London is truly the kind of city that surprises you at every turn so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to enter what would seem to just be another beautiful London Park to find that this particular one was host to a whole bunch of Dino sculptures! And not just any sculptures but the first dino sculptures in the world. Isn’t that all kinds of awesome? If this park was on my doorstep my running route would definitely including coming by and saying hi.

Even though these dinos were first installed in 1854, I like how Bromley Council have tried to bring them into the current century by installing some audio points along the trail.

There are other fun things in the Park as well, including a maze. Deceivingly simple eh Craig?

After we worked up an appetite walking around the park and making our way out of the maze we then totally undid all of that exercise by indulging in some lovely pub food (including a gorgeous ovened camembert with garlic) with Andrew and Elly, some friends of ours from work who live locally.

Jo likes to buy Groupon Deals and then round up people to take the offer up with her. In this case it was a round of golf at the Southwood Golf club. Groupon deals often sound good in theory and relatively cheap but activity type deals (like golf, zorbing, falconry etc.) are quite often in obscure locations that are not within reasonable walking distance of public transport or require a significant train journey. The Southwood Golf club offer was one of those deals but luckily Jo had arranged to borrow a car to make the journey a little easier on us.

I was quite excited to be out on the golf course. Its been way too long since I’ve been on the driving range – one of the best ways to work out any excess aggression. Heh heh.

When we arrived at the club I was expecting there to be many other people taking advantage of the groupon deal, meaning a lot of other amateur golfers like us! But there weren’t – we must have waved through at least six groups after us. Heh heh.

We started out the first hole with the intention of scoring … but it was pretty clear after everyone’s 6th or 7th shot just to get to the green that the score card was fairly redundant. Heh heh. Still, that didn’t stop each one of us having at least two spectacular and quite miraculous shots throughout the day.

We won’t mention the fact it took us nearly five hours to finish the 18 holes … 😉 A great day but many my butt is sore from all that walking! Who said that golf wasn’t proper exercise??!!

For my birthday this year Sandra was treating me to a spa experience at the Six Senses Spa over at Canary Wharf. Being a Saturday the area was, thankfully, devoid of suits. Its always a bit eerie to visit Canary Wharf when there are no city-folk about but I like it sooo much more …

The Six Senses Spa isn’t particularly large (so I do wonder how it copes when it gets much busier.) The offer that Sandra had got for us was an Aromatherapy Associates Essential Facial (25 minutes), use of the Thermal Suite and ginger tea with dried fruits in the Tranquility Lounge.

Upon arrival the receptionist was friendly enough but clearly didn’t really care that much to invest in us. She showed us the changing rooms but didn’t bother showing us around the facilities. I felt she was kind of fake, even if she was on the surface being quite friendly. The changing room themselves wasn’t very big with two showers, I think about 15 lockers and a few hair dryers. At least they had a swimsuit drying machine, oh and robes, towels, shampoo, conditioner and body wash are supplied.

First for us was the use of the Thermal Suite. The facilities were pretty stock standard (with a steam room, sauna, and traditional dry sauna (that didn’t really get cranking until after about an hour after the facilities opened.)) The sensory shower was good. However the best part of the Suite was the Hydrotherapy pool which was quite large and had interesting jets. Got crowded though when more than six people were in the pool.

Next up were out facials. My therapist was very friendly and accommodating. In fact most of the people in the spa, bar the receptionist, were very friendly, even going so far as to put the blanket over you once you’d finished your session and were relaxing back in the Tranquility Lounge. The Lounge had space for about 8 people, so not sure what they do with the extra people once they got out of their treatments.

Overall a pleasant enough experience and good for a two hour visit.

Given time and money, Namco is a place I could happily spend hours playing around in. Tonight Craig, James and I certainly gave it a good old college try. There is bowling (albeit of the dodgy-sort where the pins are held up by pins. In fact we hit many strikes but the computer kept registering only 9s!), and bumper cars and of course a ton of arcade games.

For all our effort this was the extent of our prizes!

Next stop on the “Rache’s Last Day in London” itinerary was a Chocolate Walking Tour with Great British Tours.

The walking tour had a pretty good itinerary visiting the following areas:

• Cox Cookies & Cake (the place known for adult themed cupcakes – the chocolate coming from the Triple Valrhona Chocolate Chip cake) (S)
• Mrs Kibble’s Old Sweet Shop (not strictly linked to chocolate it nevertheless was a cute find with jars are filled with retro sweets)
• Freggo (Arguably the best ice cream in London – the tenuous link to the tour being a chocolate ice cream flavour) (S)

• Prestat (One of the oldest chocolate shops in London Prestat has been awarded two Royal Warrants which basically means it’s a supplier to the royal family! The Dufour family who created the store is widely credited with creating the truffle)
• Fortnum & Mason’s
• Ladurée (Again a tenuous link with chocolate – but I can well understand people’s obsession with gorgeous macaron – the Salted Caramel one I had today was divine)
• Charbonnel & Walker (A posh chocolate store and truffle specialist)
• Selfridges but mainly we had a pitstop to visit Godiva. (S)

The stop at Godiva was the best of the whole tour. The tour which was sadly lacking in chocolate tastings (which is what you normally expect from a chocolate tour.) Godiva not only gave us a little talk on what to look for in good chocolate but gave us plenty of samples (which other members of the public were very happy to muscle in on! Honestly some people have no shame!)

So, what do you look for when tasting chocolate? There are four things:

1. Shine. The chocolate should be shiny.
2. Snap. When you snap the chocolate there should be a loud audible snap.
3. Smell. True chocolate makers will not wear perfume because it can permeate the chocolate.
4. Not melting. It shouldn’t melt when you hold it in your fingers.

Our tour guide was pretty good to be honest. She was training to be an actress so was getting right into her spiel. The funniest thing was how she was telling us about the tour operator and how he didn’t really care how many people went on the tour. She said she had previously given a Harry Potter tour which had over 60 people on it!

But as I said before I can’t rate the tour too highly because it wasn’t really a co-ordinated effort with the stores we visited. It was more the case of standing outside as our tour guide told us about the place and then having free time to go in ourselves. At one store, Prestat, we must have waited outside for about 20 minutes simply because the store couldn’t handle that many of us in there. I would normally expect that on a tour we’d get some sort of privilege, even if it was only as simply as getting samples. We did get some samples (as marked with (S) above) but I think that was more because the store felt sorry for us or the store generally offered samples anyway.

Rache is in London town for the last time in a long while as she is soon heading to start a new life in Canada. We are going to miss her terribly but I was happy that she had the time to spend at least another day with us before she headed off. We were trying to think of something a little bit different to do and with the weather being a bit dodge it kind of limited our options a bit. However, Rache and Emma came up with a brilliant idea to hit Arts4fun. They have various venues around London but the basic premise is that we could paint our own ceramics, get it fired up and then have a cool piece of art or whatever to take away with us.

The only drawback was that there was a hen party that came in about halfway through our time there – and they were very loud and just a little bit disruptive.

At Arts4fun you can paint as many pieces as you want – you pay a set fee to use the facilities and then a price per piece. You do have to leave your pieces behind to be fired, however, so you should ensure you have the opportunity to come back and pick your art again. Alternatively they have postage service.

Oh, and if you’re worried you’re not creative enough to play they have plenty of templates on hand for tracing or painting over and the staff are very helpful with ideas on how you can paint your piece.

What a fantastic way to spend a couple of hours on! It was very cool indeed and, in spite of the hen party, was a great way to relax, chat and just generally chill out.

The carnage of our table:

Takashi Murakami is a contemporary Japanese artist whom I first heard of when we were visiting Versailles last year. His art was littered around the Palace and I found it very cute and whimsical. I read that the Gagosian Gallery was exhibiting some of his work so I definitely wanted to make sure to check it out. It was kind of surreal walking into the gallery – the door was opened by a woman in a black suit and inside the art space was “patrolled” by more people in black suits. Obviously security maybe. Even at major art galleries I’ve never seen the likes of it with these guys in suits standing spaced out every 5 metres or so.

The work of Takashi Murakami on display was much more … shall we say, adult, then what was exhibited at Versailles. As a result it was kind of awkward to look at the pieces of art without feeling a bit uncomfortable. The pieces of work on display included Big Box Ko2, Nurse Ko2, 3M Girl, Mr Big Mushroom and Miss Clam. I’m sure if you twist your mind you can imagine what the last two in particular refer to! Here is a picture lifted from the Gagosian Gallery website:

As part of the exhibition you’re also given a mini Big Box Ko2 that you get to take away and make yourself. (It took me the better part of a True Blood episode to complete …)

Overall I enjoyed the exhibition very much.

An M&M world opened up in Leicester Square I think about a month or so ago and boy is it popular with the tourists! I could well understand the fascination having visited the outpost in Timesquare New York about a billion times though many people wonder what on earth people find fascinating in the store. I personally just love seeing all the merchandise – and there is a lot of it! From an M&M selling perspective disappointingly the store only sells plain M&Ms and peanut M&Ms and as impressive as the wall of M&M dispensers is (in every colour imaginable) at the end of the day you could get the same M&Ms in a supermarket. I’m hoping that they bring in the ones I really want like the mint crispy M&Ms that I can get in Oz, or the coconut ones I’ve seen in other countries.

There are lots of photo opportunities in the store, another reason many tourists love the place including a Beatles Pedestrian Crossing on the bottom floor, long queues on that one. There is also an M&M lab where you can see M&Ms being formed or packed. But the thing I like is the Period Table of M&Ms.

Rehana thought her matching M&M was the Clumsy Yellow guy …

… whereas I was, rather appropriately with my green nail polish, Flirty. 😉