On the first day of our adventures together, we began the day at the Camden Market. This market is a huge place with multiple components, including Camden Lock, Camden Town, Camden Stables Market, and Inverness Street Market. My friend and I walked through all the little stalls, ate crepes for lunch, and bought a couple of cheap novelty items.
The coolest market in Camden Market, because it's a former working stable turned into a market
After lunch, we moved my friend's stuff to her family's house and spent the evening in Notting Hill, right next to the Kensington area. This neighborhood is so beautiful and so cool. It looks like this:
I like the funky, brightly painted houses best. If I could live anywhere in London, it would be in a bright yellow flat in Notting Hill.
We walked to Portobello Road, which is famous for Portobello Market. When we arrived, the Market was just starting to close up for the day, but we still had time to wander through some of the stalls and into the little shops along the street. Portobello is much fancier than Camden... there is a tangible decrease in my fear of being pick pocketed in going from Camden to Portobello. We ate dinner at a Malaysian dive restaurant and got cupcakes at the London bakery Dragonfly Bakery.
On Saturday, we started off the day at Westminster Abbey. The Abbey is across the street from the Parliament Building, and is therefore the center of tourist pandemonium on a Saturday in the summer. Unlike a lot of historical sites and museums in London, the Abbey also charges a pretty hefty entrance fee. Even considering both those factors though, the Abbey was well worth the trip. Like the Notre Dam, the Abbey has incredible floors, ceilings, and stained glass. Unlike Notre Dam, the Abbey also has a whole series of small chapels on the edges of the main sanctuary, and each one is designed differently and intricately, usually with the tomb of some important British person inside, like Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth I.
Speaking of tombs, the Abbey houses a whole lot of them. In addition to the big tombs in the chapels, there are tons of people buried beneath the floors of the Abbey, including many British political figures, but also including people like Charles Dickens, William Wordsworth, Chaucer, Charles Darwin, and others. Many famous funerals have been held there too (and coronations and weddings), including Princess Diana's, which I watched on TV as a little kid, and which had previously supplied all my knowledge regarding the Abbey.
Pictures are not allowed inside the Abbey, but here are some from the Internet...
The main sanctuary
The Lady Chapel, probably the biggest chapel and my favorite because of its intricate, almost lace-like ceilings
Me outside the Abbey... it was a rainy London morning
After fully exploring the Abbey, my friend and I found lunch and then set off for Tate Britain. This museum was fairly small but offered a large variety of art by British artists. Like Tate Modern, it had a good selection of printmaking, which I loved because of my printmaking focus in my art minor.
An etching of London by JMW Turner
It also had modern art like this famous piece by Piet Mondrian, who was Dutch but who worked in England
Even though I love the prints in the Tate Britain, I discovered that my new favorite artist is a painter... John Singer Sargent paints so beautifully and so romantically
"Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose"
"Study of Madame Gautreau"
Once finished looking through the Tate, my friend and I headed back to the Holborn area so that she could see the British Museum briefly. This constituted my third visit to the British Museum, but I still stumbled upon a lot that I hadn't seen before, like an exhibit on money (interesting after my Monetary Theory course last semester) and these cool old clocks...
We ended our day with dinner and a couple of ciders with friends from LSE near my old dorm.
On Sunday, my friend and I started off at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. Speaker's Corner is famous for allowing crazy people to exploit their soap box rights on Sunday mornings, and large crowds come out to watch them rant about the end of the world.
Cooky bananas
Hyde Park is very, very large and is home to many other neat things. There are tons of paths to walk along and fields to lay out in or play "footie" in. The park hosts lots of concerts, the first being a Rolling Stones concert in the sixties and the most recent that I know of being a Jay-Z concert a couple of weekends ago (wiiiish I had gone). There is a pond in the center of the park, on the other side of which is Kensington Gardens, home to Kensington Palace, which I visited on my very first night in London. Of particular interest to me are the pony riding lessons conducted in the park on weekends.
I would've been one of these girls had I lived in London at age eight
Hyde Park is also home to Marble Arch... not as cool as the Arc du Triumph, but still neat
After walking through Hyde Park, my friend and I took advantage of her aunt's membership passes at the Natural History Museum. Admission to the general exhibits are free, but a few special exhibits require payment or a membership pass. In this case, the Museum had a really cool butterfly exhibit that we got to see for free.
Some swans and me at the Natural History Museum
Dinosaurs
Butterflies!
We ended our day with a trip to Warwick Avenue. Most people outside of London haven't heard of this place because it isn't really famous. I wanted to go because one of my favorite musicians, Welsh singer Duffy, has a song named after the street. The whole song and music video are centered around the Warwick Avenue tube station.
Me at the Warwick Avenue tube station
Duffy at the Warwick Avenue tube station
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhZ5-L9znt8
On my walk home, after my friend took the tube back to her aunt and uncle's house, I stopped at a patisserie whose desserts I'd been eying all week. I enjoyed an amazing slice of strawberry cheesecake, deciding I'd make a small late dinner in a couple hours. These sort of decisions may result in a few more hours at the gym when I get back to the States, but for now, I say, Life's short... eat dessert first.
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