London: Sep 1: The East End and the West End (inc. National Gallery Part 2)

Beigels & Vicinity
I spent the morning following a guidebook's walking tour in the vicinity of the East End around Brick Lane, taking these pictures on the way. They document the sites much better than this blog post. My main excuse for doing this tour was to visit a particular bagel shop for breakfast. The tour was only okay for three reasons: I'd already seen most of the area before, the architecture is low-end and bland, and the tour's historical emphasis was on Jack the Ripper (whose story I don't care about).

First, I stopped by Beigel Bake, this time to actually try some bagels. (I saw it once before with Di Yin, but we weren't hungry then.) I had one with butter and one with cream cheese and lox. They were okay bagels: better than supermarket bagels but not as good as New York bagels. I'm not sure what was wrong with them -- perhaps not enough bite to the crust? I wouldn't buy them again.

On my route around Brick Lane, I stopped by Spitalfields, which was setting up for a clothing and accessories market. Soon after, on Wentworth Street, I found another fashion market, or it could just be that all the shops on the street were placing their racks outside.

The National Gallery & Theatre District
In late afternoon, I left work to explore the area of the West End around Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, and Chinatown, with a stop by the National Gallery to see what I missed on my last visit. This area includes much of London's theatre district, though the district covers a wider area than I explored this day. By the way, the West End is east of Buckingham Palace and where I work, so I have trouble with the name.

While wandering the West End, I took pictures. Again, these pictures describe more sights than I'm writing about here. This area is definitely a much nicer part of town than the East End. I like the liveliness of the area, and that there are few roads crossing the district to interfere with strolling.

As for Chinatown, in particular, it's no bigger than I previously thought (a couple of blocks). Still, it's not quite as bad as my previous impressions: I saw people behind windows rolling noodles and steaming dumplings.

As I mentioned, I stopped by the National Gallery. Here are my notes:

• I breezed through 13th-15th century paintings because religious art generally doesn't interest me (and many paintings had such themes), and because a good fraction of these paintings don't include perspective and I thus had trouble finding them attractive.
• Carlo Crivelli, a 15th century painter, paints religious scenes with naturalistic details. He uses vivid paints and does a good job with depth.
• I wanted to photograph one painting because of its elaborate frame: rose vines surrounded the painting and were elevated above the frame itself. It was no mean feat to remove that extra underlying wood.
• I took longer in the wing of the 17th century paintings because they varied much more in subject and look than the 13th-15th century wing. Incidentally, the 17th century wing's emphasis was on Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Rubens.
• I like Richard Wilson's landscapes, especially A view of Holt Bridge on the River Dee.
• Claude Gellée (a.k.a. Claude Lorrain) was the model for / precursor of many later landscape painters I like.
• I definitely liked the Flemish painting Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures (circa 1620). A painting of paintings, it reminded me of two similar works I saw at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston: 1, 2.
• Hendrick van Steenwyck (the Younger) made good paintings of attractive architecture.

London: Aug 31: Notting Hill Carnival (again) and more

I had Monday off because it was what the Brits call a bank holiday.

First, I took the opportunity to re-visit the Notting Hill Carnival for lunch. It was more packed than yesterday, and there were more parties on the street, sometimes with real musicians (drummers). I also saw more policemen than the previous day. Walking became a crawl once or twice. The police definitely managed the flow of people; for instance, I tried to leave the district on the same street I entered, but I couldn't -- police had made it a one-way pedestrian street. I had to detour a few blocks to find the proper way out. Furthermore, there were crazy lines not just for food but to enter the nearby tube stations. (They closed the main/closest tube station due to crowds, but nevertheless the other tube stations nearby were so crowded that we had to queue to enter the station.)

After my festival re-visit, I met up with Di Yin and two other people to hang out for the afternoon. We met at Harrods, one of the Britain's famous department stores. Naturally, having met there, the first thing we did together was to wander through it. It's a big store; it appears to have everything.

We spent the middle part of the afternoon wandering through the very English Regent's Park. It's pretty. It was a warm, sunny day, a perfect day for a stroll in a park. We only walked through part of the park.

In late afternoon, I brought them to tour my company's offices. They were impressed with our micro-kitchens and canvas beach chairs, among other things. We relaxed for a spell, then called it a day and went our separate ways.

I snapped these pictures during the day's outing. Di Yin also took some. That link goes the first picture she took this day. The rest of her pictures are relevant. If you're in slideshow mode and begin seeing pictures of our local neighborhood, Southfields, you've finished the set and have cycled back to the beginning of her album, which are pictures I already linked to.

London: Aug 30: Notting Hill Carnival

On Sunday, we attended the Notting Hill Carnival, a Jamaican-themed event and one of the world's largest street festivals/parties. The entire district was closed to cars! We wandered through the district and found the festival just goes on and on. Given the crowds, the visible police presence wasn't a surprise. It boggles the mind that there were so many people everyplace we visited, yet the festival was spread over the whole district. And it was loud: there was music all over the place, all played through speakers, usually mounted on trucks, plus many people with whistles (the purpose of which, other than adding more noise, I know not). Also, I was happy to notice that practically every vendor sold food. :) (This was perhaps a good thing, as that meant there were enough vendors to service the crowds.) The food choices mainly consisted of grilled jerk chicken, curried goat, rice & peas, and Asian food (satays, fried noodles, and egg rolls). (Obviously, only those first three are Jamaican.) Finally, I'll note the Carnival has a parade but, unlike the SF parade, the route wasn't fenced, making it easy to cross.

I took a good number of pictures at the festival. Di Yin also took some pictures. The link goes to her first picture of the Notting Hill Carnival; when you see a picture of me holding a plate with a fried plantain, you've reached the end of the relevant portion. Her later pictures are for the following day; I'll link to them in my next post.

Oh, and as you'll see from the food comments in the pictures, it was an unexpectedly great food day.

After about four hours, the ringing in our ears and the density of the crowd drove us away.

We went home, had tea, sat around for a while, then headed to Putney Bridge, a downtown area near our apartment, for Sunday roast. Sunday roast is a traditional British meal served at pubs. It consists of some form of meat roasted with potatoes and vegetables. Given its uniquely British status, I knew I wanted to have it once while in England, and Di Yin and I managed to fit in on this day.

We tried it, deemed it good, and returned home for dessert.

London: Aug 29: Being A Homebody

On Saturday morning, August 29, 2009, Di Yin and I went jogging in Wimbledon Common/Putney Common. It was a beautiful day with big, puffy clouds. The Common is a large pleasant space: a combination of forests, fields of straw-grass, wildflowers, a lake, and a windmill.

Later, I returned to Wimbledon Common with a tupperware and picked blackberries. I gathered blackberries from three different patches in the Common to hedge (hehe) my bets.

For lunch, we walked down to the Southfields tube. On the way I took a few pictures of the vicinity as I realized I didn't take any pictures of my neighborhood when I wandered around the previous day. Incidentally, Di Yin also took seven pictures of our neighborhood. The link goes to the first picture in the sequence; when you see a picture of me with my android phone, you've reached the end. The later pictures are not relevant to this post; I'll link to them in other posts.

We got lunch from the French deli, Chanteroy, that I spotted the previous day. I had a good ham & brie sandwich (naturally, on baguette), though I think I might've liked Di Yin's ham & emmental sandwich more. (Emmental is a mild, hard cheese in the Swiss family.) We also had the blackberries; these were of course a mixed bag: some plump and ripe, others ripe yet pleasingly tart, and others still maturing. None were bad; all were just a reflection of the changes berries undergo in their lives. In less exciting news, I finished the meal with a plum, leftover sweet brown cheese from Undredal (Norway) on baguette, and a few bites of something labeled a chocolate croissant but was really chocolate bread. (Nevertheless, it was good).

In the evening we cooked dinner at home, a fact I mention because I wish to record that we had a good ginger beer made by Fentimans.

London: Aug 28: Marylebone Neighborhood

On the way to work on Friday, August 28, 2009, I decided to browse Southfield's town center (my local town), though its size makes me more inclined to call it the cluster of stores near the tube station rather than a town center. It took thirty minutes to see everything and conclude it was a normal town: a couple markets, a few pubs, a few other restaurants, a bakery or two, a butcher, a fishmonger, a beauty parlor, a couple real estate agents, a couple outposts of banks, etc. (basically everything that you'd expect). The only place worth mentioning is an apparently-very-popular hole-in-the-wall French deli named Chanteroy. That description is compact and apt: although I'd been looking in the window of every store in Southfields, I almost missed this one because the storefront is so narrow, the signs are obscured by overhead construction, and I thought the door might've simply been part of the adjacent shop. The only reason I noticed it was because of the queue of people into the doorway. I tried to look in. There's a long deli counter. It's really narrow: the distance from the counter to the wall is the width of a person, so I couldn't push my way further in to peek at the cases. There seemed to be many tarts, and the people behind the counter were stuffing things in baguettes. The entrance smelled of cheese because the cheese selection is at this end of the deli. I hoped to try it at some point (and did try it, on a later day).

In the early evening, I walked the neighborhood around the Bond Street tube station, Marylebone Lane, and Baker Street. It's a decent neighborhood, average for a good city. The part closest to Bond Street and on Marylebone Lane is cuter and has more local restaurants than the chain-infested area near the Baker Street tube station. Marylebone Lane itself is quite attractive. After my walk, I met Di Yin at a restaurant in the neighborhood, the Golden Hind, which, from my research, is supposedly one of best fish and chips joints in London.

During the day, it rained intermittently (despite no prediction of precipitation at all). I can't recall going more than fifteen minutes without taking out my umbrella, or fifteen minutes walking around with it open.

Over the course of the day, I took a couple pictures.

London: Aug 27: Belgravia & Mayfair

On Thursday, August 27, 2009, I planned to go walking in the afternoon, but ended up starting my excursion sooner than I planned because of a fire in my office building. Using a book of walking tours of London, I walked through the neighborhood of Belgravia and among its white 19th-century mansion-row-house buildings. Because it was such a beautiful day, and the walk having taken less time than I expected, I continued with another walk from the guidebook, through the nearby and similarly elegant and upscale district of Mayfair.

I took these pictures during the walks.

London: Aug 26: Science Museum Lates

In the evening on Wednesday, August 26, 2009, I met Di Yin and some friends to go to the Science Museum's program named Lates. Once a month, the Science Museum opens late and adds some special, temporary activities and lectures to its program. The theme of this day's Lates was crime scene investigation, but we didn't actually manage to get into any of the special programs. (We tried to go to a CSI-like talk but the queue was over an hour, and we tried to go to the investigate-a-staged-crime-scene event but were told it was booked that entire evening for parties of four.) We did go to one special, though un-themed, activity: a silent disco, in which every person gets headphones (with two radio stations) and dances. You don't know what the other dancers are listening to! And, a nice bonus compared to real dance clubs, you get to control the volume.

We spent a while browsing the museum, especially the interactive exhibits. It was fun. (I can't compare it to other science museums because I rarely go to them.)

I took one picture in the museum, not of any of the events related to Lates but rather of a poster I thought might be worth examining later.

Once we all got hungry, we ended up at a fairly good Indian restaurant, Khan's of Kensington. It also had very good service, quite a contrast to dinner the previous night.

London: Aug 25: British Museum Part 2

On Tuesday, August 25, 2009, once again a regular workday in London, I continued my pattern of disappearing for a few hours by returning to the British Museum. I saw almost the rest of the museum (see first visit); comments on what I saw and thought on this visit are in the pictures.

In the evening, I met Di Yin, one of her friends, and a friend of that friend, and we went to dinner at a restaurant on Brick Lane (Shampan II) with mediocre food and horrible service. Even discounting that the restaurant wasn't particularly good, I think I'm gradually learning I don't like Bangladeshi food. We also stopped by a famous bagel bakery, Beigel Bake, which does business 24/7, and watched them twist bagels and stir a vat of bagels in boiling water in the back. The shop also bakes its own bread (allegedly good) and pastries (probably not good).