Notting Hill Carnival

August 31st--Today was kids day at the opening day of the Notting Hill Carnival. This is considered Europe's largest carnival or street festival, celebrating the Caribbean culture. We quickly witnessed that. Luckily though, we arrived early before it got "really" crowded. We saw several different parades come through that included loud music and lots of children in colorful costumes. We wandered around for a while looking for the kids activities that we thought would be taken place, but couldn't find any. In fact at one point, Mike said "this is the biggest non-event". We finally enjoyed really good jerk chicken cooked street-side for lunch. After lunch, we walked around some more and finally started making our way out of the area. It was absolutely amazing the amount of people that were coming towards us to take part in this event. They estimate more than 1 million people. Once we got really close to getting out of the carnival area, we came across a bounce house. The kids jumped in it for awhile and then had their faces painted. After this, we decided it was best to leave the area due to the amount of people and headed to Kensington Gardens where we found the Princess Diana's Memorial Playground. It was an unbelievable playground. The kids enjoyed a couple of hours here. Unlike yesterday's beautiful London weather, today was just the opposite. It was really overcast and threatened rain most of the afternoon. But, we lucked out and missed any rain. After playing at the playground, we took the bus back to the Pizza Express close to our apartment for dinner. From here we walked back to the apartment for the end of a long day.