Easter Weekend

I'm still a few weeks behind on updates, so here's quick one covering Easter weekend.

We didn't do anything until the Saturday, as Friday was spent at home nursing a hangover. When we did leave the house on Saturday, we ended up catching the tube to the mail depot to pick up a parcel and then making an epic walking journey to Kew Gardens. The epic journey was my fault as I severely misjudged the distance on the map from Acton town to Kew.

When we finally made it to Kew, we went to the local Tesco and bought ourselves a picnic lunch and made for the garden gate. The queue was only about 20 minutes to get in as the day itself was spectacularly sunny. By the time we got in we were half starved, so we headed for the nearest shaded area beneath a tree to tuck into our cured ham and cheese and baguette and whatever else we got.

The grounds of Kew Garden are immense, so even though there were a lot of people in the park, it hardly felt like it. There is nothing quite like the massive expanses of green lawn that are called 'parks' in England - it's nothing like the botanical gardens in New Zealand which tend to run steeply down a hillside. If I had to compare it to anywhere, it would have to be Hagley Park in Chch.

There are a lot of very picturesque areas to be found walking amongst the gardens. There are little groves of different flowers such as rhododendrons and azaleas; there's an arial walkway high above the tree tops;  tropical glass greenhouses that allow you to climb around the steamy upper rim; and our favourite of the day - the fields of bluebells.

Note: I've just come back to writing this after a few weeks hiatus, so I apologise for any disjointedness.

After the gardens, we headed back on the district line when it began bucketing down with rain, lightning and all. We had tickets that night to go see Hamlet at the globe theatre and were concerned it might have been rained out. We got there in time for the show, which is definitely the best way to see the inside of the theatre. We had the 5 pound tickets for the ground in front of the stage, so if it had rained we'd have been soaked. There was only a very light bit of drizzle though.

The show itself was amazing and everything that I'd imagined a Shakespeare play at the globe to be like.

I'll dump a whole lot of pictures at the end here. Sorry, I don't have photoshop installed, so I can't make them look pretty so they will have a slightly washed out grayish quality to them.

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