Christmas in London

Christmas of 2014 was spent in London, England!

(photo below from Trafalgar square)

We arrived in London a few days before Christmas and went home on Christmas Day. To our big surprise, everything in London is closed on Christmas Day – including all public transports! As we checked in at the hotel, the host made us nervous about the trip back to the airport and asked us to change our flight tickets to stay another night When we declared that was not possible he was of course very helpful with arranging a car for us to the airport…

We had tried to find a hotel centrally located and found:

This is not an extraordinary hotel, but quite pittoresque with a good location and very friendly staff. A plus for us for being given a free upgrade of the room, a nice gesture! The breakfast vas excellent for being such a small hotel, they even had fresh fruit:

And of course for Christmas Day – the traditional Christmas Crackers:

The hotel also took care of the Christmas dekorations to make us feel lika home:

The Sumner hotel is located just a five minutes walk from…

…the big shopping street Oxford Street! The street starts at Marble Arch:

Just behind, in Hyde Park, was the well visited Winter Wonderland -full of attractions, food, drinks, Christmas and lots and lots of people! It was quite an event  just passing through! Lucky for us, we were able to sit down outside in the mild winter weather, enjoying a cup of mulled wine watching everyone else in the crowd.

In the lovely weather on Christmas Day, the park was perfect for a nice and quiet walk without the crowd of people:

On the days before Christmas, the streets of London was extremely crowded with people shopping gifts in the last minute. And you are allowed to shop gifts for yourself as well It was almost difficult to find your way forward on the streets, however we really enjoyed the spirit of all Christmas decorations and was pleased to be in place where everyone really goes all in with this! And although the crowd kept on pushing, I just hade to stop here and there to eternalize this! Like these two famous stores:

Maybe we had not done our homework properly, but we were stunned by the fact that we could walk around big parts of London, seeing many of the point of interests by foot. Rumors said that Piccadilly Circus was not as big as you might picture by photos, and well spoken – this is really not more than an intersection..:

But it was fun passning by! We then headed for Trafalgar Square:

On our way towards Big Ben, we passed the famous London Eye at distance. (I wished to have taken a tour, however my travel companion is scared of hights…):

One of my ambitions with the London trip was to see the symbol I have associated with London since I was a child, Big Ben!

I also managed to catch this flying moment above the Westminster palace:

And of course we passed Westminster Abbey (at the moment going through some renovation), but we could not go inside since it was closed this day:

Closer to the evening, we paid a visit to the royals at Buckingham Palace:

Walking around is very nice (and good exercise!), however this made us a bit limited in exploring all of London. So we went under ground and took the subway to get to Camden, to visit the well known market. Wow, what an experience! It was a never ending market, or at least that is how it felt, amazing! We ate slices of pizza in the street, drank mulled wine in cups and shopped for watches, leather bracelets and the fun stuff! We met friendly people and well decorated buildings. So I strongly recommend a visit to Camden market if you go to London.

For Christmas Eve, we had booked a table to eat dinner at The Grazing Goat, very close to our hotel and Oxford Street:

This is definitely a restaurant we can recommend; nice atmosphere, friendly and service minded staff and well cooked food. Following local tradition, we had stuffed turkey. For dessert, we ordered Christmas pudding to feel English, forgetting that we realized in Scotland last year that this pudding is not very tasty at all… But we got some good ice-cream as well, saving our last impression from the restaurant

The visit in London was full of good food but we had a hard time finding more of the traditional English pubs that we like. We had a local one just around the corner from the hotel though. Good restaurants is quite easy to find and we also tested a nice winner close to the hotel.

One of the biggest impressions of London we got on Christmas Day – when this big city was cleared from all people and traffic. This was at the same time both a spooky and amazing feeling! Probably the only day of the year when you can stand in the middle of Oxford Street  and take this photo:

This was also a good day to take photos of more of the symbols of England:

London is a city I would gladly visit again! Maybe without all Christmas decorations next time

And what do you know, you can find your own way (road) in London as well…