Elephant Hunt

Today, we hunted elephants.  In the rain, armed only with notebooks.

Desperate for something to do with the kids, I stumbled upon Elephant Parade, a city-wide art installation in which painted plastic elephants are displayed around the city and will be auctioned on 3rd July to raise funds for Asian elephant habitat preservation.  I thought it would be fun to trek around the city and see how many elephants we could find.  And it was, apart from the fact that a steady, soaking rain was falling, or more accurately, swirling around us when we arrived in town.

We'd brought one of Caroline's friends with us, a very sensible French girl, and it was a lot of fun watching the three of them hunting elephants and fastidiously writing the name and lot number of each one in their little notebooks.  In all, we found 25 elephants - 7 on the South Bank, 5 on Embankment, 7 in Covent Garden and 6 in Trafalgar Square.  To be honest, I cheated a bit - I had a map of the elephants' locations on my iPhone (a great little device which I absolutely love and wonder how I ever lived without).  This seemed an impressive number until I met a woman who, with her daughter, had found 143 of the painted pachyderms over three weekends.  Better get up earlier tomorrow.

It's also a lot of fun listening to the children's conversations.  At one point, we were approaching two elephants situated under Cleopatra's Needle, an Egyptian obelisk on the Embankment flanked by two Sphinxes when Caroline gleefully pointed and squealed, "Hey, look, there's the Shrinks!"

It was an exhausting day.  We ate both lunch and dinner out, which is always a little trying.  Lunch was at Wagamama, a chain Japanese noodle joint that the kids all love.  Unfortunately, every time Caroline eats there, she gets sick, so hopefully tonight will be the exception.  Why, you ask, would we continue to go to a place where Caroline gets sick?  Because it was raining, the kids were starving and cold, and everywhere had a 20 minute wait except the dim sum place, which didn't seem kid friendly.  I'm sure a couple of custard buns and maybe some chicken feet would have been fine, but we chose Waggers instead.  There's nothing like a nice bowl of ramen on a chilly London afternoon.

I ordered a bowl of edamame - steamed, salted soybean pods.  These things are one of my favorite things about Japanese food.  The kids enjoyed them, too; or rather, they enjoyed squeezing the little buggers until the beans popped out and flew across the room.  I can see the appeal, but this very nearly killed a waitress when she slipped on one of the beans.  We had to put a stop to the beanapulting at that point.

Now, I'm spent.  Caroline's friend is sleeping over tonight, and they're all in their pyjamas watching some bug movie now.  I may just fall asleep before them, dreaming of elephants and soybeans.