London with a Child - Natural History, Science, and British Museums plus a few parks

Hello out there and welcome to another episode of the Findlater travels.

This week instead of just being the adventures of Kyran and Mercedes Findlater we had a little tag-a-long Hector Findlater (Son of Hamish, Kyran's half-brother). 

Kyran and I were on Baby sitting duties, so this blog will be a little more of in and around London but from a Family/Child-accompanied point of view. 

This week I have learned that London is not all that Child friendly when it comes to mothers with prams. We were lucky that there was two of us, because I feel that we had to pick the pram up and carry it at literally every train/ subway station that we visited and half of the museums. 

From this respect I think that if you are planning to visit London with a stroller/ or wheel chair there needs to be a lot of prior planning and the trips and expect the trips to take you longer. 

The Natural History Museum:

(www.nhm.ac.uk)

Little Hector is crazy about dinosaurs so in an attempt to blow his little mind we took him to the Natural History Museum. I know that there has been previous blogs about this museum but lets revisit from Hectors point of view.

First thing we saw was the Giraffe and its skeleton and then the mammoth, and then with so much to see we ran around the entire museum saying "look" and "wow".

The following are a few pictures that I took along the way.

Hector is a little boy that is so into dinosaurs that he knows the names of dinosaurs that I have never heard of before. 

However when we got to the water dinosaurs he was looking a bit confused, I think a lot of children's stories focus on the land dinosaurs and not so much on the water one. In any case I think he was as equally impressed to see any dinosaur of any kind.  

We eventually got to the actual dinosaur display/ exhibition. As you walk in you can see dinosaur skeletons above you then as you turn the corner and walk down the corridor the light starts to dim. Eventually it gets pretty dark and you can hear growling. 

As you turn the corner you are faced with an animatronic T-Rex! It growls and moves its head and tail around. In front of it is a half eaten smaller dinosaur. 

All in all it is well put together and for the older kids it is fantastic. For little Hector it was terrifying and he went running out of that room soon after he saw it.

The rest of the display was bones/skeletons and animations, Hector enjoyed the rest of the exhibit but later when we asked him if he wanted to go see the dinosaurs one last time he said "yes" up until we got to the entrance and he realized that he would have to pass the T-Rex and instead said "I'm tired, I want to go home". 

The Science Museum:
(www.sciencemuseum.org.uk)
Since this was right next door to the Natural History museum and we had heard that there was a thing for smaller children we headed over to see what it was.

For those of you who are not familiar with this museum you enter and walk through towards the back of the building through various displays (Engines, cars, trains,rockets etc.). 
The section with the space rockets and moon landing stuff was themed, so dimly lit room, rockets on the roof. Poor Hector thought that he was going to meet the T-Rex again and kept running out of the room (I didn't realize this at the time). So needless to say there was no interest in space stuff (initially) from little Hector. 

Below are some photos of Hector and Uncle Kyran wandering around together.

On the Sunday we decided to go to the British Museum (www.britishmuseum.org), again we had to carry the pram everywhere.

The first story I have to tell you is about Hector and his shoes. I am sure this has happened to many a parent many a time, but here is what happened to us:

We were all getting ready to leave the house and I said " Hector go get your socks and get Uncle Kyran to help you put them on".

Hector did just that and then got in the pram, we all got ready and left the house running to try to get the train.

We missed the train only to be sitting at the station looking at Hector..." Hector where are your shoes?" So in the end it was a good thing that we missed our train or Hector wouldn't have been able to run around all day. Kyran was sent home to get him some shoes and the day was saved!

As with all kids they have good days and bad days, so we didn't get to spend much time in the British museum in the end. We did however manage to take a quick selfie and then took Hector outside to run around. 

Hopefully in the future we will do a more comprehensive blog on the British Museum.

After we got walking Hector fell asleep so we set off looking for somewhere to eat. We were unhappy to find out that our favorite "Vegan Hippo" place was closed for renovations. So we had to keep looking.

We ended up walking through China town and beyond. Here are two of the photos that we took along the way. 

The final food destination was a place called Firezza. (www.firezza.com/restaurant/dean-street), We were drawn in by the writing on the window offering Vegan Cheese on pizzas. The pizza was huge, very tasty, the pricing was reasonable (for London) and Kyran later got accused of eating ALL the pizza from Hector.

After a late lunch we decided to do a park crawl and wear Hector out before taking him home. I taught Hector how to play in the Autumn leaves and make piles to kick and jump in. We did that at the park and then headed home. 

The photo below is of Hectors new dinosaur hat that I made him, and he ran around the house "rawr"-ing like a dinosaur.

In the end we had a good weekend with little Nephew Hector. 

I know that this blog hasn't been one of our more adventurous ones but I though I could do a bit about our adventures with little Hector. 


One last thing to add is this Vegan cake we found around the corner from Hector's House. he cake shop/cafe was called "Le Grand Jour" and you can find it on Google maps here.

It was super tasty and super sweet, I couldn't eat the whole thing but Kyran stepped in to save the day and ate both his piece and half of mine! It had a VERY difficult (but tasty) layer of hard toffee or caramel style substance in the middle of it, making it quite a mission to eat it. But it was a good and successful mission!

Once again thanks for reading our blog, as always if you want to contribute to keep the blog full of adventures I have set up a Paypal account that you can donate to. 

paypal.me/findlatertravels

Also if there is anything that is around where we are and you want us to see it/review it please do let us know! we would love to hear from you. Send us an email at:

findlatertravels at hotmail.com

Until next time, I will leave you with this quote:

There's something so great about being with your nephew and, when you're tired, just handing him off back to your sister. 

- Tahj Mowry

London - Street Markets, Food and Canary Wharf

Hello and welcome to this weeks blog.

This is another one that was set in London, however we decided that we would set off to see the less touristy location of Canary Wharf. On the way we encountered a few street markets and found ourselves an American vegetarian/ vegan restaurant.

Warning: Some of the images you are about to see may cause uncontrollable hunger

But first: The plan was simple: get to London, get breakfast/ brunch and then go check out Canary Wharf.

On the map below the plan would have been arrive by train at the red dot, go to orange dot for breakfast and then yellow dot for the rest of the day. 

Here is what happened:

Did you know that London is like a ghost town early Sunday morning? There were people about but everything was shut like there has been some sort of Apocalypse and I wasn't told.

We knew the direction that we had to be walking so we headed that way. 

I remembered that I had once got lost in this direction before and that there was a building that had a giant aquarium in it so we decided that we would check it out on the way through. 

The photo below is taken from outside, as the building was closed like the rest of London.

"110 Bishopsgate boasts the largest private aquarium in Britain. This spectacular feature holds around 90,000 litres of water, 70,000 litres of which is contained within the display (featured in the lobby) and the remainder held within the life support system located three floors below ground in the basement levels of the building.

The display measures 12m wide by 2m deep and 4m high, weighing approximately 100 tonnes when filled. The aquarium itself is made from acrylic, not glass."

The information above, and photo below is stolen from this website http://www.herontower.info/your-building/aquarium

Once we had seen what could be seen of the aquarium we resumed our quest for food which google maps was telling us was 30 minutes away. Perfect because the place we were looking for didn't open till 11am (it was around 10:30 at the time..). 

The following are the distractions we found along the way, in the order that we found them in.

Petticoat lane Markets - This market seemed to sell only clothes and shoes, but it just seemed to spread the whole way down the main street and then out into some of the side streets (Apparently there are more than 1,000 stalls). Supposedly this a world famous market and we just happened to stumble upon it on the right day at the right time. 

Fun Fact: "Petticoat Lane" as a street doesn't actually exist any more - we have the Victorians' prudishness to thank for that, wishing to avoid any reference to undergarments they changed the name to Middlesex Street in 1846.(http://www.londontown.com/LondonInformation/Attraction/Petticoat_Lane_Designer_Fashion_Market/82c9/)

Spitalfields Markets - This was a more modern and dare I say 'hipster' market. It claims to be about arts and crafts, fashion and food. 

I found it fascinating how the English have adapted their outdoor places and between buildings into this market area that allows for an outdoor type of lifestyle/ market experience that is protected from the elements year-round. 

There were a lot of niche items in this market such as top hats and pin-up clothing. There was an entire shop of felted items (see photos below) and definitely some works of art! this market I have pinned to come back to at some point to spend more time at and perhaps spend more time checking out the food and drinks available.  (http://www.spitalfields.co.uk/)

Before we leave this market I do need to mention the little Ethiopian vegan stall that we spotted as we left the markets (Photo above: Bright green stall center right). All the food at this stall looked amazing but we had set ourselves the goal of finding this American-style vegan restaurant and tasting everything on their menu so we didn't want to eat anything to preserve room in our bellies. But this stall's food looked amazing, and we were still 30 minutes on foot from our destination so we decided to try a little and support such an amazing looking stall see photos below.

Their shop has a Facebook page you can visit, they are called Merkamo, and are an Ethiopian vegan food stall. 
https://www.facebook.com/merkamolondon/

So after the a quick snack we were back on the street and again still heading for brunch, but we came across yet another market and it too had so much good food (and other things, but we were so hungry at this point all we could see and smell was food!)

Brick Lane - According to it's website Brick lane is "a chaotic, bustling artistic hub which attracts a lot of young Londoners in search of second-hand furniture, unusual clothes and bric-a-brac." 

I am not sure even what to describe this market as, there was a lot of culture and art! 

Kyran's words were "There is too much culture here for me"

Just in the area around there were murals painted on the walls of the street (see below), innovation-spaces and huge contrasts between old and new/re-purposed spaces.

The innovation space that I mentioned above was the Second Home Spitalfields - I would like to mention this place here as it was appealing to me as a entrepreneur and having been in a part of the entrepreneur community since university these types of places fascinate me, and renews my faith in humanity. 

If you could point a type of infrared detector are these types of places and if it read the ideas and passion that flies around places like this you would see it glowing bright red, places like this are where the future comes from. People like this are who are changing the world and to have so many different people with so many different ideas all in the same place it allows for input, networking, pivoting, the ability to bounce ideas off each other.  AMAZING!! that's what I have to say about places like this!  
https://secondhome.io/ (If you wanted to check it out)
    
At last we made a bee-line for the restaurant as we could stand the hunger no more, nor could we resist the amazing food smells that we were continuously surrounded by. 

90 Degree Melt - The American restaurant that we were so dedicated to get to (http://www.90degreemelt.co.uk/). 

Surprisingly the food was very decent, when you hear american food you think fatty, overly large portions, cheese, meat and sugar. This place did offer some amount of that but the:

Pancakes were wholemeal (I think) and banana with topping of banana, berries and rose petals,
Chili & Sausages: Were sausages with small hash browns/ potato gems, bread and a wholesome chili bean mix.

The Pesto mushrooms on toast was exactly that, no extra sauces, but we did get vegan cheese in the place of feta.

The Melt, (this was may favorite) pesto, vegan cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers/ capsicums all in an toasted sandwich, simple but delicious. 

After we had eaten enough we continued on to complete the mission that we had set out to achieve - to wander through Canary Wharf and see all the fancy modern architecture. 

Canary Wharf: During the Second World War, the docks made the East End a prime target for German bombing raids. If you shut down the docks, you made life difficult for all of the UK and not just London. It is estimated that the Germans dropped around 2,500 bombs into the area, destroying a lot of the dock areas and local housing.

The ships are now bigger then the docks so they had to move out the ports where the water was deeper.

After the wharves closed down the properties in this area were owned by a few different companies that could not agree on anything. As land in London was always at a premium the government stepped in and created the London Docklands Development Corporation. The rest is history, development boomed and even during our visit if you stood in one place and rotated 360 degrees there were at least 8 high rise buildings going up.

Canary wharf in now a financial hub as well as being home to private luxury accommodation. 

That my friends brings us to the end of another blog with the Findlaters and our travels around the world.

If you do like reading our blog you should consider subscribing/following us, that way you know each time a new blogs gets posted.

If you want to contribute to keep the blog full of adventures I have set up a Paypal account that you can donate to. 

paypal.me/findlatertravels

Also if there is anything that is around where we are and you want us to see it/review it please do let us know! we would love to hear from you. Send us an email at:

findlatertravels at hotmail.com

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams. - Oprah Winfrey

***