"I told Yah"...."I told Yah"....That's what I woke up to. Hannah repeatedly telling daddy "I told yah" in the other room. It was around 8:15 AM but we still did not leave the house until shortly after lunch. We are definitely still very jet lagged.

We headed out with all intents and purposes of going to Trafalgar Square but then randomly changed our mind when we heard the lady robot voice on the underground at Green Park say that we could get out to see the Buckingham Palace. We walked through park and towards the Palace Gates.

There was an event going on in the Palace for what we thought was for War Veterans. We got to see lots of fancy dressed ladies with awesome hats :)

After taking a few pictures we headed towards our original destination, Trafalgar Square. Again without any particular planning we ended up walking through St. James's Park and decided to let the kids take a walking break and eat some apples.

Taking a walking break in St James's Park

Hannah had fun picking flowers from the field and giving them to mommy, daddy, and Kian.

After that we took a nice long walk during which Hannah was picked up and took a short nap to Trafalgar Square in search of the ice cream shop where, in 2006, we first talked about picking 'Hannah' as our daughter's name if one day we were going to have one. We didn't end up finding it. So we picked just picked the nearest cafe called, Pompidou.

Kian had a delicious chocolate pastry with milk and we enjoyed an apple caramel crepe. Hannah woke up at some point during our afternoon dessert feast and got a strawberry ice-cream.

Kian and Boney the dog enjoying a delicious chocolate pastry

After everyone had regained their energy we walked to Trafalgar Square and had fun with the fountains and the lions.

We also saw a cool street performer do a neat balancing trick with a few crystal balls.

We then decided to head to Piccadilly Circus which was not a very long walk away. On the way we encountered another one of our favorite telephone booths and Hannah and Baby Ginger made a quick call.

We have no particular interest in shopping during this trip so we just walked through Piccadilly Circus. We didn't even stop to take any pictures since Kian was falling asleep. We had enough time to just walk to the South Bank from Piccadilly and since we don't mind the exercise we skipped the underground.

We ended up having another random experience and walked through the Horse Guards Parade where Hannah had lots of fun collecting mini rocks and we enjoyed the view.

Playing with rocks at Horse Guards Parade

For dinner we met up with an old colleague, Simon B, in the South Bank at a South American restaurant called Las Iguanas.

The food was good and we were able to sit outside. The service wasn't so great, no servers for outside so there were repeated, lengthy trips to the bar to order food and drinks, and the bartenders were clueless on how to take meal orders for children. Simon informed us bad service is pretty typical of London where there isn't much of a tip culture.

Crazy Quesadillas

Meaty Mini Burgers

Taco Sampler

Gambas

After dinner we were caught in the famous London rain but found refuge under some trees, and by the time we headed to the underground the rain had turned into more of a mist. Thanks Simon for coming out to meet us, sorry, we forgot to take a picture!

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