Long-weekend in London

Last Saturday hubby and I travelled to London for a long-weekend (Saturday to Tuesday). Sunday we spent the whole day at a conference center (enormous building!) celebrating the 50th anniversary of the TV show Doctor Who (the day was truly amazing), and Monday was spent seeing parts of London and doing some shopping. Hubby suggested that we went to check out the Christmas fair/market in Hyde Park, and so we did.

A huge part of the park was turned into a kind of swiss/german alpen village, with rides and stalls, a skating ring and other activities. 

Alpen Hotel - lots of shining lights.

There were lights and Christmas characters all over the place, and Christmas music filled your ears.

Huge snowman in front of the ferris wheel
(pariserhjul, in Norwegian).

The snowman was waaay taller than hubby.

I think we spent a good few hours walking around in Hyde Park checking out the Christmas market. We picked up a few things for our selves, and even found a couple of Christmas presents.

Santa's head on display.

Stumbling upon the pirate's castle, we saw that it was a good thing Mini wasn't with us - we'd never been able to get him out of there..

The pirate castle.

Yarr.. the robot pirate.

Decorated bench. I liked the little squirrel carved into
the back of the bench.

There was even a ghost train!

Ghost Train of Christmas Past.

 After a while, the chill of the November morning started to be noticeable, and we stopped by one of the stalls to get something warm to drink. We had plenty of things to chose from, everything from viking mead (whatever that was..), glühwein, hot chocolate and egg nogg - but we ended up trying something none of us had ever tasted before - apple nogg with amaretto and whipped cream. (Basically, this was warm apple juice with a splash of liqueur in it, and with whipped cream on top.)

The apple nogg-cup.

After a couple of hours it seemed like we'd covered most of the market, and we decided to walk over to Oxford Street to get some more shopping done.

Troll in the Bavarian Village.

If you're ever in London around the time before Christmas, we can both highly recommend the Christmas market/fair in Hyde Park. Although we were there in the morning, when there wasn't too many people there mostly other tourists and people with young children) it looked like it could be a fun place to come back to later in the evening - and all the lights would definitely have been impressive to see in all their glory at night (and not just in the sunny morning).