London, part 1

Ireland is nice. Slow-paced, quaint, bucolic. Very pleasant. Very...quaint. Relentlessly quaint. After a while it gets to you.

On the second weekend of my visit to Ireland my friends and I took a quick trip to London. London is anything but quaint.
We stayed in one of the greenest and prettiest parts of London, just outside of Kensington Gardens. Because of our tight schedule we didn't get to explore the gardens, or neighboring Hyde Park, or any of the nearby museums. Still, we dipped into Kensington Gardens briefly to get some pictures.

Swans. Not geese, not ducks. Swans.

Rainbow in a fountain
Pigeons. Yes, we have pigeons at home, but these are London pigeons!

Kensington Gardens is beautiful. If you can spend some time there during your visit to London, I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

After this brief interlude in the largest patch of anything approaching nature in London, we were off to find an open-topped tour bus for a day of sightseeing and tourism. But that is a story for another entry.