Marco and I took a short trip to London last week with the Eurostar train, from Thursday morning through Sunday evening. I’m a big fan of the Eurostar train (formerly Thalys) as it only takes about 3 and a half hours and you arrive in the city centre at the St. Pancras station. Of course, we had to get to Rotterdam first and if you are traveling to London you have to be at the station an hour before your train departs so you can clear security and immigration. So it is more like 4 and a half or 5 hours in total in the end. However, if you’re staying in the EU, like Paris, you only need to arrive about 15-20 minutes before your train leaves.

We lucked out – the weather was definitely on our side. It was about 26C/78F on the day we arrived, with the weather slowly getting colder each day we were there. We only wore a jacket on our last day. The only rain we had was a meager drizzle for two seconds while we exited the hotel and entered the cafe next door for coffee.

One of the days we went to the Design museum to see the Tim Burton exhibition:

The exhibition takes about an hour and is five large rooms. There’s plenty to see in those rooms, though. Note that it is only around until May 26, though it will probably move to a different city later in the year. You can read more about it at the official website.

After the Design museum we took a stroll through Holland Park. Inside the park you have the Dutch gardens:

It was full of absolutely gorgeous flowers. The proof is above!

And also a few statues, strategically placed.

After that we visited the Kyoto garden, also in Holland Park. It was created for the 1992 Japan festival in London.

There was a marble slab of a bridge going across part of the pond which you could walk across, allowing you to get pictures up close.

It was a peaceful place, and gorgeous in the beautiful weather we had.

All in all it was a lovely long weekend, although it is definitely nice to be lazier this weekend!