Week 3 - London Eye

Undeniably great views of London, even on a pretty dreadful day. Not something I'd be happy paying full price for, but it's one of those things that has to be done.

This week has been a slow week for me and a particularly busy one at work, so I didn't get much chance to research the different things on this week. I did however stumble upon the fact that the London Eye were giving a free rotation this weekend and having never been on before, this looked like a pretty perfect opportunity.

The free go was for the first 500 people who made it down to the Eye on Saturday morning before 9.30, so was yet another week I had to be up at the crack of dawn at the weekend!

It was organised in collaboration with 'renowned' street-photographer Matt Stuart (needless to say I have never heard of him). In return for a free spin, participants were encouraged to tweet a photo of their experience. 

Rather than go into all the usual stuff - how the London Eye is Europe's largest Ferris wheel, (formally the World's largest) standing at 135m tall etc. I thought I'd just film the whole experience and share it. 
Since to do the revolution takes around half an hour, I've condensed it down to under 4 minutes and set to Cheap Trick's Top Gun classic 'Mighty Wings', which happens to be the perfect length:

I feel I can't really be too critical since I got to go for free and I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but I'd describe the experience as a lot like Venice - lots of hype, something you should probably do once, but full of tourists and ultimately a little disappointing. 

In fact the best part of the experience was when an impromptu snow ball fight broke out in the queue to get on! Needless to say though, there were some people who did not enjoy that as much as others...

My advice? If you are dead-set on going on look out for the 2 for 1 vouchers they regularly do, otherwise walk around the city and see the sights up close.

As a little bonus I took the opportunity to mock up some 'classic London' black and white with red bus photos. Let me know what you think.

You wait for 1 bus and then 2 come along at once!

View of Westminster from the top of the Eye