On Friday, August 21, 2009, I headed across the bay for an Egyptian festival, the King Tut Festival, in Hayward. I learned about the festival from a flyer in my dentist's office. (He's Egyptian.) I guess the Coptic community is small--I was amused the girl greeting people at entrance knew him. :)
I arrived at the festival an hour behind my intended schedule (due to running around getting things in order for my trip the following day), so I went straight for food. Due to my hurry, I accidentally left my camera in the car. Once at the festival, I scouted it, gulped some food down, then took a church tour. The tour, with a dozen people and one energetic guide, was cozy. It took twenty minutes during which I learned a good amount on the history of the Coptic church. Maybe my knowledge of Christianity is sparse, but I never realized that there are five original organizational units of Christianity ("the pentarchy"), each started by a different significant figure, and each associated with a different originating city: Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople. The Coptics are from the branch started in Alexandria by Apostle Mark; they're commonly referred to as Egyptian Orthodox Christians.
After the tour, I explored the festival in more detail and got more food.
Though run by the Coptics, the festival was similar in style to the many Greek festivals I've attended. Like the Greek festivals, this festival occurred at the community's local church and had a heavy emphasis on food. Most of the tables were set up in the church's parking lot, adjacent to the playground. Non-food items for sale included jewelry, posters, t-shirts, boxes, plates, and pots; all of these were patterned/decorated in a style that felt appropriate for Egypt, some like what an Egyptian tourist might buy. The costumes/clothing were hokey, making me think more of Egyptian Halloween costumes than anything an Egyptian might actually wear. There was also a bookstore which mostly sold religious books, and some videos too.
Like Greek festivals, there were many tables of food: kebabs, pita, falafels, dolmas, stuffed cabbages, zucchinis, peppers, hawashi sandwiches, feteer meshaltet, and a wide assortment of desserts (basbousa/bassbousa, kunafa/kunafah, baklava (in rolls), katayef/qatayef, kahk, lokmadis/loukoumades). I got to see the woman make pita bread (roll it, bake it). You can buy it fresh from the oven. As for the Egyptian food, if you haven't heard of most of those, you're not alone. Incidentally, gosh it's a pain that there aren't standardized spellings of many of these dishes. I guess it's because they come to the roman alphabet from a few different languages.
The coolest thing about the festival is that I heard more Egyptian than English. The analogous statement cannot be made about Greek festivals, which I think try more actively to bring to the festival people outside their community.
The only disappointing feature compared with Greek festivals was the lack of live music. Although there was a stage, all the music was pre-recorded. However, I think this may have been due to the time I attended the festival; according to the schedule, the festival often should have live music.
Although I left my camera in the car, I nevertheless managed to take pictures of what I ate using my cell phone's camera.
Egyptian Festival
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).
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.
London: Aug 7: V&A Museum Part 1
On Friday, August 7, 2009, I disappeared from work to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum. I saw about half of it; here are the pictures I took, along with captions I wrote 6+ months after the fact. (I originally wrote captions on the same day, but lost my copy of those.)
The museum is hard to place. I guess I have to say that it covers applied art from all eras and cultures. It includes ceramics and metalworks (serving dishes and the like), rugs, fashion (dresses, etc.), furniture (cabinets, chairs, etc.), lamps, and wall decorations (tapestries, paintings, etc.). The British section even has multiple period-rooms on display, transplanted to the museum from old houses elsewhere in London.
The museum also has a strong emphasis on sculpture (South Asian, Asian, Western, etc.). Indeed, the "cast court" is definitely the best section I visited. It's incredible. I have no problem with the fact that the casts aren't original. So what that they're copies--the pieces that they're copying are extraordinary.
I also visited a special exhibit that showcased furniture and that felt like a haunted castle. Everything was a warped or a strange combination of real objects, such as a bathtub that looks like a boat, a teapot than looks like an animal's skull, and a seemingly-melted wooden wardrobe. Weird.
London: Aug 5: British Museum Part 1
On my break from work on Wednesday, August 5, 2009, I decided to explore the British Museum. I made it through most of the ground floor, which mainly consists of the museum's Egyptian and Greek collections. Both these collections are impressively extensive, made all the more so by the notable cleanliness of the items (i.e., they're well-preserved).
For details on what I saw, see the many pictures I took in the museum.
Incidentally, on the way to the museum, I realized how common it is to walk by pubs that are over two hundred years old. This certainly isn't a common occurrence in the U.S.
London: Aug 4: Tate Britain Part 1
On Tuesday, August 4, 2009, I disappeared briefly from work to visit the Tate Britain. It was yet another museum where every painting comes with an explanation.
First, I walked through the odd special exhibit of contemporary art: Classified. It had three works that I want to comment on:
- Gillian Carnegie managed to a paint a forest, Black Square, using only a single color of black paint. The appearance of trees, ground, etc. is simply due to texture variations.
- Simon Patterson's piece, The Great Bear, is a tube map with stations and lines renamed after people and professions, thus drawing connections between them. Something similar could make a good Game clue.
- The Chapman Family Collection is a group of primitive-looking statues that reference McDonalds: a totem with what looks like a big mac as a head, a mask that looks like a bag of fries, some eyebrows that makes the shape of the golden arches, a person with smile like Ronald McDonald's, etc. This room certainly makes a statement about art and authenticity.
I made my way through some of the rooms of the regular collection of historic British Art, and found I could appreciate the lushness of the 18th century portraits. I also saw John Brett's The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs and felt it captures the idea of a clear, tropical, relaxing day.
I took a picture along the way to Tate Britain, and a few more at dinner.
In the evening, Di Yin and I ventured out to try a Bengali restaurant on Brick Lane. It's a dried- and fresh- fish-heavy cuisine. We didn't like our meal because we felt everything was significantly oversalted.
London: Aug 3: National Gallery Part 1
On Monday, August 3, 2009, I stole out of work to visit the National Gallery. It was such a beautiful day, I decided to walk along the park (St. James) to get there rather than take the tube. On the way, I took a few pictures.
The museum provides an incredible amount of detail on its paintings. Not only does every painting have a description, most (yes, most) paintings have audio guide explanations! There are thousands.
I visited about half the museum this trip:
- 16th-century paintings. In this section, I was amazed how vibrant the colors are. The museum must have the best-preserved (or best-restored) paintings from this era. Nevertheless, I found (as I expected) the section had too much religious imagery for my liking.
- 18th- to early-20th-century paintings. This section has all the painters you'd expect at a quality museum: monet (some decent ones), pissarro (half a room of his paintings), manet, gauguin, cezanne (half a room), van gogh, and degas (a whole room). Although photography wasn't allowed in the museum, here are some of my observations of this section:
- There is a whole wall of Turners, including The Fighting Temeraire, which I had as my computer's desktop background for years. (I wish I could take a picture of the painting!) In person, the painting--the colors--were everything I hoped. Also, funnily enough, it's rated the greatest painting in Britain. I wonder if my previous choice of this painting shows that I'm subconsciously a Brit.
- Seurat's Bathers at Asnières (Asnieres) was everything I hoped.
- The museum has other good examples of pointillism besides Seurat. (All the good-quality examples of pointillism I've previously seen anywhere else were all Seurat.)
- I liked van Gogh's A Wheatfield, with Cypresses.
- Francesco Guardi and Canaletto drew good, detailed pictures, mostly of Venice.
- Richard Wilson, an 18th-century painter, was an early romantic.
- I can now identify how Renoir paints women.
"[Monet] takes pleasure in discovering traces of humanity everywhere; he wants to live continually in a human environment. Like a true Parisian he takes Paris with him to the countryside, he cannot paint a landscape without including well-dressed men and women."Emile Zola, "a close friend of Monet"
London: Aug 2: Tate Modern, Hyde Park, and Green Park
On Sunday, August 2, 2009, I took the train to see the Tate Modern, located in a renovated old power station. London's contemporary art museum, it shows the true expanse of 20th-century art in all its many styles. It's organized by form or subject, not chronologically as at most museums. I appreciated that almost every piece has an explanation. The museum is free, though I skipped the special exhibits (which charged) because I wasn't interested enough in them. Since it wasn't really my scene, I went through it in the relatively fast eighty minutes.
Though the museum didn't allow photography, I want to comment on some pieces that struck me:
- Georges Braque. This artist, who I'd previously never heard of, surprised me the most of everything I saw at the Tate. His works were so typically cubist, they could've easily been Picassos. Given the identical look and quality of the paintings, I'm shocked he doesn't get more attention.
- The large (7' x 16') canvas that is Monet's Water Lilies after 1916.
- The similarly large, long (6' x 18') canvas that is Jackson Pollock's Summertime: Number 9A.
- Robert Therrien's Table and Four Chairs. It's a table tall enough to walk under. Weird. It made me laugh and smile. Located in the small special exhibit on Scale.
- Miroslaw Balka's column of stacked, colored soap (which looked like flat stones). Looks cool.
- Alighiero Boetti's map of the world that has the every country colored/patterned like the country's flag--a neat idea.
- Jeff Koons's room with large outlines of stuffed animals (scroll down) (a bear, an elephant, etc.) in colored, reflective plastic. Cute.
- A set of thin, otherworldly, statues of standing women. These would've gone well in my collection of such pictures.
After the museum, I began taking pictures as I walked along the Thames, past the reconstructed Shakespeare Globe Theatre, and through the historic pubs and other brick buildings in the neighborhood that is Southwark / the borough market (closed this day) to get to a tube station. Grabbing lunch on the way, I took the train to Hyde Park and walked part of it and saw that it has a feel and functionality like New York's Central Park.
Later, I met Di Yin and we strolled through Green Park. Green Park has many pleasing grassy expanses and artistic, tree-lined, crisscrossing paths. It looks like a great place for a picnic.
Incidentally, Di Yin took some pictures after I met up with her. I linked to her first picture. While flipping, when you see a picture with the caption "The next weekend, we went back to borough market" (it's 18 pictures after the one linked above, or picture #103 in the album), you're done with the relevant pictures. I'll link to the other pictures at the appropriate time in later posts.
London: Aug 1: Borough Market and British Museum
On Saturday, August 1, 2009, Di Yin and I ventured to Borough Market, London's largest and oldest food market. It's the scale and caliber of other major markets such as Vancouver's Granville Island and Barcelona's Boqueria, including everything you'd expect from a huge market: fruits and vegetables, meats, fishes, cheeses, breads, sweets, etc. Vendors were fairly liberal with providing samples, and we tried countless items (cheeses, spreads, hams, drinks, desserts). Given its size and popularity, it's no surprise it was extremely crowded on this weekend day.
I took some pictures this day, mostly of the market. Di Yin took many more. Her pictures do a better, comprehensive job at capturing the market's flair. When you hit pictures from Hampstead Heath (picture 72), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the other pictures at the appropriate time in later posts.
After some mis-steps with the national rail system, we arrived, passing Southwark Cathedral on the way to the market. Once there, we met one of Di Yin's friends who'd lived in the city for a couple of months, and toured the market with her. In the market, I got to try a (raspberry) Turkish delight. I decided I must try it because I'd recently seen The Chronicles of Narnia. The sweet wasn't my kind of candy. In contrast, we brought some cannelés (canneles), delightfully-light mushroom-shaped French pastries made of egg-batter with a caramel-y outside. (The name comes from the fact they have groves on the outsides, i.e., they're fluted = cannelé in French.) I also assembled a lunch from a wild boar sausage on a bun, strawberries and cream (oh my god this looked so good every time we walked by, we had to try them), grilled halloumi cheese (which was served, oddly, on bread), and a chelsea bun (a sticky, fruity loaf). We also bought a bunch of good stuff for later meals.
Next, we headed to the British Museum, where we met two other friends of Di Yin. I don't have much to say about the British Museum this time because we mostly stayed in the South, South-East, and East Asia section of the museum, which isn't where my greatest interest lies. At least it was clear this collection had quality, well-preserved, well-presented artifacts. I noticed a column which, though shorter, appeared identical to those I was so impressed with in Ranakpur (India).
Near the museum, we walked through Russell Square and saw some other Bloomsbury sights.
After the museum, we re-met the Borough-market friend and grabbed dinner at her recommendation: Lowlander Pub. It's a pub with a great beer selection. I had a La Trappe Dubbel that I liked so much I'm writing the name down so I can get it again. I made everyone else try it too, and they agreed my enthusiasm was justified. It's a very smooth, balanced, dark ale. It's got a pleasant smell that includes caramel, and a taste that includes aspects of fruit (which made one person say it "feels like fall").
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