market, art, thames

After 7-months of relocating to England, I finally decided it was time to head to the nation's capital; so it was no sleeping-in on Saturday as we purchased advanced seats to London. Seats were in its abundance on this early-ish morning train and we spent a peaceful 2-hour journey with our books, M&S muffins, and complimentary tea from Midland Mainline.

Not sure if it was because it was my second visit to London (first time was roughly 8 years ago) or that I am now a 'resident' of England, but the old architecture, cobblestone streets and massive numbers of pigeons didn't elicit the same apprehensive feelings as before. It definitely I didn't feel too strong an urge to buy little knick-knacks and trinkets as souvenirs from the numerous street vendors.


As we had a couple of hours to spare before meeting our friend, we took the Underground into London Central. The nice thing about the Tube system is that is organized by the colours of the rainbow. But the entire network is so convoluted, you can't just say the blue line but rather the medium blue line to differentiate it from the other two shades of blue - it's essentially ROYGBIV times 2. A normally efficient way to travel but many of the lines were undergoing construction, thus making it a bit more difficult to get from points A to B.

We visited Borough Market on the south bank of the Thames. A wonderful artisan market filled with produce, baked goods, exotic meats, etc. a la Granville Island (thankfully, I fulfilled by local produce craving the day before so I had no temptation to buy any leafy, green things).

This pyramid of brownies:


became this in a matter of minutes:


We walked along the river, across the Millennium Bridge,


to St. Paul's Cathedral,


to finally Leicester Square, where we met Maggie for a dim sum lunch in Chinatown.

After moments of indecision, we made our way to Buckingham Palace, stopping in Green Park and the Canada Gate along the way. We tried not to look like 100% tourists but we had to whip out the Lonely Planet occasionally - hey, at least didn't wear our backpacks on the front of our bodies. (However, the picture below may disprove my tourist claim.)



We walked through a few exhibits at the Tate Modern


and rested our tired feet on a bench overlooking the famous Thames.


We didn't give ourselves much margin for error to catch the 20:00 train back to Derby. We ran through the streets of London and luckily got onto our reserved train, a bit sweatier than desired.

More photos here.