Our London Visit Day 7 – Sightseeing and Knitting

On this last full day in London at first we visited the CLC Bookshop in Ave Maria Lane (near St. Paul’s).

Then we went to Liverpool Street Station to see the monument for the children’s transports. About 10,000 mainly Jewish children were saved from Nazi occupied territories and brought to Britain by people like Sir Nicholas Winton.

Afterwards we went to Paddington Station again for a different monument ;)

In early evening we set off to the Southbank Centre to meet the Stitch London knitting group in the Royal Festival Hall :) It is a lively and open group (anyone can just come and join them) consisting of mainly but not exclusively women of all ages. While I was with them, Hermann preferred to take photos outside.

On the following day we had to say good-bye to our beloved London :((((

Our London Visit Day 6 Part 2 – A Knitting Steampunk Event

In the evening we attended this special event at the Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road. Lauren O’Farrell a.k.a. Deadly Knitshade, the author of “Knit the City” and “Stitch London”, had invited me via Twitter. At first I was reluctant to go, because in the online information Lauren was not even mentioned, even though she was part of the event, and I really didn’t know what to make of something like Steampunk. In the end the wish to meet Lauren in person plus curiosity plus the fact that it was about BOOKS won over my scepticsm ;) But before we went Wikipedia had to do its job again.

The event was a book presentation mainly of books by Gail Carriger. First it was Lauren’s turn, though. She read a part from “Stitch London” before Ms. Carriger read from her book “Soulless”.

In the room hey had set up a table where the visitors got tea and the typical English colourful and extremely sweet cupcakes. Lauren had brought much of her work including Cooey the Pigeon and Plarchie the Giant Knitted Squid. The visitors sat around small tables sipping tea and eating cup cakes.

Talking about the visitors: most of them had dressed in full Steampunk attire. Not all of them, luckily, otherwise we would have felt terribly out of place ;)

After the book presentation there was a long queue in front of the table where Gail Carriger was signing books. I bought a copy of “Soulless” and when the queue was almost finished I had it signed, too. Currently I’m reading it. Even though vampires and werewolves are not actually my cup of tea it is very entertaining :)

Here is a video someone took of the event and uploaded on YouTube:

Our London Visit Day 6 Part 1 – Almost No Credit Cards Accepted!

Monday was the day with the worst weather of our trip, so we had to choose some indoor destinations – which is not really difficult in London ;) First we went to St. Paul’s Cathedral, but mainly to take some photos from the outside (from under arcades and roofed entrances) and visit the shop inside where we saw this very clerical chess board:

Afterwards we went to Paddington Station to have a look at the souvenirs in the Olympic Shop. To our big surprise we experienced something which we never had before or afterwards during all our shopping in London: this shop for the Olympics accepted only one kind of credit card – which unfortunately was not the one we used. We could hardly believe it! So it was one of the very rare occasions where we actually needed to pay cash. In every little shop we visited our card was accepted – not in this one. It really made us laugh!

So we decided to do some shopping in Oxford Street again where we never had such problems!