London: Day 3
- Comments: No Comments Yet
We were up on time today to have a decent breakfast, then we set out for the Portobello Road antiques market. It was a beautiful day and we wandered the streets and the stalls looking at the incredibly amount and variety of stuff for sale.
I went into a beautiful leather shop that Grandpa B would have loved, there were several beautiful, full grain leather trunks and satchels. I took a picture of the place, I loved it so much. From there we found a store selling hand blown glass balls in the color I was looking for, amber, and I was delighted to pick one up. We goofed around all the way down to the Travel Book Shop, of Notting Hill movie fame and wondered in it for a while. I picked up some post cards of the shop. We spent some time in some furniture decor shops and found a really nice journal for Geo.
We stopped for a coffee and some short cake at Coffee Republic, and a local lady sitting beside Geo said that the market was pretty quiet, virtually unknown outside the locals, until the movie. Now its mostly tourists.
We’d gotten to the market early enough that it was a leisurely stroll down the street, but it was a struggle through a crush of idiot tourists to get back up. I did stop into The Highland Store and bought two tartan scarves of an ancient twig, toothless man who was very pleased to sell an ancient hunting Stewart tartan, (like on grandpa’s bagpipes), and a McQueen.
We also stopped in at several antique jewelry dealers, and tried on several beautiful eternity rings. Geo wanted to buy a beautiful 890 £ one for me, but I wouldn’t let him. Finally, on our way to the tube, I stopped at a beautiful handmade clothing store with great.clothes, and a charming, hard-sell proprietor. She was funny. I may go back.
From the market we took the tube to the Tower of London, and the Tower Bridge. We walked across the bridge and took several pictures of it, the tower, and the river. We checked out Butler’s Warf where they used to take goods on and off ships and run them between store houses over the street on tramways. We took some pictures of the street, then went back over the Bridge to the tower where we toured the outside of the building and Traitor’s Gate and read all of the historical note signs. There was too long a line up to go for a tour, so we decided to go another day.
We walked up to the Monument, to the great fire of London in the 1700′s, then caught the tube to Charing Cross. We had lunch at 3:30 in an Italian restaurant, we were starving and tired by the time we stopped. I had a mushroom pizza and Geo had tortellini in cream sauce.
When we left the restaurant, we passed a pub with a sign in the window stating that you weren’t allowed in if you were wearing football colors. Interesting.
We made our way to Trafalgar Square and took pictures of Lord Nelson on top of his column for Garry. Personally I liked the lions at the base of the column better. We took pictures of the lions, and the cool tree sculpture in front of the National Art Gallery, and tried to avoid being crapped on by pigeons, other tourists were buying bread to feed them, and had the birds sitting on their heads, not too smart.
We stopped in at the Art Gallery so Geo could go to the washroom and I managed to slide my collarbone out of place while looking at books in the book store waiting for him. It was painful, but it’s back in place now.
We wandered the streets until we reached Regent and Oxford Streets, then we fought our way through the crush of holiday sale shoppers. I’ve never seen so many people in my life. I tried on some cloths at Laura Ashley’s, but I’m not a cute little girl who can wear that stuff, so I didn’t buy anything.
We walked back to the hotel and stopped at the Beirut Express for baklava and cappuccino. It was good, but the service was indifferent.
Geo was tired, so we ended up back at the hotel by 8:00. We found a restaurant at the end of the street our hotel’s on that serves chicken vindaloo, so we’ll have to try some tomorrow (Red Dwarfer’s honour). We watched the opening season soccer games on the news in our room, all the big teams tied, Arsnal, Man United & Newcastle.
Tomorrow’s New Years Eve and we’re planning on going to the Petticoat Lane market and all the free museums and galleries.
I almost forgot, we found China Town today, it’s in the region of Trafalgar Square. The first shop we went into was where I found a pincushion that I’ve been looking for to put my ear rings on, we were lucky today.
There are presently no comments for this post.
You must be logged in to post a comment.