Reunion at Forest Hill

What a lovely weekend!

Jon & I met up with Uncle Chacko and Sheela at their cosy Forest Hill home. It was a nice Saturday afternoon excursion for us since we had not yet gone to that part of London, which also turned out to be nearer than we expected (in terms of transport links at least - just 45mins away)!

A good hearty and healthy lunch of roast chicken, lots of veggies, super tasty potatoes, and Sheela's fantastic brownies with toasted buttered coconut and nut topping! No pictures, sorry, I kind of forgot about my camera :) But I assure you, it all looked great!

It was good to catch up. Jon hadn't seen Uncle Chacko for almost (or more?) than 10 years, I hadn't even met him before, and we last saw Sheela only last year (which was also my first time meeting her). So it was a lovely time of getting-to-know-you, and getting-to-know-you-more; sharing our lives and personal experiences.

I was quite stuffed after lunch, and so I was glad when Uncle Chacko suggested we all go for a walk - I could walk off some of the fullness ;) The neighbourhood is peaceful, calm and has great views of London City. From the top of the hill (Forest hill rem?) you can see the dome of St Paul's, the London Eye, BT Tower, Barbican, and all the way to Canary Wharf. Actually, it's like the view from Primrose Hill but inverted horizontally. Whereas from Primrose the view of London is from the north, here it's from the south.

Uncle Chacko then led us to the Horniman Museum, and what a little gem the place was! The first thing we saw were the sprawling green fields of the museum that are open to the public. Reminded me a little bit of Fort Canning park, but think wider expanse of space.

We explored the museum's natural history exhibits and the surprising section on aquatic life. In the natural history section were thousands of stuffed animals such as the Dodo bird, rabbits, foxes, fish, and most interestingly a gigantic walrus! Lifesize might I add! It's full dimensions are approximately 1.5m tall, 2m long, and er..at the widest point maybe 0.6m in radius? :) LIFESIZE! Sheela and I were laughing at the mental image of a herd of those things flopping towards us...bizarre!

Other interesting exhibits included insects in such wild colours like turquoise and shimmery violet, giant crabs which feed on coconuts (just try to imagine how it would open that hard fruit!), and sharks teeth (a full 5 rows of it on both the upper and lower jaw!).

The hightlight though, was the Apostle's Clock, an old wooden clock decorated with different sections depicting different scenes. At the top was Christ on the throne. At 4pm everyday figures of the apostles would enter from a door, bow before Christ, and exit through another door. All would bow except for Judas. Well..this happens almost everyday.. we waited eagerly for 4 o'clock to arrive. And when it did...nothing happened. How anti-climatic :) Apparently it worked the day before! I guess the apostles must have had a bout of stage fright that day. Well, we'll just have to make another trip down to the Horniman another day! (And this time, I'll bring my camera!)

The aquarium was equally engaging. I found the jellyfish, with their almost glow-in-the-dark quality, very intriguing and beautiful. The particular breed we were looking at were the Moon Jellyfish, distinguished by the 4 glowing rings in their heads. A cute find were tiny tiny starfish, about the size of the head of a nail! If you don't look carefully you'd not even notice them!

Well, we head back and spent more time in conversation on all sorts of topics. What a time! I love such good conversation :) We didn't think we'd stay so long, but my, times flies when you're enjoying yourself :) Forest Hill certainly won't be a one-off stop!