A Sunday in the City

Today I am going to write about a (more) proper London weekend. This Sunday me and my new London friend went to walk in the City. We started with a Leighton House Museum which was highly recommended by TripAdvisor. Having looked at the museum's site, I was immediately inspired by the Arab motives on the pictures, and off we went. Sir Leighton was a rich and famous (within London at least, I presume) artist, who lived in the 19th century. The house, which was also a studio, is quite modest but very nice. The owner had a great taste, and house's interior is a pleasure to look at.

On our way to the museum, my friend took me through a beautiful Holland Park. It used to host one of the biggest properties in the vicinity - the Holland House - until it was demolished by German bombings in 1940. Even a brief glimpse on our way through the park made me make a mental note to come back here later.

Holland park is full of flowers, all for different seasons.

A smurf-house, or a dwarf-house if you please. Leftovers from the mighty castle.

Amazing gallery of paintings - actually one big painting separated by white arches.

Next, our plan was to go have a look at the Festival of Love at Southbank and the Wonderland next to the London eye. Since, it was quite far away from where we were, we decided to take Barclay Bikes. Barclays Cycle Hire is an amazing system for short bike rides: throughout the city there are bike stations with bikes, secured in the slots, and a payment machine next to it. Daily rent costs 2 pounds, however, this is only in case you use the bike for less than 30 minutes at a time. You pay when you first take the bike, cycle for less than half an hour, park it at the next station, and later during the 24 hour period you can take another bike at arbitrary station, and again, if you use it for less than 30 minutes, you are not charged anything extra. If you, however, go over your time limit, i.e. bike is not parked for more than 30 mins, every next hour started costs you 1 pound. This way you can move from station to station, park the bike, wait for 5 minutes, take the bike again and cycle further. The tricky part is that you plan your route, come to the next station, you have, say, 5 minutes to park it and... there are no slots available. So, you are here, standing with the bike at the station and eventually you get charged for overtime just because it was full. A slight variation of the above: you come, there are places, you park the bike, but your bike is the only one at the station now, you wait 5 minutes, in the meanwhile someone comes, pays for the bike and drives away. Now you are in the middle of your journey, you can take the bike now, but there are no bikes. My friend told me, that in spite of the bike company driving around and bringing bikes from one station to another to make sure every station has both bikes and empty slots available, still in the mornings the residential district stations are empty (all went to work) and central London stations are full (all came to work), and in the evenings it is vice versa - everybody is taking bikes from the hot spots in central London and driving them to residential districts.

In spite of all that, we were able to take the bikes and cycle where we wanted, at the same time getting our daily dose of fitness. 

Wonderland  and Festival of Love looked good. Lots of people, lots of music, lots of food - normal big city hangout on a great summer day.