Windsor

I am psychic. Seriously. How else can you explain how I knew on Friday morning a few weeks ago that I should not get up early in order to make my Friday class and should instead go to Windsor with Shruti and Nicola? It’s because the psychic part of my brain knew that my lecturer would have been double booked and the whole class minus me (the psychic one) would sit in an empty lecture hall for 20 minutes before leaving and being rather upset that they had bothered to turn up in the first place.

Well, that or the lazy part of my brain just got lucky.

Whatever. I will, from now on, be charging 15 pounds for psychic readings. You must book your appointment in advance.

Windsor turned out to be much more beautiful than my lecture hall would have been, affirming my decision to follow my psychic (read: lazy) leanings and take the day-trip. We came out of the train station and started walking towards the water so we could take what Shruti described as a beautiful boat trip on the river Thames.

We were slightly distracted by ice cream before purchasing and boarding an empty, double-decker boat for what would turn into a near-private boat trip. The clouds had almost cleared and there was a crisp, fall breeze rising off the Thames. The boat drifted along at a lazy pace as the automated tour guide drew our attention to Eton College on the right, the Windsor Racecourse and Windsor Castle on the left, and other notable sites along the banks. We drifted in comfortable silence, taking way too many photos while Nicola and Shruti slowly licked their ice creams. Mine had been gone since we boarded the boat since I always eat ice cream way to fast when it’s in a cone as I hate melted, sticky, dripping cones. ( I should remember to ask for a cup but I never do.)






Shruti and Nicola.


It started to drizzle and we found a rainbow!

We gently bumped back into the dock 40 minutes later and strolled through the park before heading up toward the castle. (Side note for those of you who are Harry Potter fans – this is where they filmed the flying lesson in the first film! For those of you who aren’t, don’t judge me for knowing that off the top of my head!)

Starving and freezing, we soon stopped for lunch at a pub where I had the best English sausages and mash I’ve ever had. (Another side note: I love pub food. Put mashed potatoes and sausages or beef and veggies on anything and it automatically becomes delicious.)

We rounded a corner on the hill leading up to the castle to find ourselves sandwiched between shops on one side and a sloped, green lawn before the castle wall on the other. Shruti led us up onto the grass where we did what any normal college girls do when they are on a grassy hill in front of a castle – take about 18,000 jumping photos and then roll down the hill.


I know my camera pretty well and usually am able to get pretty good jumping-shots. Nicola took one nice one of Shruti and I at first, then made us take a series of awful ones that mainly feature one or both of us squatting on the grass.


This is the nicer one.


Me ducking under an invisible missile...


And Shruti being impressed by my oddly princess-like, the-invisible-missile-didn't-hit-me-celebratory jump.

After we finished enjoying the lawn and the sun, we continued around the hill to the front of the castle where we (very disappointingly) found out that you can go into the castle but it was closing in five minutes so we weren’t going to be allowed to go inside. (We had thought it was closed to the public before.)

Even from the outside it was one of the most impressive castles I had ever seen. It was huge first of all, and the walls were massively tall and made of giant stone blocks. You could see part of the chapel inside from the walls where we were standing, and from what we could see the wall of glass at the front must have been stunning with the sun shining through it. Nicola was leaving that Sunday, but Shruti and I decided we would make it back before the semester ends to at least walk around inside the castle walls.

Heading back down the hill toward the train station, I noticed a little sign on the grass that said something to the tune of “stay off the royal grass stupid commoner.”

“They should have put signs further down,” Shruti said when I pointed it out.

Pretty soon we realized that there was a sign every ten feet.



Oops.

Other Photos from Windsor!


Random pub number 1.


Random pub number 2!




Yes, these are attack swans. They're pretty, but lethal. They like to strike around Windsor Bridge in small, organized squads.(Click to enlarge so you can read the sign.)







RLO/ anecdote (Again this isn’t so much an observation specific to London, just one that happened to arise here.)

Most of you have probably had the experience where you bite into a piece of meat and think something along the lines of, “wow, that’s an odd texture. It tastes kind of funny too. Hmm and it’s got that I-was-prepared-a-while-ago-and-was-left-sitting-somewhere-for-a-few-hours kind of feel to it.”

I bet that most of you haven’t continued eating anyway, consuming half of the offending meat due to an odd mixture of being too lazy to be really concerned and trying to decide if you’re just being paranoid about the meat being bad when it's really fine.

If you haven’t had that experience, do yourself a favor and don’t continue eating the meat the next time it tastes off.

I was having dinner with Zahra the other night at a restaurant in downtown Harrow, eating kebabs and naan, when I encountered an odd-tasting minced lamb kebab. Everything about it was off– the way they minced it and then reshaped it into a weird ladder-like kebab, the texture, the taste, the temperature. I stopped eating about half a kebab too late, and 20 minutes later my stomach started to feel slightly funny. That passed then I was hit with overwhelming nausea, which passed soon after and was replaced again by a mildly uneasy stomach.

By the time I began walking back to my dorm another 20 minutes later, my stomach was definitely rolling. Of course there are no bathrooms open between that restaurant and my dorm either.

You know that scene in Bridesmaids where the girls get food poisoning and the bride ends up having diarrhea in the street while wearing the really expensive wedding dress?

I was about to be the bride, sans the dress.

Lovely. I’ve never taken a crap outside before.

Luckily I burst into my room just in time to run for the bathroom and save myself the Bridesmaid-esque humiliation. Seriously though – next time meat tastes funny, I am going hungry.

London-isms

Headmaster – Principal
Touch Wood – Knock on Wood
Booing – crying (i.e. “She’s booing her eyes out.”)
Hair grip – bobby pin
Skanking – Dancing
Wee – pee (i.e. “I’m going to go for a wee.”)
Fancy – like (i.e. “I'd fancy a cup of tea right now,” or “She fancies him.”)
Cuppa – cup of tea
Brew – cup of tea (i.e. “Would you like a brew?”)
Cushty – Cushy
Right – very (used similarly to proper. i.e. “It’s right over the top,” or “That’s right mad.”)
Ta- can also mean bye
Baddie – bad guy
Shirty - blunt

Thanks for reading! I am leaving tomorrow morning for Bulgaria to visit my friend, Mariana, and will be there until next Monday morning. I’m not taking my laptop since it’s heavy, so expect a blog sometime early next week. Ta for now!

Art and Cookies

My Modern Art in London class has got to be the best class in the world, not just because it’s relatively easy (it involves critical thinking but you aren’t tested on any of it) but because I can’t think of a better way to learn about art than to go view galleries in a city like London.

Each week we meet at a different gallery where the professor gives us a paper with some background information and a list of artists or paintings to view in a certain order with themes to focus on as we view the pieces. She then bounces around to different students and gives context or insight into the painting they happen to be viewing when she finds them.

Two weeks ago we met at the Courtauld Gallery in Westminster. I arrived half an hour late after getting hopelessly lost, but the professor was still waiting in the lobby with tickets and guide sheets. (Hey, at least I made it this time – the first week I was so lost that I ended up in the wrong location and never made it to the correct museum.)

This week we were viewing pieces from prominent Impressionist (my favorite period) and Post-Impressionist painters. We were to start on the third floor with Manet’s work and were told to focus on how the modern world appears in his paintings. One thing Manet did, as she explained at the first painting, is play with people’s expectations. In The Luncheon on the Grass, for example, a) the men are wearing clothes from the period in which he was painting them, which b) made the nude woman sitting next to them on the grass quite alarming. At the time in which Manet was painting, nudity was seen as indecent and was often placed in the past – meaning the men should have been wearing clothes from a much older time period. Furthermore, the nude woman is looking directly at the viewer, making the painting very confrontational, as she is not the passive nude found in earlier paintings. Finally, the woman bending over in the background is huge, thus messing up the illusion of depth and forcing you to realize that you are viewing a painting and consider it as such.

I never would have gotten all of that if she hadn’t been there to direct my eyes.

I personally was drawn more to Manet and Renoir’s paintings on the other side of the room, as I love the softer brush strokes, the quality of light and vibrant color combinations that, very much in keeping with impressionism, they focused on.

I love how Monet would produce sets of similar works, like the haystacks, to explore the different effects created by light. Looking at the haystacks, it isn’t the figures in the painting that strike you; it’s the colors and the lighting he captured that speak. One work by Monet in particular titled Antibes (1888) caught my eye. (That is the painting in the photograph. Sorry for the blurry iphone photo - my camera died!) The description next to it explained that he was interested in capturing the “transitory effects of light and wind,” and he “captured the intensity of Mediterranean light and color by using strongly contrasting colors.”

The paintings that we were supposed to visit happened to be displayed on the fourth and third floor, but instead of organizing the tour by floor, they seemed to be on alternating floors, meaning we had to climb up and down the stairs each time we moved on to the next category. It was a bit of a work out for the body as well as the mind.

The next week we went to the Degas Exhibition. Want to guess who got terribly lost on the way there?

Luckily I left about two hours before we were supposed to meet just in case I got lost. I ended up walking around the Royal College of Art next to Hyde Park wondering why there were no Degas Exhibition signs since it was supposed to be a massive collection. Then I Googled the Exhibition on my phone and realized that I was supposed to be at the Royal Academy of Art over by Piccadilly Circus.

Oops.

I made for the nearest tube station, power walking fast enough that I may as well have been jogging, and got off three stations later with four minutes to go until we were supposed to meet in the Academy courtyard. If I made it in time the entry fee with the group would be 2.50. If I didn’t it would be 15.

That’s 12.50 pounds incentive – nearly 19 dollars? I ran the last bit, barely making it to the group before our professor left to buy the tickets. I was out of breath and disgustingly sweaty but so happy to still have my 20 bucks!

The Exhibition was really interesting. It was titled “Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement,” and focused on his obsession with movement. Three things in particular struck me. First, they had literally brought pieces from around the world and put them together in one place, which is amazing. Degas himself might not have even had the chance to see his work all together and arranged in groups that showed his development as an artist. On one wall for instance they had about five longer, panoramic paintings, one from private collections, another few from the US, and then the others from different countries in Europe. It gave such a different perspective being able to see them on the same wall next to his other work like “Two Dancers on a Stage.” (1874) In the longer paintings, Degas directs your eye in a skimming motion from side to side and foreground to depth, creating motion through your viewing and by what you imagine happening as you look to another part of the painting. In the other paintings like Two Dancers, He positions his subjects in poses that are so fleeting you naturally imagine the motions that follow. By walking from his earlier paintings to his later ones you can see him develop as a painter, which was fascinating. Second, they had collected a large number of Degas’ paintings and an even larger number of his sketches and studies. Thus you could literally follow his process from sketching ballerina’s legs, to certain ballet poses to finally painting a picture. It’s amazing how extensive each painting was. Finally, the curators had collected work and equipment from other prominent figures at the time that had influenced Degas. For instance, Muybridge’s photographs and cameras were there, and compared to several of Degas’ photographs and paintings, the influence was clear.

Overall I was very impressed with the Exhibition.

RLO - Baking

I’ve been on a real baking stint lately, which has been tasty but so annoying at the super market since things have different names here! And, for some annoying reason, the Internet doesn’t work in Sainsburys. This means that when I’m standing in front of the icing sugar and looking for powdered sugar, I can’t Google if the two are the same. Instead I need to hunt down an employee and beg for help.

Once the baking scavenger hunts are finished though the baking has been a lot of fun. It started with Felicia, Lindsay (pictured above - I like to refer to them as Felindsay for future reference) and I making chocolate chip cookies. (There’s another example of baking difficulty – you can only buy chocolate chips in bags that are roughly the size of one cup. What!?!?)

The cookie dough brought back memories of sitting on my living room floor in high school with my friends (shout out to Garisma) and a couple of spoons for hours talking about anything and everything. Then the cookies were warm and gooey and delicious. Of course the next day I had to make them again. Sam, Helen (two of my flat mates) and I took them into Sam’s room and watched Fargo, which neither Helen nor I had seen. (He described it as a dark comedy, which I definitely understood once I saw one of the kidnappers shoving the other into a wood chipper… On a side note, try watching that movie and not saying “Oh yeah,” every five minutes for the rest of your life.)



Since then Irish car bomb cupcakes (chocolate Guinness cake with Baileys ganache and Baileys frosting – thanks Aleia!) and brownies have resulted, and a pumpkin pie and more cookies are on my list of to-makes.

Side Note

I always like to know names when my friends are telling me about people so I can try to keep people straight. So, for future reference, my flatmates are:

Helen (a fine arts major from southern England)
Sam (a music major from Northern England)
Annabel (a film major from the middle of England)
Joe (from Liverpool and I think he’s a film major. I always forget his course)
Chloe (A fashion major who lives north of London)



More names to come as I need them!

Now, more fun with signs:


That's one of the ads inside all of the Tubes! Isn't it great? I think my favorite part is the tagline "Be special, give sperm." If you go on the website (Shout out to Erin) it's even better! You can sort the men by categories like eye color or religion and then "add to cart." Also there's a game on their blog where you guide the sperm to the egg. It's so bizarre but so funny!

Finally, a preview for my next gallery visit post.


DON'T STEP ON THE ART!

London-isms

Plaster – Band-aid
Fringe – bangs
Blag it – BS it/ wing it
Piss about – run around (Piss seems to be a very versatile word here)
Slag – slut
Marks – grades
Stroke - pet (as in “stroke the cat”)
Crème Fraiche – Sour Cream
Ping Pong Bat - Ping Pong Paddle
Ta – can be used instead of thanks or cheers.
To let – to rent
Take it on the chin – be a good sport about something (i.e. “Well he lost but at least he took it on the chin.”)
Bicarbonate of soda – baking soda
Icing sugar – powdered sugar

Weddings and Wands

Buckingham Palace

A few weeks ago I decided to see Kate Middleton’s dress at Buckingham Palace with Palak in an attempt to really get into the British spirit. It seemed a good place to start since I can’t think of anything more British than the royal family, except perhaps tea. (Palak and most of the other English people I’ve met can tell me more about the British royal family than they can tell me about themselves.)

Also, cool fact – if you select the Gift Aid option when you buy your ticket, you can convert it into a one-year pass to Buckingham Palace! (Gift Aid, as far as I understand, means that the money can be used for some royal function or given to some charity or claimed for tax or something along those lines. Basically, I don’t care if you’re using the money to butter the Queen’s toast if you’re going give me a one-year pass instead of a one-day ticket for the same price.)

Our ticket also included a (one-year!) pass to the Queen’s Gallery next door. (Love the fat lion - he was part of a table.) We began our trip by rushing through that, making sure to admire at least one painting per room so we felt like we had seem the Gallery in part before moving on to the palace. (Palak had school in 2 hours and we had come for the dress! Plus we had one-year passes so we could come back any time.)


I've been inspired - I now want to commission a painting of my cats when I go home.


I love the sassy horn blower. (Click to enlarge)

After several long queues (lines) we finally made it into the palace.

Rarely has a building made me feel quite so small. Each room was massive and ornately decorated. They flowed into each other seamlessly, the silk on the walls blending between rooms with complementary patterns or colors and the rugs perfectly tying together the walls and the chandeliers hanging from gold plated ceilings. Raised ceilings magnified the already-large rooms and mirrors were set above eye level to reflect the room back to you, creating the illusion of even more space. The colors were soft and tasteful and the furniture sparser, making it seem as if each piece were more deliberately chosen than those crammed into the Castle in Copenhagen.

The experience was definitely made more surreal by going with an English person. Palak must have commented “The Queen actually walks here!” or “This is where they took the photographs after the wedding!” several dozen times at least. (Her knowledge of the royal family seriously impresses me – she recognized where they had taken each photograph in the palace after the royal wedding!) That kind of enthusiasm is infectious, and soon I found myself whispering awed comments and tiptoeing on the plush rugs as if I were on hallowed ground and was afraid of disturbing the peace.

After going through a short exhibition of what seemed to be expensive, rare baubles that the royal family has collected over the last few hundred years (tiny portraits of the Russian Czars, Faberge eggs, flowers made out of gems and the like) we rushed around a corner and found ourselves in front of the dress.

It was displayed with the hem a little below eye level and set a few feet back behind a net to protect it from wandering hands. The dress looked beautiful in the photographs, but it was so much more intricate and impressive in person. Lace covered the torso down to the waist and was embroidered in lines that came to a point on the skirt. More lace was stitched around the hem and rose to mirror the point above while the lace collar at the neck added a delicate, feminine touch. The train was fanned out and also tastefully covered in webs of lace. We circled the dress for about 20 minutes before straying to the case behind it, which displayed her tiny shoes and earrings. The lace on the shoes matched the dress, and you could see signs of wear from the wedding day inside the shoes where the leather was creased.

We followed the signs in awed silence (I’m telling you, that kind of admiration is contagious.) through to the next room where we found what I assumed to be a replica of the cake.

Correction – where we found the cake. The only parts that weren’t the actual cake were the top three tiers.

What???

It’s been six months since the wedding! And, according to the plaque, a team of bakers had worked on the cake throughout the two months leading up to the wedding.

Eight tiers of cream white piping and frosting roses sat behind the glass, looking as perfect as if it had just been made the day before. The cake inside all of that frosting was fruitcake, which is apparently the royal English wedding cake of choice. You could see the single cut that the couple had made for photographs on the first tier.

As beautiful as it was, I did fleetingly recognize the insanity of paying to see an eight-month-old cake. That was trumped by the oh-my-gosh-I’m-looking-at-the-real-royal-cake-that-Kate-and-William-touched feeling, no doubt a result of the hero-worship that I had caught earlier from Palak and the other Brits around me.

My one complaint from the palace would be that you are not allowed to take photographs inside! I paid over 20 quid (pounds) for my ticket; I should at least be allowed a few souvenir photographs! It’s ok though; I took 53 photographs of the back of the palace and the surrounding park to make up for it. I can’t photograph the inside? Fine, I’ll just fill up my memory card with photos of the outside to spite you! (Sometimes that five-year-old logic pops up again and is hard to refuse. When I was a child and I got mad at one of my parents, I would go on a hunger strike to punish them. Really young me? Not super efficient.)

The thought seems less logical now that a) I have a mountain of identical photographs and b) no one at the palace cares.








That's the wall around the palace. I don't think anyone is getting over that any time soon.

Wands and Dennis Severs’ House

Shruti’s friend from University, Nicola, was visiting from Germany last week. As both Palak and Shruti had training for work on Wednesday, I kept Nicola company as she explored London. (That is Shruti and Nicola in the photograph.)

A week before, my new American friend Lindsay had told me about a massive toy store called Hamley’s near Oxford Circus that had a huge Harry Potter section. Of course, Nicola and I had to go. Then, when Shruti and Palak requested wands, we decided we all had to get them.

Shruti chose Hermione’s wand, Palak got the Elder wand (the rest of us didn’t think we could handle the power), Nicola got Ginny’s and I got Ron’s (mostly because I think of all the characters, he and I have the most in common).

Best 20 pounds ever spent.

When we met Shruti and Palak at Waterloo station after their training was over and gave them their wands, they both squealed in excitement. Shruti pulled hers out and began casting spells, admonishing us to do the same since “nowhere is safe.”

We all gave in later on the train ride home.



“Shruti, people are staring.”

“No they aren’t! I cast Muffliato - they can’t hear a thing.”

I love that she has no shame with her wand. Soon we were dueling and most of the passengers were laughing or jealous. (Again, best 20 pounds ever spent.)

Before our fun-filled train ride, Shruti, Nicola and I went to the Dennis Severs’ House while Palak went to her lectures. (She has school Wednesday evenings.)

I had found the museum on a list of must-sees in London the week before. The website said “to enter its door is to pass through a frame into a painting, one with a time and a life of its own. The game is that you interrupt a family of Huguenot silk weavers named Jervis who, though they can still sometimes be heard, seem always to be just out of sight. As you journey off in a silent search through the ten rooms, each lit by fire and candlelight, you receive a number of simulations to your senses.”

The house was truly amazing. It was similar to being sucked into the British spirit at Buckingham Palace, only the House was much more personal.

You need to email or call to make reservations since they only let a limited number of visitors enter each night. This prevents you from running into many people while you are inside, thus preserving the illusion that you are in another time. The house is only open a few nights a week and talking is prohibited as it also disrupts the illusion.

It was a good thing I remembered the address of the house because there were no signs indicating that it was anything more than a normal house. The man who runs it was waiting outside the door, and after chatting with us and asking us to leave all of our worries at the door and enjoy the atmosphere, he directed us downstairs to the kitchen where we would begin our tour.

Each room is decorated in a slightly later style than the last, starting in 1724 and ending in 1914. Everything in the house is authentic and presented without restrictive glass or ropes. The food in the rooms is half eaten and real, making it seem as if someone living in the house left the meal halfway through to attend to something and will return shortly. In some rooms they’ve hidden tracks that play horses clopping by outside or people walking overhead. The lighting, the sounds, the surroundings and the smells all combine to take you back in time. It really feels as if you are spying on a family in their home.

There was a paper upstairs with the house slogan, “You either see it or you don’t,” prompting you to see the family in the rooms and to imagine further. “Scrooge has just seen the ghost of Christmas Past sitting in the chair behind you and is alarmed – do you see it?”

After about ten minutes, it’s hard not to see it.

The house was amazing. It was like consuming numerous paintings, several plays and a novel or two all at once, only instead of simply observing, you are literally in the middle of the story.

An hour passed in what felt like 15 minutes. By the time we stepped back onto the street, present-day London felt more contrived than the scenes we had just left behind.

RLO

Preface: This is not an observation specific to London, just one that happened to arise here.

Palak’s house has two bathrooms – one downstairs with a conventional, stand-up-while-bathing shower, and one upstairs with a bathtub and a shower handle that you pick up from a stand at the front like an old fashioned telephone. (Thank you Exchange3D.com for this photo!) The women of the house usually use the upstairs bathroom, while the men tend to take over the downstairs one.

The first time I entered the bathroom to take a shower I was a little confused as to how to go about showering in a tub since I’ve only ever taken showers standing up. I stood confronting the tub for a while, trying to work out the logistics of bathing while sitting. In my mind, when I picked up the handle, water would spray everywhere, my arm would get tired, I would be freezing without a steady stream of piping hot water hitting my back throughout the duration of my shower and rinsing my hair would be rather like your mom pouring cups of water over your head when you were three.

My shower (of course) was much less dramatic. Water stayed in the tub, my hair rinsed easily and my skin was literally steaming from the temperature of the water. Plus, if I closed or squinted my eyes, I could kind of pretend I was a grand lady in the 19th Century. In short: loads of shower fun.

After a few showers I had a thought! An epiphany, if you will.

Washing my face is a pain - I always get soap in my eyes and I hate turning my face directly up into the water since the pressure hurts. But this showerhead is a handle and thus not attached to the wall, meaning I can direct the water in any direction I want!

Apparently my common sense is severely lacking in unfamiliar situations.

Grinning at my brilliance, I washed my face, groped for the handle with my eyes shut, and pointed the handle straight up at my face.

Grin erased.

What resulted was not a gentle, pleasant splash of water. No, when you direct a stream of water that is coming out of a faucet at a high pressure upward, you get a freaking geyser. Luckily it stopped short of the ceiling because I don’t think I would have been able to reach that with my towel.

London-isms

Fiddly – delicate, wobbly
Match – game (i.e. rugby match, football match, etc)
Proper – they use this word often to mean “good,” “really,” “very;” used to place emphasis on whatever follows it. (i.e. “He’s proper mad,” or “That was a proper match)
More-y – something that you start eating and then want more of (i.e. “Potato crisps are so more-y; I can’t stop eating them.)
Pisstake – joke (i.e. “It was just a pisstake.”)

Camden Town and Leadenhall Market

Camden Town


This is Kiara, Felicia and I reflected in the tube window on our way to Camden Town!

I’ve never been able to haggle. It’s certainly not for lack of opportunity because at home my dad, my brothers and I like to go to the swap meet near our house on the weekends to walk around and take in the atmosphere and all of the items for sale. It’s rather like going garage sale-ing but instead of having to go around to find them all you just need to make one stop. One time I was able to haggle an item from seven dollars to five and was immensely proud until my dad told me it was probably a three-dollar item. No, my not being able to haggle is most definitely due to a lack of ability.

The Camden Markets in Central London that Felicia, Kiara and I visited about a week ago are basically a collection of swap meets that were started in the 1970s. One area has stalls arranged in three or four rows selling dresses and jackets; another area is a covered market hall where you can find all sorts of odd candles, necklaces, notebooks and such; yet another has a crowded second hand bookshop and about 50 tables selling nearly any food you can think of. The markets seem to wind on forever.

Looking around when we arrived, I was pretty sure that the majority of these markets would require either some sort of haggling or severe ripping off.

Severe ripping off, table for one please.

We came out of the Tube and found ourselves in an oddly mixed mass of people. There were young, middle aged and old people who looked to be from a wide range of economic backgrounds speaking quite a few different languages with a variety of accents. Camden Town seemed eclectic already. We drifted with the crowd toward a street to the left and stopped at the first stall we found to admire the dresses that were hung around the inside of the tent. There were some really pretty ones, but they were all short and summery, and as it is getting colder each day they wouldn't do us very much good for another six months or so. An Asian man watched as we wandered, popping up whenever one of us touched something to tell us the price and try to pester us into buying it.

“That dress? That’s a very pretty one- it will look very nice on you. It’s 15 pounds. Okay fine, for you today, it is only 12.50 – I’ll give you a special price. That’s just for you, just today.”

Really dude? You took off 2 pounds 50 p? The dress is pretty but a) it looks like it should cost more like 8 pounds and b) it already has a stain. If I was any good at haggling I might have tried to bargain the price down. Also, don't try to act like we are best friends! You don't even know my name! As we walked on we soon realized that all of the tents on that street sold identical dresses at the exact same price. Some of them were pretty, but they looked like they had been made very cheaply and would deteriorate after one wash.

We continued back down the original street, all of us dress-less, passing sunglasses and souvenir booths that were reminiscent of Venice Beach. Soon we reached a slight turn and saw a bridge with the “Camden Lock” sign ahead. Before the bridge there were stores ranging from shoe shops to darker costume-like clothing stores with larger-than-life items popping out of the storefronts. Huge 3D shoes were stuck to the front of the Converse store, a plane was taking a nosedive on the front of another shop and massive roses were blooming out of a third.



At the end of another side street was the entrance to a glass-roofed market with tables arranged around the square room on the first floor and the balcony ringing the top of the room. There were smaller items on the tables in this market, such as necklaces, coasters, novelty London boxes, leather journals, sculpted soap and quite a few different odd candles. This was probably my favorite area of Camden Town since there were more novelty objects that you wouldn't find in most stores and fewer clothing stalls. The building was ornately decorated and, since the roof was glass, there was a very soft, natural light.


The coolest soaps ever!


Wax beads that you pour into anything to create a candle. Like vegetables and fruits?? Odd, but awesome!

We meandered through the table maze and out the back, following our noses down the street into a courtyard with food tents. Felicia and I ordered Jamaican jerk chicken wraps from two very chatty men. The wraps were delicious! The chicken was a little spicy, but the tropical mayonnaise and grilled plantains cut the spice.

There was a table next to where we were sitting selling mashed potatoes and meat. On the table was a hot plate with a lidded pot. A woman from a Chinese table came over and lifted the lid to peek inside when the man cooking had his back turned and burned herself on the steam. I would say that should teach her to be nosey, but as I can be the nosiest person on the planet karma might teach me a lesson in return.






Let me see your lion face!


There were the coolest seats ever between the river and a row of take-away eateries!

Overall the trip was a lot of fun. I got three necklaces, (one with a little, metal camera, the second an ornate key with leather wrapped around the rod, and the last with a round, locket-like clock) a leather journal, a 3-pound rug for my room and a leather, monkey coin purse for a friend. I spent about 30 pounds.


My camera necklace.


There's my key necklace, and behind it to the right is the clock necklace.


My leather journal.


Finally, this is the awesome rug I got for only three pounds!

Leadenhall Market

If you haven’t noticed already, I love Harry Potter. Being in London has only enflamed that love; so don’t be surprised when I continue to point out the shooting locations for even the shortest scenes from the films when I visit them! The shooting location of this post is a rather major one from the first movie.

The area where the current Leadenhall Market stands had been a market and a meeting place for tradesmen and various food vendors since the 1300s. (It’s really weird thinking that the US didn’t exist when this market began and wouldn’t exist for hundreds of years!) The structure standing today was built in the late 1800s and was extensively restored in 1991. This market was used as the filming location for Diagon Alley in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s (Sorcerer’s) stone. While the filmmakers did a lot of work on the shop fronts to create the alley, if you look at the background in the film when Hagrid and Harry are walking through London to the Leakey Cauldron before entering Diagon Alley, you can clearly see the market behind them.

Palak and I decided to go see the market the Sunday before last and, after navigating around a million weekend tube closures (see my RLO below) and circling the area twice, we found the entrance!

The market was closed since it was Sunday, but that made our first visit nicer. There were almost no people walking through the Market so we could soak in our surroundings and photograph in peace. It was a beautifully designed building (if you could call it that) and you could definitely feel why it had been chosen as the location for Diagon Alley.

When we started taking photos, we tried to use a pen as a wand. (Rather unsuccessfully I might add, which leads to the purchasing of real wands that will be covered in my next post!) We were basically standing in Diagon Alley, (Yep! Still super exciting!) so we did have to take wand photos. (The photo above is a non-pen-wand photo of Palak.)


An awesome building we passed on our way to Leadenhall Market.


(Click on it to enlarge so you can read the writing.) I want one of these in my house...




Ironically, this was the name of the pub at the entrance to Leadenhall Market. (For those of you who don't know, New Moon is also the name of the second book in the Twilight Saga.) So this is where the worlds of Harry Potter and Twilight meet...

And finally, another sign adventure!



RLO

I am starting to hate the Olympics, which is sad because the Olympics and I have always had a very fond, exciting relationship. Every four years when the summer Olympics come on my TV, I am enthralled. I find myself compulsively taking notes for hours and hours and days on end through sports I have scarcely heard of. (That’s one of my habits that I find more annoying since it causes hand cramps – compulsive note taking. You would be surprised how many notebooks I have filled from watching the Olympics, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel alone – I would bet there are more than I fill one average school year.)

“Oh my gosh, it’s rhythmic gymnastics!”

“Megan, do you even know what that is?” my brother usually asks.

“Duh,” I answer. “You’ve never done ribbon twirling???”

Oops, neither have I…

It’s always around that point that I make myself put my pen down and change the channel.

This year though, that relationship is already tainted by the stupid Tube closures. Since the summer Olympics will take place in London, the London Transport officials close different sections of the Tube each weekend for repairs and improvements.

So far they have closed the Metropolitan line (which runs right outside my dorm) every single weekend for about four stops in either direction of the station within walking distance. That means I have to walk to the three-times-slower Bakerloo line ten minutes away- but wait! Then I have to switch lines about four stops later because the Bakerloo line is closed, so I switch to the London Overground which is also closed in a few stops, so I catch the Jubilee line and then find myself stuck in central London because the Central, Circle and District lines are, of course, all closed in the area. It’s maddening. Half hour trips end up taking three hours. (Not that I let all of this stop me from getting around London; it just takes me a lot longer to get anywhere and I tend to get a lot angrier at the Olympics.)

Hopefully by the time I hear that familiar music on my TV again this summer, the Olympics and I will have been able to work through our issues and mend our relationship.

We’ll see.

London-isms

Rubbish – trash
Bollucks – darn
Git – jerk
Cheers – Basically they say this any time you might say “thank you,” “hello,” “goodbye,” “you’re welcome,” or “excuse me,” but not when you want to toast something.
Knackered – tired; exhausted
Brilliant – yay; cool; basically denoting that something is positive or exciting. (i.e. “Oh you’re coming! Brilliant!” or “She’s bloody brilliant!”)
Fag – cigarette
Best mate – best friend
Mate – friend (i.e. “I went out with a couple of my mates last night.”)
Bloke – guy
Dude – ok, I know how you would use this but it’s hard to explain, so I Googled it. According to Wiktionary, (which was the best explanation I could find) dude is a noun, which means: “a dandy; a man who is very concerned about his dress or appearance.” That lead to a separate search as to what dandy means, and apparently it means “almost first rate,” or “very good.” It is usually used when a man has impressed you by his mannerisms and appearance. (i.e. “I met the actor and he was a complete dude!”)

Next time I will post about Buckingham Palace and the buying of the wands. Thanks for reading!