Hiya! So last week I wrote about how I celebrated my birthday with my friends but I also had a day trip to London with my Mum to celebrate my birthday. I had a great time so I thought it would be nice to share the event of the day with you! I would highly recommend doing all of the things I did!
Admittedly, it was an early start (5:30am) as we had to get a train up to London at 7:30am. The first place we wanted to visit was Madame Tussauds, which opens at 9am so we decided to get there at 8:40am. If you can, I would advise using Tesco club card vouchers as it meant that we were straight into the venue and avoided all the queues! I had been to Madame Tussauds before but I loved going there again. It’s brilliant how you can go on stage with the waxworks and touch them when you get your picture taken. A couple of the waxworks didn’t look that much like who they were supposed to be i.e. Julia Roberts and Adele but most of them looked so real; it was almost as if Posh was staring straight at me! I was convinced Russel Brand was going to move when I touched him. I also enjoyed the 4d movie experience of Marvel characters (I think?!) as I loved all of the effects like the water and the moving chairs. We probably spent an hour and a half in there before we had some late breakfast in Café Nero.
Our next stop was Notting Hill! We hadn’t planned to go there as we thought Madame Tussauds would take longer but as we had enough time I suddenly thought I would love to visit Notting Hill as ‘Notting Hill’ is my third favourite film of all time (I love films and I have a vast collection so that means I adore this film). We ended up walking down Portobello Road and visiting Portobello market. It was lovely to just wander through the streets, popping into shops and marvelling at the beautiful houses. I googled where William Thacker’s house and book shop were and I believe I visited both of them (if the website was correct). I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed visiting Notting Hill and I would urge anyone to go there. It feels wonderful to have (potentially) visited parts of where Notting Hill was filmed!
After spending an hour or so wondering around Notting Hill we made our way to the Tate Modern. We ate lunch in the café there, which was a bit expensive, but I guess most places in London are expensive! After a lovely lunch we went to look around the gallery. As lunch took longer than expected we only had an hour to look around. This actually worked out fine as we could only visit two floors (there were members’ floors and ticketed exhibitions) so we spent half an hour on each. I think that this was a sufficient amount of time as my mum is not the sort of person to stand and admire each piece of art, but I would have probably spent longer if I was alone. There were so many innovative, fresh and thought provoking pieces of art and I particularly loved the work of Simryn Gill who exhibited captivating photographs of people with fruit for their faces. I also loved the rooms which featured videos playing; they were very original and intriguing.
I have to apologise as I do not have any more time to continue writing, but I will continue this post next Sunday!
Love, Sydney
Sydney Actually 