Cockney Rhyming Slang Phrase of the Week

The first person to successfully interpret the phrase into proper American English will receive, in five years time, a Little Orphan Annie Secret Cockney Decoder Pin.

This week's phrase IS:

Wait a cock linnet while I put on me weasel, then we'll be out the rory.

Good luck!

The Thames is a Tidal River

I bet you didn't know that! Well, we didn't. One day we were crossing the millennium bridge and noticed the river was moving toward the East, and the ocean. Which makes sense. Then, several days later, from the top of the Tate Modern museum (when we took the Blog Title Photograph above!), we noticed that the tricky Thames was moving in a westerly direction. WHAT?!

We were confused.

Then, we went to a little town called Southend-on-Sea. It's kind of like a wannabe Atlantic City crossed with a Chuck-E-Cheez. But it's also quainter. And it's on the ocean--actually the Estuary of the Thames. And accessible by train, and one of the less expensive destinations from London. It was here that we discovered that the River Thames is, in fact, a Tidal River all the way to London, and perhaps farther inland than that. This means that the ocean tides affect the current of the river.

Southend-on-Sea also has the longest pier in the world! It's about 1.34 miles long. There it is, stretching out behind us toward shore, where there is a lovely, cheezy amusement park!

The most excellent Bloggers in the world

Yep, we're back. Did you miss us?

We're currently digging through our pile of photos to see which ones we should put up next...and we're trying to decide if we should opt for chronology or favoritism. Or entertainment value.

Well. If we don't start toward the beginning, we may never catch you up. Which, incidentally, may be just peachy. Still, here's the short version. We've been to:

The British Museum. (which looks like THIS on the outside!)

And which houses artifacts of all kinds, including the Rosetta Stone, some incredible mummies, parts of the Parthenon and other Greek and Roman sculptures, and, okay, well it's just so huge that's all we've really seen yet. Good thing it's free! We've already been there 3 times.

Here's Kyle on a bad day. Actually, it's some old Egyptian who, apparently, made too many pots. And was buried with them. Luckily, the sand almost perfectly preserved him and his spiffing pots, so that we can now observe him encased in this lovely glass...or, really hard sand. Huh.