We got up in good time to catch the first train after 9.30am up to town. Our first destination was the Museum in London - Docklands and we had to travel to Canary Wharf to get there. There was a very well designed exhibition on the hidden rivers of London and we learnt about the Wandle which I lived near when I was in my flat and also the Lee and river Crane near us now. The exhibition was very well laid out and the entire museum is so interesting, housed in an original warehouse nearly three hundred years old and rather incongruous amongst the modern high-rises in Docklands.
It was heading for lunchtime and I was keen to try a new food hall/market that I had read about near Borough. It was rather off the beaten track but Mercado Metropolitano was really good. With a wide range of different food stands, plenty of space to sit and a micro brewery on site. There were outside gardens and heaters although with the intermittent rain we chose to sit in. I tried a half of a local blond lager and a Lebanese platter, Colin went for ginger beer and a Caribbean jerk chicken dish - both delicious.
As the food market was somewhat ‘off piste’ we took a bus up to Blackfriars bridge to visit (the high point of the day) part of the Thames River Festival exhibition. We were headed to the Barge House located behind the Oxo building to see three floors of exhibits and information about mud-larking on the Thames. It was fascinating and I got to meet Nicola White who I follow on Twitter as well. I am really enthusiastic to try and get a permit from the London Port Authority to enable me to start looking at at our local shoreline.
We were flagging a bit now so needed a cup of tea before our final destination for the day - the Frontline Club in Paddington for a talk on Costa Rica organised by Wanderlust magazine. We walked along the South Bank and then over the Waterloo Bridge and caught the second bus of the day to Trafalgar Square and The Crypt Cafe. This is one of my favourite places for a snack and fuel stop in London.
We were cutting it a bit fine but managed to get the overcrowded Bakerloo Line to Paddington and find the location in Praed Street. After a thirty minute wait the talk started. Unfortunately it was a bit of a repeat of a talk we had heard at the Destinations show back in February with little new information. The guy was meant to be a photographer but to be honest his images were not that impressive and the bulk of the talk seemed to be about the high standard of accommodation in the country. Good points of the evening - we got two drinks and some nice canapés (although I did pay £5 a ticket) - bad points, the evening did absolutely nothing to persuade Colin to look into this destination as a possible future trip for us. Never mind. We were pretty shattered when we eventually got back over 12 hours since setting off in the morning with 15,076 footsteps.
