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Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Hither and Thither

Just back from the second of two trips back to the UK following my return from HK. Both times the weather was absolutely splendid - London definitely looks at its best in the sunshine. For various reasons I flew with the three main carriers from Dubai back to the UK - Emirates, BA and Virgin - for BA and Virgin I was in the premium economy (PE) cabins. It is quite interesting to compare the three airlines. Emirates remains by far the best in terms of all round service, quality of food and plane etc. (even though it was economy, the seat pitches were not significantly less than the PE seats on the other carriers). Virgin provided a welcoming glass of sparkling wine but apart from that it did not seem noticeably different (apart from the legroom) than their economy offering. Even though it was a 777, the BA plane's entertainment system seemd quite old fashioned when compared with Emirates and Virgin. However, BA did provide some fancy earphones.

I suspect that next time I will probably stick with EMirates unless I had to fly economy rather than PE.

Did quite a lot of driving up and done the M4 for the last trip as we had to get A's passport renewed so we had a night in London staying at the Moran Hotel in Chiswick - nightmare to reach from the M4 (traffic at the Chiswick roundabout on Sunday afternoon was terrible) but pretty convenient to get into Victoria for the passport office and also to go to Kew Gardens where we spent a lovely afternoon potterng aroung the grounds (the kids were particulaly taken with the rowing throught the "Tutti Fruitti" groto on the boating lake - special glasses and banana smells made the experience rather surreal.

We also had a trip around the Tower of London - V. insisted on queuing for the crown jewels so we were all exhausted (although to be fair the queue whilst seemingly interminably long did move reasaonbly quickly) by the time we had returned to pick up the car (now rather dented following an unfortunate altercation with a pillar in the carpark after Saturday's scrapping incident in Bristol...).

Now back in Dubai in time for Ramadan before heading abck to UK for my main hols in a couple of weeks.

Bonkers in Honkers (Part 6)

After the rather late night last night we had a very quiet day today - again heading off to Stanley for breakfast at Rolf's and then on to Shek O to take advantage of the beautiful weather. If anything the beach was even more crowded than yesterday. After a relaxing couple of hours sunning ourselves we headed back to the Hotel for a quick change into our travel clothes and then headed off to the airport for our flights back. Whilst there were a couple of Lions shirts to be spotted (catching flights on to Oz) we were sharing our flight back to the Middle East with the London Scottish ruby team who had apparantly beeen touring in HK.

The flight back was uneventful and we were back home by around 11:30pm. All in all a really fabulous trip.