Weekends with visitors

The last weekends were really full with activities like sightseeing and having dinner in nice restaurants. As mentioned in the last entry Dave's parents were visiting from Kansas City and while they spent the weeks exploring England and Scottland the weekends were reserved for activities with us.
One highlight was the long weekend in London. I don't know why, but I love and hate this town. I am always very excited going there and I make plans what I want to see and do this time, but as soon as I am there it seems like there are too many people and especially too much traffic. This is the time I would like to go to one of the nice parks and stay there until we can have sushi and go home.
But this time we had a very full schedule. I arrived on a Thursday night. Dave just got promoted to Lt.Col. and we wanted to celebrate this during this weekend. They all picked me at Stansted airport and we drove to the hotel. The place we stayed was located in East London, which is kind of colorfull area with a lot of immigrants from every culture you could think of. The hotel itself is located in the soccer stadium of Westham United, which was fun. It was only a 5 minutes walk to the next underground "tube"-station. We had almost three full days in London, but this never seems enough. On Friday we did a bus sightseeing tour. Then we had "High Tea" at the Savoy hotel. Well, not a place to wear jeans and sport shoes, and not a place to expect a lot of food for 60$ per person ;o), but a very high society atmosphere, tea of all kinds (even if I don't think they know how to do it properly) and some nice little bits and bites of different things. After this we went to a show: Billie Elliot, the musical. Have you seen the movie? It is mainly about a 12 years old boy who comes from a workers family and instead of boxing he became interested in ballet. That was hard to exept for his dad who was on strike for keeping the coal mines in this area open and therefore had to fight every day for surviving. Really, it was amazing what the 13year old boy who played the main character showed. Great.
The next day we had time to go on a "flight" on the London Eye. Look at my flickr page to see what I am talking about. It is the big wheel. After this ride Dave's parents and we separated for a while. They visited Westminster Abbey while we went to the Aquarium. I've seen so many churches, abbeys and cathedrals since I am a frequent visitor to England that I already have a hard time remebering what I saw where. Well, and I am always intersted in animals ;o)
We also went to Buckingham Palace. All the roads around the palace were closed since they had a test run for the Queen's birthday parade. What else? A drink at the Sherlock Holmes Pub (where Sir Doyle wrote one of his stories), another church visit (St. Pauls cathedral), some shopping at Oxford street, a quick visit to Hyde Park and nice Sushi at a Japanese Restaurant. The last day was dedicated to the British Museum. We managed to see maybe half of the exhibitions there. We looked at the Assyrian, Greek and Egypt area as well as at the mummies. The also have the stone of Rosetta there, which helped to translate hieroglyphics. The best thing about almost all museums in England is: the entrance is free! They ask for a donation, but that is up to you. But I think it is a great idea to bring these things to everybody, so I of course donated some money.
That was my long weekend in England. Together with Dave's parents we also spent some more time in Cambridge and in the Norfolk countryside. Now they are home again and our weekends will be back to normal...whatever this means.
Maybe we should start thinking of some more details regarding the wedding next year...and Dave needs to learn Scuba diving....I want to go mountain biking....and then there is the business trip to Vancouver next week...
Well, I don't think I will be bored during this summer ;o)