Day 3 London wanderings

 It’s a good thing I like shoes because my room at Z Hotel in Soho is a shoe box.  At 459 pounds for 3 nights it’s the Manolo Blahnik of shoeboxes.  The bed is a wide single, the floor space immediately inside the door is slightly wider than a single, and it has a fancy bathroom at the end.  That’s it.

No room for cat swinging here!

It’s quiet and clean, and given the noise on the street outside on my first night here, that was a welcome discovery.

I slept really well, woke every few hours but went straight back to sleep again until about 6am.  Made coffee x 2 using my jeds bags brought from home, and caught up on the blog.  Headed out about 9.30 and grabbed breakfast at the nearest Pret.  I tried an extra shot in their horrible coffee in the hope of making it palatable, but I wasted 60p for an extra horrible coffee.  Wandered up Regent street in search of the Breitling shop, to see if I could drop off J’s watch for repair.  It’s about 16 years old and the self wind mechanism needs a kick start in the morning to get it going again.  Why, I hear you ask, would I bring a watch halfway round the world to get it fixed?  Good question.  NZ does not have a Breitling agent, and the only option was to send it to Sydney for assessment.  I had hopes that I could drop it off to a shop here in London and have it fixed before I leave in 5 weeks.  Not so.  They also have to “send it away for assessment” to quote on what it will cost to repair, and then if I accept the quote the repair will take ….. 6 to 8 weeks.  Yup.  They won’t courier it back to me when it’s repaired (if we go ahead) but they would allow my nephew Cameron to collect, provided I give them consent via email and he brings ID, fair enough.  What to do ……

Next I wandered to Three to buy us some sim cards to use in Iceland.  Spark doesn’t have a roaming plan, so this was the next best option.  Cost is 20 pounds for 60GB of data for a month.  Pretty good deal, and they have good coverage with the main provider in Iceland.  When I went to pay with my 2 x 20 pound notes left over from our 2019 trip I found these are no longer accepted, and I will have to take them to a bank to be exchanged.  Cash is hardly accepted anywhere these days, so no point keeping any on you at all, cards are tapped everywhere.

Continued wandering and mooched in and out of stores, just looking, no purchases, mindful of travelling light.  Wandered down to Trafalgar Square and sat there for a bit until the pigeons got too friendly, and had a stab at taking in some culture at the National Portrait Gallery.  I am clearly a complete philistine, because the lump of oil paint on the wall that was supposed to be some fantastic art work, built in layers to be almost sculpture-like looked like a blob of white and black newspaper clumped and left to dry, and no way could I see any semblance of a face.  I didn’t stay long.

My nephew Cameron had arranged to meet me at Holborn station he has been here since mid-2020, working as an architect and has recently got a work visa to stay here for 5 years.  He is making to most of access to Europe for travel, and also discovering that it is not all beer and skittles, and making a connecting flight using Ryanair and a NZ passport requires a good sprint through the terminal to board on time.  We sat in The George pub for a few hours chatting and generally catching up, before heading back to Soho to meet his girlfriend Lucy for a kebab dinner at Le Bab. 

Then it was time to call it a night, so I headed back to my Blahnik to sleep.