One day to go (Part 1)

I got up relatively early to have some breakfast before the final training run through Hyde Park at 8 a.m. It was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining and the sky clear blue. Uli took us along the Princess Diana Memorial Walk and past tomorrow's finish area on The Mall.

Preparations for the event were well under way.

In about 24 hours I would come running (or crawling if things didn't go well) along this road to finish my first marathon. Scary thought. We didn’t run very fast and were back at the hotel after 45 minutes.

Because he reads my blog Uli knows that I like wildlife photography, so he recommended the “Wildlife photographer of the year” exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

Outside the museum you'll find these parts of trunk from a primitive tree. They are "older than the dinosaurs" (330 million years old; lower Carboniferous Period). Amazing.

I spent more than two hours inside the exhibition looking at the pictures in awe. It was great! The exhibition ends on April 23rd, so you will not have a chance to go and see it for yourself but you can see all photos online at NHM Wildphoto gallery. Here are links to some of the pictures I thought were extra special:

Gorilla in the rain

Old leopard behind bars (the look in its eyes brought tears to mine)

River of dreams

Glare of the great owl

Of course the pictures loose some of their magic if you look at them online. But you get an idea of what it was like to see them framed and in a proper size. Thank you for that, Uli! It was a morning well spent, albeit it was a bit frustrating to see what photographs a 10 year old can make!

After leaving the exhibition I went to Charing Cross road, where a lot of bookshops are located. Markus had asked me to look for a book about The Beatles that he would like to have. Excellent! There are few things that I enjoy more than being in bookshops! My bookshelves are quite impressively stocked and yes, I have read them all.

Fortunately I had noted the ISBN from Amazon.co.uk, because it turned out that there are two books with a similar title and similar ISBN about The Beatles. One is more expensive than the other and has a few more pages. Markus wanted the smaller, cheaper one and all the shops I went to only had the more expensive version in stock.

The good thing is that now I can tell the good bookshops in London from the bad ones. Books etc. is excellent. The shop assistant immediately found out that there are two similar books and that I was after the one he hadn't got. He did some intensive computer research and finally announced that he could order it, but it would take a week. Too long for me. Foyles at least acknowledge that there are two versions of the book, but weren’t confident that they could order it at all. Waterstone's claimed that the ISBN I had noted did not exist and that, if the book wasn’t in their computer nobody could find it (conclusion: Borders is nobody). When I told the shop assistant that the book is available from amazon.co.uk and asked her to please (I was still polite at that point) check the computer again, to see if she could order it for me, she shooed me saying “go and get it from the internet then”. Sorry, Markus! I did the best I could.

Next time I will check into this hotel!