London: Aug 8: Borough Market (again), Clockmakers Museum, Spitalfields, Notting Hill, and Edgeware Road

This was a busy day. We visited a number of neighborhoods in London, plus countless markets (literally).

In the morning, Di Yin and I returned to Borough Market. Again, we wandered through, sampling as we went. By far the best item we sampled was an amazingly good, refreshing "first discovery apples" apple juice. It enticed us to buy a number of these apples.

For lunch, we bought:

• a small pear yogurt: the pears were good; the yogurt was average.
• the Thai green curry chicken (in those huge pans) that we spotted last time, served with coconut jasmine rice: good.
• an eggplant kibbeh (bulgher crust wrapped around an eggplant filling): neither of us liked it.
• a sandwich with chorizo, roasted pepper, and frisee: fairly decent.
• cannelés / canneles (those French pastries we bought last week and liked so much).

From Borough Market, we walked across London Bridge and through the empty financial district to the Clockmakers Museum. It's a small, cute museum filled with displays of clocks, pocket watches, watch keys, and more, as well as signs describing the history of clockmaking in London over the centuries. I learned why having an accurate clock makes determining longitude really easy, and recalled that one can easily determine latitude from the stars.

Sometime around now, I took out my camera and began taking pictures. Di Yin, meanwhile, had been taking pictures all along, beginning with this one. The rest of her album is pictures from this day. If you're in slideshow mode and you begin to see another batch of pictures from Borough Market, you've cycled to the beginning and are seeing pictures from our first visit. I already linked to those pictures.

As we left The City financial district, we entered livelier parts of town as we walked over to Spitalfields market. Spitalfields itself was also lively, full of cafes and restaurants with outdoor seating, plus other shops. Nearby are regular pubs (no gastropubs) and cute tea-houses.

A few blocks away, we found a line of food stalls: Tibetan, Indian, Thai, Moroccan (two of these), Chinese, risotto balls. There was also someone running a grill out of a converted trailer truck, and another joint running out of a converted double-decker bus. Walking by these, I decided I liked the smell of this part of town. Further along, we found stands selling clothes. It turns out this area is part of the Backyard Market.

On another block, we found a "pop-up market", this one an indoor, low-end jewelry market, and, later, another small indoor market with items for the home (kitchenware, furniture, etc.). Next we came across a large indoor market with clothing.

This was getting absurd. These markets just go on and on. By the way, there were people around, but I wouldn't call the area crowded.

We walked and learned we were at the end of Brick Lane, the Indian district we visited before. This time we found the dense part of Brick Lane -- we must've not been far enough along on our previous visits. We popped in a large Indian grocery store, walked by desperate Indian restaurateurs (why is it that it's more likely Indian restaurants have people on the sidewalk recruiting patrons than other types of restaurants, and why do these people always look more desperate?), and looked in another grocery, Bangla City, one that sells two-foot-long frozen fish.

And now, for something entirely different, we took the tube to Notting Hill. To get there, we passed through Liverpool Station, which has a high-windowed roof, giving it a nice, open feeling.

Notting Hill has a nice mix of dense, small, retail shops and residences. We walked down Portobello Road, passing through a series of street markets (antiques then food then fashion) as they were shutting down, but we still appreciated the neighborhood without them. Given Borough Market, Spitalfields, and Notting Hill, I guess Saturday is a big market day.

We headed east down Westbourne Grove road. We discovered an entirely organic grocery store: yogurt, bacon, ice cream, pastas, etc., all organic. Farther east, we began to see Middle Eastern places. The area around Queensway Road looked enticing, but we would not be distracted from our goal of discovering the Middle Eastern food along Edgeware Road.

On the way to Edgeware Road, near Paddington Station (one of the most important interchange stations in the city) we found places clearly for travelers on the go, such as fast food joints and 7-11-type markets.

Eventually, we made our way to our evening/dinner destination: Edgeware Road. Edgeware Road is famous for being the Middle Eastern/Arab/Persian/whatever neighborhood of London. This area is where wealthy people from that part of the world live and eat.

From what I'd heard, I expected Edgeware Road to be a small, neighborhood-y road, not the wide road with five lanes of traffic that it turned out to have. We walked down Edgeware Road, sorting through the restaurants to select one with good food from all those that had large crowds sitting outside simply because people needed places to smoke cigarettes and hookahs. We passed many specialist restaurants: Iran, Lebanon, Damascus, Beirut. Even cities have distinctive cuisines. In neither in New York nor San Francisco have I seen restaurants concentrating on particular parts of the Middle East so specifically. Eventually, we spotted a darling little Persian place, Patogh, slightly off Edgeware Road, and went there to have dinner.

After a good dinner, a short stop for ice cream, and a long tube ride, we arrived home.