Mar 4, 2015

The game is afoot

Saturday morning, I caffeinated Saori and we went across town to the Broadway market in East London. East London is apparently the hip new place to those people "in the know" and it was, actually, swimming with hipsters and other young urbanites. The New York Timesactually published a "36 Hours in East London" a year or two ago, which I relied on heavily to create the day's itinerary.

No Tube stop near the market so we got to figure out the buses which turned out to be my new favorite way across London. When I'm using the Tube, the feeling I get is like a fish fighting it's way upstream to spawn through the tunnels of a massive hydroelectric dam. When I use the iconic double decker bus, it's like we getting a free city tour, floating between buildings and watching the city stitch itself together.

The market was fun. Fresh baked breads, craft jewelry and pottery, felted hot water bottle covers, way-to-cute woven socks with foxes on then, screen prints, Vietnamese food trucks, organic free trade coffee shops with poppy accent colors and weathered wood tables, and even some shops which were around before gentrification. In short: the accoutrements of the good, instagramable, life.

We bought some delicious baked thing with nuts which was something between a croissant and a muffin from an old table at the entry to a warehouse, behind which was the actual independent bakery. We also bought a small ceramic hanging planter for our apartment.

After wandering through the market we waked along Regent's canal, a waterway with a pedestrian path alongside filled with runners. It's a cool area. Old, industrial, blue collar, but filling in with artists and bohemian creatives, the harbingers of gentrification.

We went to a recommended Bangladeshi restaurant near Spitalfields market, another market, this one specializing in handmade, boutique, and vintage clothing. The area, incidentally, is a huge immigrant center, with a historic Bangladeshi community. We were the first customers of the day at Monsoon, but the food was good. Ordered garlic naan, mushroom rice, a lamb bindi, and a prawn curry of some kind. Not so obviously spicy at first bite, but builds to a deep, slow kick.

The the street is actually overflowing with Bangladesh restaurants: part of the challenge was getting the attention of our waiter who would fairly leap out of the restaurant at anyone who as much as slowed down in order to entice them in.

After lunch we stopped at a pub and I got my first cask British pint of the trip. The pub was modern, bright, airy, with a carefully constructed weathered industrial look. I started calling it the Anthropologie Pub. Outside, a young architect was intently measuring the front entry. We were curious about what he was doing so I asked him.

Between scribbling measurements, he told me. Many bars and pubs lack back entry's and loading zones. Beer comes in giant metal or wood kegs, which are quickly dropped off on the porch of the entry . Then, the walk-off mat flips up revealing a chute in the floor to the basement. The problem is that the kegs bang up the porch floor when they hit. It was true: many of the tiles were missing or broken. He was going to replace it, he said, with rubberized athletic gym flooring.

After our pint, we bussed back to central London by way of the financial district, and from there, walked over the bridge to the Southbank center. We ended up browsing through the bookstores, perusing the food market and finally split some curry. After dark, we followed the exited stream of people back to Waterloo station. Waterloo made me miss dad and Tay particularly, since this was always the way I entered the city coming from the Surrey countryside.

We went back to our neighborhood, and walked from the Baker Street apartment and museum of Sherlock Holmes, to nearby North Gower, where they shoot the TV series. In the dark and rain, we stopped in front of Speedy's cafe, and the apartment which is the stand in for 221b.

We had a few pints more at the nearby pub, the Anchor, which was mercifully free of Sherlock tie-ins. No Eggs Benedict Cumberbatch, Morijitos, or Moffat Fries. For me, just beer and some STP.

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Medium is the message

I moved the blog again. I deleted the Tumblr account and moved everything to Medium.com, a more writing-centric website. medium.com/@wende