Stumbled into London
After the amazing adventures in Island we landed in Zagreb, the capital city of Croatia.
We picked up our car, went to a lovely dinner with Neb’s friend from the university days and drove next morning to Belgrade, the Capital city of Serbia.
We met our cousins who welcomed us with a home made goulash and Serbian delicious food we have been craving for; kajmak from the local markets and home made ajvar! Indulgence at its best! Thank you!
We left our bags at theirs, and flew to London the next day!
London was never in our plans, the decision to go came about when our Kiwi friends visited us in Rovinj! They have moved to London a few months ago, and invited us to come for a visit. Thanks to their generosity and kindness we decided to go and spend a week in a big city of London.
I guess many of you have been to London, but for us this was the first time ever!
For some reason London was never on our travel wish list. I don’t know why that is, perhaps it could be because I didn’t like my English teacher when I was a young girl!
My Mum paid for private lessons, but I was a very very naughty girl who skipped classes week after week. The lady teacher was old, strict, had a big stick and she was not pretty. I’d say I was afraid of her, but I don’t need to tell you what happened when Mum discovered my mischief!
Ever since, each time someone would mention Big Ben, Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, a thought went through my mind - thanks but no thanks!
Well, when the opportunity presented itself, and with this beautiful proximity of European countries, we jumped on a plane in Belgrade and here we are.
Since we had little to no time to prepare or organise ourselves we landed at the Luton Airport and had no clue how/where to go next! Can you imagine me being so disorganised? It happened !!!
Free wifi and EU SIM card helped! Although I felt overwhelmed for a bit, we got onto the right bus and arrived at our friends place without much trouble.
The very first “aha” moment was - London transport is so simple to navigate through! Easy peasy!
If you ever need help navigating any large city while using the public transport check this app: Citymapper! It’s so good, we used it all the time and navigated our way through different parts of London like locals!
As soon as we arrived, our hosts were ready to take us to a special club for a dinner. Our host is the club member and omg 😱 this was something so special not many people get to see!
The club is called “The Home House” ! This place is GRAND, ECCENTRIC, and ICONIC! It is London’s most magnificent private members’ club, fusing 18th century splendour with 21st century style. Established in the 18th century, Home House was designed by George III’s architect, James Wyatt, who was commissioned to build a sophisticated palace purely for enjoyment and entertainment.
Today, Home House hosts a community of eccentric characters and individuals spread across three exquisite Georgian townhouses, offering an exceptional range of facilities including restaurants, bars, a boutique gym and health spa, elegant bedrooms, opulent private dining rooms, a beautiful courtyard garden and an unrivalled members events calendar. Home House is an inspiring space where people can connect, relax and be their best selves, building communities that inspire individuality.
We went on a tour around the club, omg, if these walls could talk…
After a lovely dinner, amazing service and intriguing walk around the place it was time to get some sleep before we hit the streets of London.
The next morning we went straight to the Abbey Street crossing, the iconic Beatles recording studio.
When John, Paul, George and Ringo walked across a zebra crossing in Abbey Road, St. John's Wood at 11.35am on August 8th 1969, they created one of the most iconic album covers in history.
And did we try to cross the road at the same place, stopping the traffic? Of course we did, we had to! Check the photo albums! 🤗
We wondered the streets in the Westminster suburb of London, from Bakers Street, to Bond street full of branded posh shops, to Ritz hotel and Green Park till we arrived to the Buckingham Palace and the Piccadilly Square. So many people, it’s crowded here and they say this is nothing compared to the summer time!
We carried on exploring the Parliament Square area where the Parliament Building is, famous Churchill Rooms underground that looked as if Churchill and his team had just left the meeting, to Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and finally reaching the London Eye.
The London Eye is the largest observation wheel in the world, built in 1999 on the south bank of the river Thames in London. Standing 135 metres high, it gives a panoramic view of London up to 25 kilometres in all directions. Apparently you can get married in the Eye at the very top and from there everything goes downhill 😂!
We went up and enjoyed it, the views are stunning!
Within the proximity of the Eye is the biggest aquarium in Europe situated in the County Hall.
We walked over 25,000 steps and soaked in the history, buildings, architecture. After the quiet Iceland nature, the noise and busyness of London made me feel dizzy! A couple of days later it became a new norm and I felt fine.
The next day we went with our friends to the Thames river cruise all the way to Greenwich to see the meridian line 0, to experience the cruise and see the local markets. We loved this trip, so informative, entertaining and we had a sunny day again! So far we’ve had one rainy evening! Apparently very unusual for London and this time of the year, so so lucky!
Fun fact: Wharf stands for a warehouse at river front, I didn’t know that!
We had a lovely lunch in a typical British pub, and Greenwich village reminded us of Devonport village.
The next day we went from the City of Westminster to the City of London to visit the Tower of London and the London Bridge.
I loved the Tower of London, my favourite spot. Again, a sunny day made it perfect for us, although the temperatures have dropped to 4 degrees. We wore warmer clothes here than in Iceland, winter is definitely coming!
We’ve learnt pretty quickly you need to allow an hour for transport one way wherever you go, minimum! And you need to plan your stay in advance to maximise your time here. This city is HUGE!
What else did we visit?
In the morning we continued wondering the streets of London.
After seeing Westminster Abbey we went to see St Paul’s Cathedral. I didn’t like Westminster Abbey as much, it felt like we were walking through an internal graveyard, the coronations information was interesting, still there was no spiritual feeling for me. St Paul’s cathedral was a different story.
Since we had a great weather we left museums and galleries for another time and enjoyed the outdoors. We’ve walked through the Hyde Park and loved it. So many people enjoying the park, dancing on roller skates entertaining people walking by, so many families, couples, friends sitting on the grass and having picnics. Londoners know how to enjoy a sunny day that’s for sure!
We went to Borough market, huge! So many different stalls from food to clothing to antiques etc, anything and everything!
We finished our trip with a visit to The Great London Fire Monument nearby the Paddington Road. I had to see it, it’s the birth place of the insurance industry.
The Great Fire of London was a major fire that swept through central London. The fire started in a bakery in Pudding Lane shortly after midnight on Sunday 2 September 1666 and spread rapidly over a few days gutting the medieval City of London inside the old Roman city wall.
The resulting fire was devastating. It consumed an estimated 13,200 houses, St Paul’s Cathedral, 87 parish churches, Guildhall, and The Royal Exchange. In addition to the many thousands who died in the fire, others caught fatal diseases that were rampant in the overcrowded temporary housing that had to be built or perished during the bitter cold of an especially harsh winter just a few months later.
At a time when London’s income as a city was £12,000, the fire itself is estimated to have caused £10 million of damage – about £1.5 billion in today’s money.
Creation of fire insurance
In the aftermath of the Great Fire, London needed to be completely rebuilt – clearly, a mammoth undertaking.
Initially, funds for that reconstruction were gathered through charitable donations collected by parishes in and around the capital. Inevitably, however – then as now – donation fatigue began to set in. Despite contributions from churches all over the country only an estimated 0.13% of the projected rebuilding costs were collected in this way.
But there is nothing quite like a devasting tragedy to focus the mind on preventing fires from causing such damage in the first place.
In the year immediately following the Great Fire, a doctor, businessman, and Member of Parliament, Nicholas Barbon, set up the world’s very first insurance company. Known as the “Fire Office” the principal aim of the enterprise was to employ its own private fire brigade to put out the fires in any of the buildings which the company insured.
Reacting to the obvious demand, other insurance companies followed – with names like the Hand-in-Hand and the Friendly Society. Despite the names, though, these companies were not set up for the protection of the public but rather as employers of the fire brigades that would put out fires of insured buildings.
If a fire broke out, all the insurance company-owned fire brigades would rush to the scene to find out whether the fire was in a building insured by their company – and if it wasn’t, they’d simply go home or stand around and watch. (This later changed and Insurance companies often had reciprocal arrangements with each other, so that if a fire brigade extinguished a fire at a house insured by another company then the brigade’s company would be reimbursed).
By 1690 one in ten of the houses in the capital was insured. The idea of fixing a “fire mark” to identify an insured building also gained ground. The company most actively involved in the issue of fire marks was the Sun Fire Office – by the year 1720, it has issued more than 17,000 insurance policies with a combined value of some £10 million. The Sun Fire Office was later to become Royal Sun Alliance and today is known as RSA Insurance Group. And the rest is history!
I am sure you get why I was so keen to see this place! 😉👍.
A few fun facts:
Over 300 languages are spoken in London making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. The top five non-English languages reportedly spoken are Polish, Turkish, Bengali, French, and Punjabi.
London was once the capital of 6 countries at the same time. In World War II, London served as the governing capital for other European countries which were conquered by Germany. The leaders of Norway, Poland, Belgium, France, and The Netherlands stayed in London between 1939 and 1945.
The world’s oldest underground rail network is in London. The first public transportation system to use steam engines was the London Tube. On January 10, 1863, the Metropolitan line's first segment from Paddington to Farringdon opened. Five years later, a second underground line went into operation. Metropolitan number 23 is the oldest surviving steam locomotive and it is on display at the London Transport Museum.
Big Ben isn't really called Big Ben.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that iconic London tower we’ve been calling Big Ben isn’t really called Big Ben. Actually, the clock in the Tower is the one that is called “Big Ben.” In honor of the Queen's diamond jubilee, the famed Tower's name was changed from Clock Tower to Elizabeth Tower in 2012.
That’s us! Unexpected, unplanned and spontaneous trip to London was pretty cool. We are grateful to our Kiwi friends who hosted us and ensured we were looked after.
We flew back to Belgrade, and now you need to wait a bit to see what comes next! Not sure if we know it ourselves or not 😉
How could you be in London and not attend an evening show?
We picked two, Abba Voyage and Tina Turner musical.
Abba Voyage
The grandiose show took place at the purpose-built ABBA Arena in Stratford, East London. The arena is moveable and it can be packed up and moved. The costs for the purpose-built venue and the technology that delivers the avatar-driven concerts cost around $175m. The first show opened in May 2022. In 15 months, the show has generated more than $150 million in sales and sold more than 1.5 million tickets.
The venue is full every night and, with an average ticket price of about £85 ($105), the show is making more than $2 million a week.
The show won’t be in London forever, though: after December 2023, the ABBA-tars will hit the road with their 10-piece live band on a world tour that will last until 2026.
The producers are now in talks to take ABBA Voyage to other places including Las Vegas, New York, Singapore and Sydney.
Additionally, the band recorded more songs than are currently in the set list, and that the ILM wizards have enough on ABBA to animate any additional songs they choose. All of this makes the idea of repeat viewings quite appealing for some hard ABBA fans.
So how was it, you may ask?
This was definitely something different! We’ve seen many things we’ve never seen before. The feeling of being inside the arena was unique, it was very immersive. It’s a piece of theatre, a piece of performance, a concert like no other. When you enter the arena, a wintry forest fills the screen, setting a bucolic and yes, Swedish tone. Any type of recording devices are strictly prohibited from this point forward with violators informed they could be ejected from the theater. Extra points go to the audience members who dressed up in their best spangly or boa-centric outfits or the groups of friends who you could tell were forming unforgettable memories with this experience.
Then the lights went down and there they were. I won’t spoil the set list—a wonderful combination of the hits and some surprising deep cuts—but I will share how it felt to be there.
They did not look like holograms. These ABBA-tars, as they’ve been dubbed, cast shadows on the stage. Their sequins shimmered brightly and when they sang and moved, you felt that they were truly three-dimensional and very much in the room with you. Only when the screen would display close-ups, as one sees at most arena shows, could you detect a bit of that uncanny valley sensation, but those were merely fleeting moments. Because they recorded themselves, you feel the heart and emotion in these performances. Sure, they could look a bit dead-eyed or have jerky movements here and there, but haven’t we all?
To sell that live feeling, each ABBA member gets a chance to speak to the audience, sometimes hilariously and sometimes movingly. The talented backing band get the occasional projected close-ups as well, further convincing you that everything is happening in real time.
I am unsure if I actually liked it or not. It’s indisputable this is a technical show at its utmost best! My brain can’t explain how they’ve done the holographic show where ABBA-tars look so realistic, but they did it!
A few thoughts from my perspective:
I don’t think I felt deep emotional connection, my brain was a bit confused! You are going to laugh, but I didn’t even notice there was a live band in a corner until the third song, and then I wondered what was it that my eyes were looking at? A live band and supporting vocals or another holographic magic?
Looking at the crowd around us, there were people like us, looking amazed at all technical things enjoying the music, while others were completely emotionally connected as if it was 1979. People danced, swayed, hugged and some cried. We were at the Abba live show?!
I wondered why ABBA did it? If it was to leave a legacy behind, then for me their music is their biggest legacy. If it was to create the band immortality and attract new generations to their music, then I can understand it.
If it was about pushing tech boundaries and being the first in the entertainment market with something so unique that required them to gather and perform once again, then hats down!
In short, it was a very interesting experience that showcased what’s possible today, and finally see ABBA “live”, or more accurately, we saw them at their absolute best. I don’t think this is the last we’ve seen of this type of show, let’s see who is next…
Tina Turner musical at Aldwych Theatre
Wow that was totally amazing experience and I am 100% certain I loved it! London crew was phenomenal, music as always great and the story heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once, with a seal of authenticity approval by no one other then Tina Turner herself! If you ever have the opportunity to watch this musical I’d say buy the best tickets and enjoy!
London Photo Album
ABBA Voyage Photo Album
TINA Musical
