Anniversary

I can't remember what time we woke up this morning, but as this was our actual anniversary day we were both eager to open the presents we had been hiding from each other in our luggage.  My present included chocolate so I was happy.

The plan for today was to go to London Zoo because neither of us had been before and in recent years we had done a lot of the other touristy things so we thought this would be something different. Rain was forecast so I made sure I had a brolly with me. We got off the tube at Regent's Park and according to the announcement on the train we should look for bus stand C for buses to the zoo.  After walking up and down the road we couldn't find stand C, and neither could other people who had been on the same train as us.  We even asked a bus driver, who didn't seem to understand the question and then pointed us in totally the wrong direction.  At this point we opted for walking through Regent's Park as the zoo was only at the other side and wasn't that far.

There was quite a lot going on in the park with dog walkers and joggers, people playing football, parents with kids and my particular favourite, a group of people doing Thai Chi. I wasn't brave enough to take a photo of them, but it just reminded me of a film.

London zoo is quite small, and I have to say, it's not as good as Chester zoo but there were a few highlights.  There was a little display going on with some of the smaller animals and I loved having the owls fly right over my head.

Bob the burrowing owl

One of my favourite places was the butterfly house.  They were just flying around all over the place.  Some of them were huge and very beautiful.  There was one particular blue variety that took a liking to my colourful coat and kept landing on me.

The blue one that liked my coat

This is the coat they liked.

My colourful butterfly attracting coat

We are totally on the penguin band wagon and arrived at their enclosure just before feeding time.  Here is my favourite character from our zoo day.  He is called Ricky the Rock-hopper.  We failed to get a video of him doing this but Robert was bending down by the glass and moving his finger around.  Ricky followed its movements intently just like a cat would.  We found it highly amusing.  He has his own Facebook page.

Ricky the Rock-hopper

By this time it had started to rain. I was fine under by brolly but Robert was getting wet, so he stopped at one of the little shops and bought himself a penguin umbrella.  It was bigger than mine and I thought about asking him to swap, but decided to be nice and let him have the big umbrella.  After all, he'd need it for his sticky out ears.

It was late afternoon and we were getting pretty hungry, so we left the zoo and walked back through the park in the rain.  It wasn't too heavy or cold and the walk was quite pleasant.  Just before we reached the other end Robert made a school boy error.  "At least it's not been torrential rain" he said.  About five minutes later, guess what.  That's right, an absolute downpour.  Luckily we were fairly near the tube station, but we still got substantially wetter.

We had booked to go and see The Ladykillers in the evening, and after a nice leisurely dinner we made our way to the theatre.

The Gielgud Theatre, Shaftsbury Avenue

Our seats were in the dress circle and were very good.  Two ladies came to sit next to me with anoraks and humbugs.  After much fussing with coats and bags and elbow banging (my elbow) they settled down for a nice chatter which I thought wasn't going to stop even when the play started, but they did eventually behave themselves, apart from the very noisy humbug sharing about two thirds of the way through the first half.  They went out at the interval and didn't bother coming back for the second half which was fine by me but I don't understand how you can pay so much for a ticket and then not bother to get your monies worth. 

The theatre is just round the corner from the tube station we needed at Piccadilly, and also just round the corner is a Cinnabon shop.  I'd heard about these but never had one, so as this was an "anything goes" kind of weekend, we bought four bite size ones, and took them back to the hotel.  There were very nice indeed and definitely lived up to their reputation.