Di Vinci, Pancakes and Linkin Park

Its been a fairly low key month since New Years but here is what we have been up to anyway.

In January we toured Temple in London which had an open weekend as part of a year long festival to celebrate 400 years of existence. Any Di Vinici Code buffs will know that this is home to the Knights Templar and whose Temple church was featured in the Di Vinci Code film. The 12th century Temple church is the main attraction which sits in the heart of legal London and is part of a big campus of buildings surrounded by gardens and grounds all with historical significance intertwined with law societies. It gets complicated quickly so you'll have to read up on it.

Then a couple weeks ago we saw Linkin Park in concert at the O2 dome, formerly The Millennium Dome. The concert was a fun evening and it gave us a chance to see the dome which has a troubled recent history as we found out during the weeks leading up to the concert. Anytime we mentioned the O2 dome everyone would instantly start complaining about what it used to be.

To make a long story short the dome was highly touted by the government during the build up to the year 2000 to do all sorts of things such as bridge the gap to the new millennium but was seriously over budget and cost the tax payers something like 800 million pounds just to construct it. On top of that it closed down not long after it opened because it couldn't support itself financially. No wonder everybody has a bad taste for the dome.

The building itself is a tremendous site and has recently been taken over and revamped to stand on its own again. Its now sponsored by O2 a mobile phone company and is worth a visit.

Finally to round out the post, last Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday also known as pancake day. This gave us a good excuse to have pancakes for dinner. However, we didn't have the crepe style pancakes that are eaten in the UK. We broke out the Aunt Jemima and made good ol' American style pancakes. We just missed the Purnell's Old Folks sausage.

Our travels pick up soon so stay tuned.