London part two

May 22-30, 2009

From Florence, we made our way to Pisa airport, where we caught a flight to London. Gladys was to fly back with Yuanting and Kenny after they returned from the US, but due to her company imposing a quarantine during the swine flu fiasco back in May, she had to bring her return flight forward by two days.

Back in London, this time we were staying at a hostel in Gloucester/Kensington, just a couple of blocks west of the Royal Albert Hall. Astor Hyde Park was pretty decent, relatively clean and  the rooms were sufficiently livable.

Borough Market

A visit to London is not complete without a visit to a local market. So Saturday we made our way south of the river to get to Borough Market. We had visited Portobello Market just before leaving for Paris but Borough Market was so much better. Part of it is situated under a railway track and the stalls sprawl out in a pretty orderly fashion.

I could not contain my excitement after seeing all the wonderful food that was being sold at the market. From raclette being prepared on the spot to cheese and leek quiches, and fresh scones with jam. Gladys and I immediately bemoaned our mistake of having breakfast before going to a market.

Not a fan of fresh tomatoes but these looked so amazing

gotta love the colors of the peppers

i wonder how many children in Africa can one egg feed?

legs of cured ham at a Spanish foods stall

I gotta add in retrospect that seeing the cured ham being sliced was a novelty for me. However, after my time in Spain, I realized that it really wasn’t a big deal because every bar has legs of ham hanging on the wall because they slice off the meat for ham sandwiches. It took some time for me to eventually get used to smelling and looking at the cured ham all around me in bars.

Gladys and I spent a fair bit of time at the stall pictured below. I would say that the picture explains everything. It doesn’t. Dried fruits and nuts covered not only in white, dark or milk chocolate, but yogurt too. And get this, the guys at the stall were extremely friendly too, shoving generous potions towards us to sample.

cheese mountain

i wonder how fresh these oysters really are

chocolate mountain...

...and brownie mountain

melting cheese before he scraped it over diced potatoes and voilà, you get raclette at a market

Sunday in London

Sunday started off with the 9.30am service at Holy Trinity Brompton before we made our way to Covent Garden. While there, we shopped a little bit, watched buskers… at a leisurely pace, like how Sundays are meant to be.

some people were awed by his body, some were just too scared of him

The buskers at Covent Garden were really great and we were thoroughly entertained by the string ensemble. I even bought their CD! The atmosphere at Covent Garden is lovely and it is one of my favorite places in London.

We headed to Oxford Street to window shop because we saw all these people with Primark bags. Almost every other person we saw on the street had come from Primark. We got there before it closed for the evening — not impressed. OK so the prices were really low but I didn’t see anything that I would wear so buying for the sake of buying would just mean a waste of money, and lesser luggage space.

On we walked till we got to Hyde Park. I love parks in temperate countries where you can stroll and actually enjoy the weather, as opposed to perspiring and wanting to find air-conditioning.

That evening, we met up with Dylan and Nat, friends from school. They waited for us at the Hyde Park Corner underground station and then we headed back in to Hyde Park while catching up and exchanging travel stories.

We decided to watch from Hyde Park corner towards Knightsbridge just to pass Harrods because it had already closed. We kept going and going, towards South Kensington where we had crepes for dinner. Dylan and Nat wanted to check out our hostel so we walked to Gloucester. I walked them to the underground station where they were going to catch the tube to Finchley, where their hostel was, and we agreed to meet up again.

to be continued…