Saturday

We had good and full first full day in London.

We slept in a bit to fully adjust ourselves to the new time zone. When we finally did get going, we went to the Portobello Road Market. It claims to be world famous, and I hesitate to disagree. One thing both Stephanie and I have noticed is how intensely international London is. We know this shouldn't surprise us, but English seems to be spoken by a minority of the people we run across. We walked up and down the long market road and enjoyed some coffee and breakfast treats. We both enjoyed our time there.

After that, we walked around the Notting Hill and Kensington neighborhoods for a while, then decided we would try to acquire tickets for the afternoon's Chelsea football match. For more on that process, please read our previous post. Once we actually got into the match, we had a great time. We had nice seats really close to the field. We were surrounded by proper football fans. We were impressed by how many songs  they had that focused on how much they hate their coach Rafa Benitez. Recent Chelsea acquisition Demba Ba scored the only goal of the match, and Chelsea won 1-0 in a somewhat slow game.

Us, not in jail

...and very close to the action

After our football adventure, we came back the apartment briefly, then went down to Oxford Circus and walked around and watched people for a while. Then we ate dinner at Nando's, a quasi-fast food restaurant that features Portuguese Chicken. We had wings and beer, and it was very good. We ended the evening with more strolling around Piccadilly Circus and the West End before heading back toward home. We stopped in at a local store for some snacks before calling it a day.

Our agenda for tomorrow is pretty blank, so we're going to figure that now before what we hope is a more regular night of sleep than we have had for a few days.