Unexplorable

I've already told you that Lena is an incredibly sweet and lovely person.  She's letting us sleep (rent-free) in her flat, despite the fact that she commutes 1 hour each morning and evening between here and her boyfriend's apartment.  She had gone out of her way to organise and include us in her East London Sunday ritual, so we happily obliged.

Just our luck, there was scheduled maintenance on the District Line where our tube stop was so we needed to take the bus to Algate East.  This wasn't too bad though, because I really like the bus.  They don't take 3 hours to get anywhere (like in Melbourne) and they have a view, which the tube doesn't.  Also there are more seats.  On this particular bus, there was a young boy sitting behind us with his mother.  "That's where we go when we die," he told her, very matter-of-factly, as we drove past a cemetery.  Morbid kid.

At Algate East, which isn't dissimilar to Fitzroy in terms of its grunge:hipster ratio, we had The First Good Coffee (at a cafe run by an Aussie).  We met up with Lena and headed to a market held in a huge corrugated iron warehouse.  There were about a million different smells going on, all mingly together and making a spicy and warm kind of smell.  It was packed to bursting with twenty-somethings, all carrying big plates of food and clad in varying degrees of tartan.  Lena stood out amongst all the black and red, with her fairy floss hair and winged glasses and pastel checkered coat.  She explained that she'd tried everything on offer and we had no other option than to pay 6 quid for a plate loaded up with Ethiopian lentils and pancakes and olives.  She had a point, though.  It was delicious.

When Nicholas and I lived in Melbourne, we frequented a cafe called Mr Tulk, named after Australia's first librarian.  We got the same thing every time we went there: avocado and lime on toast, a pot of soy chai with honey, followed by a chocolate cheesecake brownie.  The brownie was basically a work of art.  It was rich and dense and had a swirly layer of baked cheesecake on top, which was chewy and savoury.  One day they discontinued it and replaced it with a hazelnut brownie. "The New Shit Brownie" Nicholas calls it.

The brownie story has a point.  Nicholas doesn't consider a meal a proper meal without dessert, so I sent him to a little stall I'd seen that sold mint brownies (his other favourite brownie).  They sold a brownie so similar to the famous Mr Tulk Chocolate Cheesecake Brownie hat Nicholas ended up spending far too much money on brownies and made himself a little bit sick.  He claims it was worth it.

Outside the food market, there was a regular market with jewellery and a milliner (I didn't manage to get a picture of myself in a bowler hat, but I really did pull it off.  I genuinely considered it.  a) it looked really amazing and didn't make my head look even bigger and rounder than it already is, b) I could've been the Monopoly Man at every fancy dress party for the rest of my life.  Or Charlie Chaplin) and coat shops and vintage glasses shops.  We spent a long time looking around and trying on silly glasses and debating how good I looked in various hats, before we stopped by a boutique tea shop (where you could purchase one pot of tea for 30 pounds) and then headed to Lena's boyfriend, Oliver's, place.  We played a game called Resistance and I illustrated what a poor liar I am and how quickly I crack under pressure (I could never work in any kind of government or military service, or as a secret agent or plan a surprise party or do anything that involves secrecy).  We had to get an extremely late tube home and I found out the hard way that tubes start to make me queasy after a while.

Prior to arriving in London, Nicholas and I had purchased a nifty little card called the London Pass.  On Monday, we picked it up and headed to Westminster Abbey.  While Nick and I wouldn't really call ourselves Anglophiles or are particularly into the royal family, we figured Westminster Abbey would have some sweet crypts.  It did.  The best part was that it was that the audio guide was narrated by Jeremy Irons, so it felt like Scar from The Lion King was introducing you to the dead monarchs you'd read about in Patricia Gregory novels.  Isaac Newton was buried there too and that was really cool.