Back to Bikram today! Can't honestly say whether it got easier or harder…but I can now successfully balance on the ball of my foot whilst squatted down with arms & legs all sort of twisted around in some strange pose - hurrah! Progress! :P haha As our instructor wittily quipped "Bend it like Bikram!" ha. He also said to one person "there is no need to suffer in Bikram", so clearly you can't believe anything this guy says.

After we finished up Kel got some exciting news that she had a job interview for a 2 week nannying position in Spain! So we grabbed some lunch at Pret, worked out how to get her to the interview then she headed of to knock the socks of the potential employers & I headed back to Paddington to get my organization on. Spoke to our family friend Juls & organized to go out to see her & her little bub, Seb, on Wednesday, & confirmed my flight out to NYC next Monday! How exciting!

In the afternoon I met up with my lovely friend Carly, who I went to school with the year I was living over in South Africa in 1999. So that's…12 years ago! We've seen each other about 3 times since that year over the past decade or so & we boggled at the fact that we are almost double the age now that we were when we first met. But like all great friendships, despite not having spent more than a handful of days together in 12 years, it was like no time had passed at all when we saw each other. We walked and talked and walked and talked and walked and talked all around London for about 3 hours straight! Carly is finishing up a degree in commerce by correspondence at the moment &, having spent her early childhood growing up in England, has come over to live & work part time in London for a year or so.

Having arrived about 2 weeks ago it's pretty damn lucky that we ended up here in the same place at the same time! She also knows her way around the city slightly better than I do so she lead the way through beautiful parks (by the Peter Pan statue & the Princess Diana memorial), past Buckingham Palace & Big Ben…pretty much all over the city of London really. We had decided to pick up some of the Barkley's hire bikes (really cool initiative where you can pick up bikes from banks all over the city then just drop them back at another station for next to nothing), but unfortunately the bike gods were against us…we went to about 5 or 6 banks & lucked out every time. At one the second last bike got picked up just as we got there…then the machine that administered the bikes was broken at two…one had only one bike left…one machine gave us a code but the machine that actually releases the bikes wasn't working…eventually we gave in & just decided to keep walking!

We stumbled across Covent Garden & decided to have dinner there at an old English pub. It was built underground & had very low ceilings & lamp lit rooms. And great pub food! More talking ensued…It's strange how sometimes you don't realize how much you've missed an old friend until you actually see them again :)