My brother (Stephen) and his girlfriend (fiancee? – Michele) are moving to Finland from Malta this weekend. However they decided to detour through London, and are spending the weekend here. They arrived early this morning (at around 2:15am – AAAA), so we had a quite late morning. However, after we got up and had breakfast around 10:30/11am, they were soon eager to get on their way.
Our first stop was the British Museum. I must admit that though I have been in it a number of times, for lectures, meetings and what not, I haven’t ever really seen it properly. I thought today would be that opportunity. Alas, that didn’t work out! When we got in and got the map I realised that there was a film and discussion event going on which had just started one minute earlier. So we all decided to meet back where we were in just over an hour, and I hurried off to the BP lecture theatre.
The documentary being shown was episode 1 of Travels with Vasari, while the discussion was being led by Andrew Graham-Dixon, the presenter (and producer/director?) of the documentary. Ididn’t get round to the discussion part because the film took slightly longer than I expected and the time was there for me to meet up with the others. Nevertheless I really enjoyed the documentary. I always like the Renaissance period, anyways, so I would enjoy it in any case. However, we also had the book ‘Lives of the Artist‘ at school, so it was great to see the book being brought to life. You can see Part 1 of the documentary below, and can find the rest on youtube.
When we met up the others were hungry (although for once I wasn’t, as I had a big breakfast in anticipation of a busy day!). Anyways, the plan had been to go to Covent garden, but we decided to make a slight detour to the Dog and Duck. We have now been there a couple of times when we have visitors as we enjoy the atmosphere. And we weren’t disappointed! A few minutes after we arrived, all the other tables in the upstairs dining room were vacated (did we do something? 
) so we got the place to ourselves all throughout the meal. The waitress was very friendly and always present but not intrusive at all – I really like that. Also, the food was good English pub grub! Michele had fish and chips, Stephen had steak and ale pie, while Michael and I shared a sharing platter of toad in the hole. Delicious!
From there we then moved on Covent Garden as was the original plan. We had tried to meet up with a friend, but it just didn’t work out. So from there we then moved on to the Southbank, where we walked towards Tate Modern, crossed the Millenium Bridge, and arrived at St Paul’s Cathedral. By this time we were all quite exhausted, so we caught the tube home.
Back home we relaxed a bit before cooking and watching the Eurovision Song Contest Final – yeay
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