Winter Wonderland at Hyde Park

Earlier this week, I found myself with a day off and decided that a visit to the Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park was in order :).

The Winter Wonderland is basically a Christmas fair set up in Hyde Park annually. This is only the second year it's been run, but it got good press last year and promised a skating rink, a German Christmas Market, rides, a giant ferris wheel, and loads of good things to eat and drink. I'd ridden the bus past the park a couple of nights last week and seen the twinkling lights and ferris wheel, so I thought it was about time that I went and checked it out.

Justin happened to have the day off too (he worked nights last week and, as evidence of how good it is to be a doctor in the UK, he gets a week off after every round of night shifts to "recuperate"), so we decided we'd meet in Bayswater for some lunch and then stroll through the park to the fair.

The day dawned cold and sunny; perfect weather for a Christmas fair, I thought :). Lunch at a Chinese restaurant was yummy and warming (yay for a huge bowl of wontons and noodles in soup!), and we were in good spirits as we turned down Queensway road into the park. As soon as we entered the gates, however, we were lost.

Let me put this into perspective for you. Hyde Park is, to put it mildly, humongous. Justin lived next to Hyde Park all through university and walked through it to his campus every day. For my part, I've become so comfortable with London that I no longer take a map out with me, and I can give tourists directions with the best of them. Neither of us had any clue where we were or where to go, however :D. lol.

After a moment where we considered turning around and taking the tube to a station where the fair would be visible, we shrugged our shoulders and decided that we would walk in one direction and hopefully run into the fair at some point. The weather was so nice anyway (although it was admittedly a bit chilly), and neither of us was in much of a hurry. As we ambled down a path, we amused ourselves watching all the people out with their dogs, and choosing which dogs we liked and wanted. We joked that we should just pick one of them up and gain a new pet as we did - for some dogs, their owners were nowhere in sight!

We had walked for perhaps 15 minutes when we had to stop dead and groan; instead of coming upon the road to cross into the other part of the park as we'd hoped we would, we were standing in front of the Italian Gardens, which were entirely in the wrong direction. We turned around and walked back the way we came until we came to the central path and paused, looking first one way than another. Justin finally decided that he would ask a woman walking towards us for directions, so we began to walk towards her.

Our encounter with this woman was very civilised and English :D. lol. She was walking two perfectly groomed black poodles dressed immaculately in little plaid sweaters and, when Justin asked her which direction Hyde Park Corner was in his posh accent, the woman answered back, in the same cut-glass accent, "Ah yes, Hyde Park Corner. That would be at the end of Hyde Park Road. Yes, right. Follow down this path to the end until you reach a road. Cross the road and bear to the left, and there you are!" Imagine the plummiest, Helen Mirren in the Queen-esque accent, and that's what this woman sounded like. We thanked her politely (me feeling like a Neanderthal, speaking to her in my Canadian twang), and continued on our way.

Side note: it's the strangest thing in the world to relocate to another country and to suddenly find yourself as the one with an accent. I feel louder, crasser, and twangier here - my accent jars in comparison to the British accents I'm always hearing. Even stranger is that people are having trouble placing my accent. I'm not sure if it's changed somewhat since I've been here (sounds the same to me in my head!) or if it's because the people who haven't been able to place it are children and they haven't reached the stage where they can easily identify accents yet, but I've had people guess I'm from Australia, England, Scotland, China, Japan, Malaysia, Bolivia, Indonesia, India (??), etc, etc. That's actually my favourite game to play with a new class the beginning of a supply day - "guess where I'm from?" :D.

Anyway, back to the story! We followed the woman's directions and, after a bit of walking, finally saw the ferris wheel and knew we were going in the right direction. Oddly enough, it kept disappearing from view as we were walking (likely because of trees and buildings), but we did finally manage to reach the fairground about 35 mins after we'd entered the park. lol.

Winter Wonderland was alright. It was quite empty, which makes sense since it was early afternoon, and there were loads of carnival rides set up that were geared to younger children. Justin tried to talk me into riding one of Santa's reindeer around a dinky track, but I gracefully refused :). We pondered why a Christmas fair had a haunted house (still confused about that), and briefly thought about going into the Fun House, except that I recalled my last encounter with a Fun House and decided that the possibility of getting lost in a hall of mirrors was not my idea of fun.




We probably spent the most time looking through the Christmas Market, which was full of stalls selling odds and ends (everything from hats and jewelry to reindeer hides). Then my attention was caught by the pick-and-mix candy stall in the centre of the area and, that was it, I was gone :).




At first I was content just to look at the various types of candy. It was only when I caught a glimpse of the candy mice and giant slugs (like the ones Ron vomits out in one of the Harry Potter movies) that I began to want to buy some :D. Justin pulled a paper bag down and we put together a random assortment of candy, paid for it, then wandered back up the path, happily sucking on various pieces of sweets.

We spent a few more minutes looking at the food stalls (German sausages and mulled wine brewed in gigantic copper pots) before deciding we'd had enough and going in search of something warm to drink. We exited the park via Hyde Park Corner, hopped on a bus to Marble Arch, walked through the pedestrian subway to the tube station, then hopped on to St Paul's.

You may be wondering why we wanted to go to St Paul's :). Well, the answer is that there was about an hour and a half left until Evensong and I wanted to go. Justin hadn't decided whether he'd be coming along or going to Westminster Cathedral, so he decided he'd come have a drink and decide later. lol. We popped into a Starbucks, snagged a nice table and two comfy armchairs, and settled in for awhile. An hour later, we went to Evensong (Justin decided to stay as he was too lazy to leave!), had another cup of tea and some fruit bread afterwards, then I took the bus home past the gorgeous Christmas lights along Regent and Oxford Street. I'll try to take some pictures of that a little later on this month and post them for you all to see!

So, that was my day :). I'm heading out to Cambridge for the day on Saturday, so an interesting update will probably follow some point next week. In the meantime, I'm off to finish the sweets we bought in Hyde Park!