We arrived in London at 7:00am local time.  It was too early to get our hotel room at the InterContinental, so we left our luggage there and went for a long walk through the Mayfair District where the hotel is located.  Our first order of business was to find the first of many pharmacies on this trip in order to stock up on some needed cold supplies -- i.e., tissues.  We found one right away, and Julie was able to buy a bunch of tissues -- not as good as the Kleenex Cold Care we can get in the States, but better than the cheap stuff Julie had bought at the Newark airport.  We then continued on our tour of Mayfair.  Fortunately for Bob, my husband and Julie's dad, pretty much all the stores were closed, so we could only look, not buy (before long, I would make up for those lost hours of looking).  We stopped at a Starbucks (yes, they even have them in England) and had tea.  At least I did.  Julie was fading fast, and feeling so sick by now that she could only stare listlessly at her tea, so we finally went back to our hotel and got situated in a nice room with a view of Hyde Park.  Although everyone told us not to do it, Julie and I laid our heads down on our respective pillows and fell asleep for several hours.

Late in the afternoon, we were awakened by a call from Alexi Patsaouras, with whom we were planning on having dinner later on that evening.  After working out some tentative dinner plans, we decided that we felt refreshed enough to walk over to Harrod's for afternoon tea.

This is a picture of the Wellington Memorial Arch, which was situated just outside of our hotel on the way to Harrod's.

On our way to Harrod's we made a stop at yet another pharmacy to try to find some more cold medicine for Julie.

This is a picture of a typical London street we walked through to get to Harrod's.

We wandered around Harrod's a bit while searching for an appropriate place to have tea.  We finally found the roof garden terrace, where we sipped hot tea and nibbled cucumber sandwiches and scones.  Very civilized.

After tea, we headed for Harrod's pharmacy to see if we could find some better medicine than we'd found at the other pharmacy.  Julie found some great honey, lemon and glycerine drops that seemed to work pretty well.

And here I am outside Harrod's having made my first purchase!

We got back to our hotel in time to change for dinner.  We went to a trendy new café, The Sugar Club, where we were treated to a lovely meal by Alexi.  We noticed that the menu stated quite boldly that their meat was imported from New Zealand!  Nevertheless, we ate fish!  We ate, drank and talked, closing up the restaurant.  Alexi came back to our hotel with us, where we talked some more, until I finally kicked him out after Midnight, because we had to be up again at 5:00am to take a taxi to Gatwick Airport for our flight to Venice.

This is a picture of Julie and Alexi on the little sofa in our hotel room.

And here I am, looking tired, as we say goodbye to Alexi.