Tourists, Rain, Upscale Shopping: Doing the Tourist Thing on a Saturday

Some Highland Shortbread and a cup good hot tea is just what we needed when we got back to our room after nearly eight hours out and about in London.  We had way more stairs and steps than we had planned on when we left our hotel in Shoreditch and headed to the Old Street Tube Station this morning.  We were hoping the weather would hold, but we had showers off and on all day and pretty steady from lunch time until we got on the tube at Tower Hill to head this way.

We saw a lot more of London today. 

Many of the workers were working on Saturday and we watched a crew use a pretty basic method to get scaffolding parts from the street level to the upper levels of a building.

We also observed a lot more privately owned vehicles on the streets today since the ten pound tariff does not apply on weekends.

We rode by most of the major museums.  We will be back to them next week.  Today the crowds of tourist was horrendous and the lines into some like the British Museum (security check point) were really backed up.

About eleven we ended up at Harrods.  The store takes up an entire block and has enough high end merchandise to bankrupt a third world country.  It also has a lot of delectable items to eat such as caviar and truffles…..that’s the mushrooms not the candy.  Klep found a bottle of wine that cost about three hundred dollars. 

I found a few designer dresses, but I thought I would be overdressed rolling the garbage can to the street in them.  Klep remarked that he didn’t know there were as many perfume scents as we passed going through a section of the ground floor.

After we left Harrod’s, we ducked in a little restaurant Richoux established in 1909 in London, to get out of the rain and had lunch.  We decided to try something we’d never had before. 

I ordered Welsh Rarebit and lime squash to drink; Klep, Buck Rarebit and orange squash.  It was tasty, but Klep wasn’t too excited about his anchovy.

While we were in Richoux,

we had a dozen or so police cars scream by with their sirens sounding and their lights flashing.  I must admit, that always makes me a tad nervous.

While we awaited our next bus, fortunately in a covered by stop, we were entertained by a bagpiper across the street in front of Harrods.

We took another tourist bus to Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park, hike around the corner to another bus stop and found the one on the route we had not covered.

I think when we boarded the tube to come back that we had seen most of what we wanted to see.  For those of you who watch Mr. Selfridge, the show on PBS about the store in London, you can still shop there and it is, I believe, on Oxford Street.

We stopped in at Sainsbury’s, our local grocery, picked up some shortbread and called it a day.  If we do dinner, it may be take-away kabobs!