Lena, who is allowing us to sleep in her Fulham apartment, is a beautiful and extremely talkative German girl who recently moved to London and speaks with a strong American accent.  She's preparing an interview so she can study musical theatre. She's vegan, too, and describes cooking as her form of therapy.  Her entire studio apartment is decked out in pastel furnishings, she wears a wardrobe of strictly pastel clothing and her hair is pink.  She's a walking, talking, singing, dancing fairyfloss.

The walk to Lena's house

Our first proper meal in London was a vegan buffet, where we ate way too much 'cheesy' broccoli and garlic mashed potatoes.  We jumped onto a double decker bus (!!!) and rode to the Natural History to combat impending jetlag with the utter radness of a blue whale skeleton and the most complete stegosaurus in the whole world.  Maybe because it was nearing bedtime in Australia and maybe because it was 25m long, I sat on a platform feeling completely overwhelmed staring at a blue whale for close to half an hour.  A lady and her daughter came and sat next to me.

"Where is the information on the blue whale?" the mother asked.

"There is none.  Just that plaque that says Balaenoptera Musculus," the girl replied.

"That's stupid.  We don't know anything about them.  Are they really that big?"

"They can't be.  That's too big to move." 

Wrong. This specimen is indicative of the average size, but they grow to 30m.  I had read this earlier on a plaque.

"How many do you think there are?"

"There can't be a million.  Then there'd be no room for me to swim in the ocean."

Due to whaling in the early 20th century, numbers diminished dramatically until there were around 1000 blue whales living in the ocean.

Then they got up and left in a huff.

Modern dinosaur (blue whale)

Triassic dinosaur

Stone animals line the windows

Everybody else took a selfie here, so we did too.

Nick's Scottish childhood friend from Mackay met up with us and we scoped out the dinosaurs.  Apparently there is usually a line to get into the dinosaur exhibit, but because it was an hour until closing, we were in the clear.  The lighting was really dramatic and cast eerie shadows all over the wall, giving it a Jurassic Park vibe.

Did you know that for a working professional to live within 30 minutes commute of London CBD, they're looking at paying around 1300 pounds? For a room in a shared house.  With other young professionals.  London is ridiculous.

The next day we decided to get the tube (Mind The Gap) to Westminster to have a little look at Big Ben and the bridge, before heading to the National Gallery.  At Big Ben, Nicholas offered to take a picture of some tourists (his picture was pristine, centred, colour balanced, straight) and they returned the favour (it was terrible).  We decided to walk the scenic route to the gallery.  Typically, we went the wrong scenic route, ended up the the wrong gallery so we got in a less scenic bus trip straight to Trafalgar Square.

Worst. Tourist. Photo. Ever.

One of my favourite things about London is Marks and Spencer's who sell gelatine-free versions of all their candy.  This is us waiting for the bus when we got lost.

The first half of the National Gallery was beautiful.  They had a Peter Balke retrospective on in their temporary space.  I had seen one of his paintings during a lecture in my Politics of Art and the Environment class in third year university, but this time they were so different and the light was so beautiful and all the crashing oceans made me so excited to get up to the Arctic Circle.  He had done a pilgrimage up to the north of Norway, near Russia, and done hundreds of landscape paintings that basically informed the rest of his art career.  Nick and I added a couple of places to our To Visit In Norway list.

Technically no photographs in the Peter Balke exhibition... Oops.

Commemorate your trip to the National Gallery with a Giant Rembrandt Chocolate Coin

The wallpaper was actually fabric

Nick particularly enjoys Impressionism because he first saw Impressionist paintings before he got his glasses, so he 'saw' them properly.

The National Gallery

By mid-afternoon, we were completely delirious with exhaustion (it would be nearing 2am in Melbourne) and had found ourselves surrounded by Renaissance paintings of leering baby Jesus' and bizarrely proportioned men.  I was giggling so hard I was nearly crying and worried I was going to be kicked out of the gallery.

Nick lusting after this sexy Duchess

??????

Double pipes?

Double pipes were apparently a thing.

We had a few hours until sunset and thought the "brisk" weather would wake us up, so we wandered through St James Park, past geese, goslings and the aptly named Duck Island to Buckingham Palace. Queue selfie sticks and teenage girls and anglophiles and Nicholas insisting we take photographs on things that we could see on a 10p postcard.

"Spring"

Making friends at St James Park!

Grumpy tourist needs a coffee

Being a statue

I don't know what these people were doing but they looked pretty cool

Big brother is watching

The past 25 hours have been predominantly in-flight, sandwiching a hectic Changi stopover.  After saying farewell, we stood behind 60 odd Japanese school students and panicked about locks (subsequently bought locks), ate a corn and bean burrito, then moseyed around waiting for the flight.  No surprises that I was about to wet myself at last boarding call and we were almost too late to make the flight - their words, but mothers with toddlers were still faffing about and stowing luggage after we were sitting, blanketed and had put my fluffy socks on.

Burrito-eating accessories

Cameron gave me a beautiful, beautiful book to diarise my experiences

Nicholas was hell-bent on cramming as many movies as physically possible into the first 7.5 hour flight.  I watched half of Interstellar, waking up intermittently to ask what was going on, which made me turn into a panicky mess at the first sign of turbulence.  I watched a few documentaries to help keep me awake.  Did you know that there was a point where there was way too much oxygen in the air and insects grew to the size of crocodiles? True story.  That's really all I got out of it because I was distracted by the sunset.  We had almost three hours of sunset, as we chased it around the globe to Changi.

Changi was hot and sticky.  We went upstairs to the sunflower garden, where the air was too sweet but the sunflowers were pretty and glowing in the darkness, so they balanced each other out.  We watched the butterflies in cocoons because most of them were sleeping. Some uncurled while we watched (Sophie would've hated it) and their wings were still soft and tissue papery.

By the second flight I was beyond exhausted.  I kept falling asleep while eating my baked potatoes and chickpeas.  It was my turn to power through films and I watched What We Did On Our Holiday and it was all the good things: David Tennant, viking mythology, the Scottish Highlands and Billy Connolly.  10/10 would recommend.  It was pretty funny.  The kids were super cute and amazing.  When we flew over New Delhi, the sun was beginning to rise.  I didn't know how this could be possible, given we still had 6 odd hours until we arrived in London at 6am (when I would presume the sun would be rising).  For the following hours, the sun dipped above and below the horizon line as we moved around the globe, glowing different colours over different countries.  Over Moscow it was reminiscent of the Dark Side of the Moon cover.  Over London it was a pale pinky haze.

The sunrise over Singapore and the sunset over Moscow

Heathrow was busy and I almost cried when the Border Control lady quizzed us about WHY we were spending so much time in the UK and WHY Nicholas was a contractor and WHY he hadn't worked since January.  Nobody asked me anything though (thank God).