Saturday

It's our last full day in London. No bacon sandwiches today either. Instead we met Simran outside the Waterloo tube station and walked across the street to a small but amazing Saturday outdoor food market. Pop-up tents and a couple of food trucks in the parking lot of the National Theater. We walked around and the kids got fresh juices - some combination of fruits and mint. Simran got coffee. Jo bought a cronut (a crosaint donut), I bought a large number of very nice cookies, and Vivian talked a vendor out if a bowl of olives for a paltry 30 pence. In the second photo you can see her working through the olives while carrying her "wand".

Simran showed us around Southbank a bit and then we retreated underground to catch a tube to Baker Street. At some point we passed a poster for Kinky Boots and all three of the young ones posed. Backstory - in long escalator rides up and down tube station all over London you see posters and ads for plays and musicals. Vivian saw about a hundred and gravitated towards Kinky Boots. In most posters (though not this one where he's a fuzzy helmeted royal guard) a bobby is portrayed in gray tones supporting thigh high lace-up red glittering boots. Vivian asked why a male policeman was dressed like that. I said "Why not?". And she said "Awkward". But it continued to intrigue her.

We passed the afternoon lazing at my friend's home near Baker Street (the kids veged in front of a TV in another room). Rani made us aloo parathas. Evan wasn't having any of that but Vivian put away a few.

Simran and us spent the evening waiting in line back at Masala Zone near Covent Gardens. After a very good dinner we took a cab back to the hotel and I walked Sinran to her digs. 

Next morning we woke up hours before our usual time and took a cab to Heathrow. I saw Jo and Evan and Vivian off at the Virgin gates and before I arrived to my terminal for my flight to Abu Dhabi Jo had sent me a photo of the kids munching on bacon sandwiches. A little bit later I boarded a cavernous Etihad Airways A380 and arrived in Hyderabd on Monday morning to see Sharath and Sahiti's smiling faces at the airport. By then it was Sunday night in Austin and the kids were fast asleep in their own beds back at the white wooden house and London was only a memory.