impressive as we had been walking all day and having lots of beer to drink to kill the hunger :D Best way to go.

Our train ride home was interesting. hehehe... Mariann fell asleep :D I didnt trust her to wake up in time so kept awake :D Was great to come home.. We were pretty tired both of us :D

March 23 - Visiting Brenda in Oxford

I was up early today as I had plans to go to Oxford to visit Brenda. I left the house early in the morning even before Mariann woke up.

Read here for Bs wonderful explanation of our bar visit :D

March 24

March 25

March 26