That's the London Eye -

I have rode on it once, it's actually pretty boring It moves very slowly and takes something like half an hour to complete a rotation, each 'bubble' is pretty big and fits about 25 people so you can stroll around. I imagine if it's your first visit to London that it would be far more interesting, a bit like why we all like nearly injuring ourselves climbing up the Eiffel Tower

There are some teenagers who do speak very properly, others who don't, it depends on the area. When I was in school more or less everyone swore like a sailor

Vegemite/Marmite is very hard to explain the taste of, I can't think of anything like it. I often eat it straight out the pot, but I'm Marmite obsessed. I think as well as vegetable extracts it's made from some sort of yeast that was originally left over from the beer making process.

On vegemite/marmite. I accidentally, while on vacation in England, spread maybe a teaspoonful of it on a piece of toast without any butter and....ugh! I did not get why Australians on the bus tour liked it so much (now I know). To me it tastes like dried soy sauce.

Vegemite is awesome.

Foreigners make the mistake if trying to eat it out of the jar with a spoon, which will only make you sick. I only eat it on my toast in the morning, which is delicious. The taste is quite hard to explain, but the appearance is rather like an un-runny nutella. I've heard that they use nutella in movies when the actors have to eat the supposed vegemite from the jar.

Yes, I do agree with you there. I only eat Vegemite on toast or in a sandwich with cheese, but my Lithuanian friend eats it by itself. She actually keeps a jar on her bedside table, it makes me feel kind of sick, actually, when I see her just eating it with a spoon. She is a pretty strange one

Shadowlander, no worries mate, you can never have too many Lost references.
I suppose I was talking mostly about the polar bears and other animals that are adverse to Australian weather. No doubt they're well looked after but I can't help thinking they'd love to be free. That said, they probably wouldn't know what to do with it.

Yes, 'adverse' is the right word. I don't understand how all the animals can survive the drought, then the floods, then the drought, then the floods, and pop in a few Cyclones and minor earthquakes and you're set Yeah, those poor polar bears, but I think they would just sit there and wonder what the heck is going on XD

Yes, well, there are vets, keepers etc dancing on their every need. If any of them dies, it makes headline news in our newspapers, and if any foul play is suspected, there is a government enquiry about it. I agree the climate could be stressful, but then it can be for everyone in this segment of Earth, almost a Noah's ark in of itself. At least the polar bears are alive, with a whole entourage of folks dedicated to keep them so, including scientists interested in their best welfare. I should be so lucky!

I have rode on it once, it's actually pretty boring It moves very slowly and takes something like half an hour to complete a rotation, each 'bubble' is pretty big and fits about 25 people so you can stroll around. I imagine if it's your first visit to London that it would be far more interesting, a bit like why we all like nearly injuring ourselves climbing up the Eiffel Tower

I thought the London Eye was rather good. You can take a photo from it of 'the Gherkin', not to mention a far sight of St Paul's Cathedral, which we never reached when we were there in 2009. It is at Waterloo Bridge, near the British Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, which we also visited. The Eye also served as a landmark when we thought we'd get lost. If you ever get to London, do take a look at that lovely statue of Boadicea on the other side of the bridge. And yes, after a lifetime of hearing about London, I was distinctly gobsmacked to finally get there.

I liked the Eiffel Tower as well. To get to the top, the trick is to join a queue, stay on that queue, and shuffle around along the queue as far as you can go. We reached the top, and had a glass of pink champagne to celebrate. There are lifts to take, and some of them are tethered to the four legs of the tower, though when I was in it, I never noticed which was which. You get a really good view of Paris from the top, but it is a very white sort of city, with less visible greenery than in Sydney, which startled me somewhat. I couldn't understand why Parisians would spend so much money gilding the roofs of famous buildings like the Opera House or statues like Joan of Arc or the statue of Eros in La Place Bastille.

It doesn't hurt if stuck in a queue if you can have a conversation (in French) with your neighbours in the queue. I agree I must have looked a real dill, , yabbering on in my halting French about French explorers in Australia, such as La Perouse, Freycinet, Baudin and a few others. The French-speaking bloke who was taking his kids to see the Eiffel tower before school went back, didn't seem to mind, I am glad to say .

On vegemite/marmite. I accidentally, while on vacation in England spread maybe a teaspoonful of it on a piece of toast without any butter and....ugh! I did not get why Australians on the bus tour liked it so much (now I know). To me it tastes like dried soy sauce.

Yes Vegemite does taste a little like soy sauce, probably just as salty. In UK they have Marmite, made by the Sanitarium company, which isn't quite the same thing. It is runnier or something, but I didn't like it as much as I liked Vegemite, though I ate heaps of it as a child. Sort of like the difference between Pepsi and Coca Cola.
At one stage it was proposed that Vegemite be called Pa Will, because although Ma Might, Pa Will - get it?

It's good to see more Aussies!

Shantih, do you guys sometimes use Marmite in cooking? We don't use Vegemite often in cooking but we sometimes do, for soups etc.

StateofGreen, I wouldn't eat Vegemite without butter and even then I wouldn't spread that much on - just a blob on the tip of the knife. I've never tried dried soy sauce but it's very high in salt, just like soy sauce.

Electra, more power to your Lithuanian friend but I'm never going to do that! Too salty, too risky.

StrawberryLicorice, it's good to hear that you know about 'chavs' and the like, sorry if I came across as a know-it-all (I'm not).
Also, I didn't know that about Nutella being substituted for Vegemite. I mean it makes sense if you're eating it from the jar, not to actually do so but I'd argue that they're quite different in colour and the texture is a little different. Imagine the complications of being an actor/actress and trying to pretend it's highly salty, when it's highly sweet. Hilarious.

The few times I've gone up the Eiffel Tower there wasn't a que (we went out of season), so we just brought snacks along and stopped at each level I've never had enough money to get the lift straight up but I think it was nicer that way, and made the view at the very top even more exciting.

W4J, not everyone does, we always did in my family and I still do. It's great in soups and gravy, and I also tend to throw a bit in dishes like risotto to give it some extra zing. I've noticed if you do this and don't tell Marmite haters its in there they eat it and love it

Huh, according to Wiki Marmite is more intensely flavoured than Vegemite. This makes me eating it out of the jar seem much weirder in retrospect...

Edit - On a similar note, do other countries have 'import' shops where you can buy food brands from other countries? They're not really the same as Russian, Indian or Polish food shops (which we also have), but tend to focus on selling the exact brand of food you can get in the US. I've not come across a lot of them, but there used to be one in London where you could buy things like Lucky Charms, Pop Tarts, Hershey chocolate, etc. I used to stock up on Nerds, which are really hard to find over here I found a similar place when I stayed in California for a while, but to my distress they only sold Vegemite, not Marmite. It's become more common for some coffee shops or fashion stops to have a little stand selling those sort of US brands too.

Yes, we have import shops. There's one just off Queen Street Mall, if I'm not mistaken. That's the big shopping mall in the city of Brisbane. I go there a lot with my friends.

I know you're not a know-it-all, Warrior I re-read my post, and I do kind of sound like I'm accusing you of that. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. And I got that information about the nutella from a Mary-Kate and Ashley movie, actually. They admitted in an interview, that I watched when I was little, that it was in fact nutella they ate, not vegemite.

I've never much liked the taste of marmite, one of my friends in primary school loved it. And I don't think I could ever eat vegemite off of a spoon without throwing up. Ironically, about five minutes ago one of my sister's friends did. Yuck.

We have something similar to the London Eye here in Brisbane. It's the Brisbane Eye I've been on it once, when my friends and I decided to play the roles of tourists. We did a lot of things that we'd never done that day. It was quite fun, actually.

And as for the making of vegemite, as far as I know it was created for the soldiers during war as it does not go off. And yes, I do believe that it is made from yeast leftover from beer.

Edit - On a similar note, do other countries have 'import' shops where you can buy food brands from other countries? They're not really the same as Russian, Indian or Polish food shops (which we also have), but tend to focus on selling the exact brand of food you can get in the US. I've not come across a lot of them, but there used to be one in London where you could buy things like Lucky Charms, Pop Tarts, Hershey chocolate, etc. I used to stock up on Nerds, which are really hard to find over here

Ooh! I love Nerds! I can eat those by the box! The only bad thing is I tend to lose them as I pour them in my hand. How do you eat them? Sorry strange, but people eat them in many different ways! I like to put them in my hand and lick them off my hand, or pick them out of the box, or just put he whole box to my mouth and eat them that way!

Oh and this is random but I had a test where I had to read about the London Eye! It was the only test that I liked!

Brits: how popular is Kiera Knightley? She is British, right?

I don't know about the Brits, but I loved Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice!

... But it was really great the only thing is I hated the food over there.

Aww. Plenty of things fall into my tastes in the UK. Haggis, turnips, Irn Bru, and a single malt for starters. Blood pudding for breakfast.

*edits more for later ... goes out for a run*

I do have a habit of posting in topics about to close, or at least about to wind down.

Blood pudding. Blech. When I visited England I wondered why so many high cholesterol foods were favourites there. Every country has theirs of course, but there were an awful lot of rich tasting foods I saw and ate while on vacation in England.

I had REAL great tasting fish and chips with REAL tartar sauce (something very hard to find in America, at least where I live). I tried a cream tea once when we stopped over in Bristol, but it didn't seem to be of the authentic Devon/Cornwall kind.

And is the Sunday roast and pudding still a traditional meal there? I guess I remember all the times I read the James Herriot books and someone was having a roast, bacon, chips, or a slice of cheese. And with that, I'm making myself awfully hungry now....

That is so gross, i couldn't eat that at anytime. Maybe for a great sum of money.

StateofGreen, I don't know what you're talking about when you say UK food is rather unhealthy? What about the majority of American food. I've never been there myself but I know plenty who have and they all complain about how there's sugar or at least saturated fat in almost every kind of food! So different from Australia. I guess it comes down to cultural differences.

StateofGreen, I don't know what you're talking about when you say UK food is rather unhealthy? What about the majority of American food. I've never been there myself but I know plenty who have and they all complain about how there's sugar or at least saturated fat in almost every kind of food! So different from Australia. I guess it comes down to cultural differences.

I'm not sure about sugar and saturated fat being in all of our foods, but that's just what is popular to most Americans these days. Michelle Obama is trying to reform the cafeterias and vending machines of most schools to give more healthy choices to kids, which really just shows how apathetic some kids are to what they are eating, and perhaps to parents who let their kids eat unhealthy choices at the cafeteria. From personal experience, I can tell you that the public school cafeterias' selections are usually awfully unhealthy. Pizza, hamburgers, cookies, chocolate milk, cheese-glop spaghetti, the list goes on.

However, vending machines at schools and other public facilities are now going more on the healthy side (at least in my state), by limiting sodas to such things as Coke Zero and Sprite Zero, and offering baked chips instead of fried ones. The stereotype of Americans generally eating unhealthy foods is sadly true in lots of cases, but at least we can see government and others trying their best at providing for more healthy choices!