It feels like I haven’t posted here in forever, which is weird because I had this week off for what Goldsmiths calls ‘reading week’ where we have a week-long break to read (?) and start to get our final essays rolling. We basically just have reading work to do all semester until the end when we have a final essay due for each course. As an international student, my essay requirements are different so mine has to be shorter than full-time students, but it’s good to have some time to start thinking about which prompts I’m going to respond to and what sources I’ll be using. I did do some of that, but for the last part of the week I was in Ediburgh with Katie and Mo (I’ll do a separate post on that trip).
Harrods
A lot has been going on. Last week I made a trip to Harrods, which is a HUGE department store in London that has been around since the 1880s. It’s a pretty high-end department store that sells everything from bedding to toys to fresh food and groceries. I wanted to go and get gifts for friends and family, especially since Harrods teas are known to be very good! I spent a good while wandering around the store, which occupies a 5-acre stretch of the city. They had delicious looking baked goods everywhere, including in their tea room which I didn’t go into but I admired the little cakes they had displayed outside of it. I also went up to their gift shop where I got some gifts to bring back home. There’s a huge candy/toy shop which I went into, of course. I actually found a Papabubble stand right inside of the candy shop, which is funny because it’s one of my favorite little candy shops in New York (they make little fruit-flavored hard candies and you can watch them hand-roll and bake them right in the store).
little pastries outside of the tea room
the Queen’s Jubilee tea!
huge meringues!
the food courts
I also had to venture into the Harrods food markets which are expansive and include a full meat market, a produce market, a Godiva chocolate room, a copule of restaurants, and a prepared food room with baked goods, cakes, sushi, traditional British pies, sandwiches, salads, and a lot of other yummy things. I spent way too much time walking around trying to decide what to get for lunch, but I finally settled on a mini pie filled with turkey, gammon, and cranberry, which was really good!
After Harrods I wandered around London for a while since it was a pretty nice day. I walked towards Hyde Park and went through some nice neighborhoods right in the city as well as through my first subway (which isn’t a train station, like in New York, but a little tunnel under a busy road that acts as an underground crosswalk so traffic isn’t disturbed). I made it to Hyde Park and walked through it for a while, then exited and headed towards Oxford Circus where I got the tube back to New Cross. The walk was really nice and helped me get a better sense of the layout of London 🙂
some nice houses on my walk
the Wellington Arch by Hyde Park
On Thursday night, Maggie and I went to go see a play called One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show at the Tricycle theater by Kilburn in northeast London. Tricycle was actually a pretty cool space because along with the theatre there was also a cinema there where they show art films, mainstream flicks, and family-oriented movies, and they host creative learning workshops for young people. The theatre was set up really uniquely as well with sort of a cozy scaffold-like seating set up that was really intimately placed with the stage. And of course, the play was really really good! It was set in the 1970s and was structured like a 70s sitcom about a black family living in Philly. You can read about the plot if you click on the link above, but the play did a really good/interesting job of commenting not only on issues of race and class relevant to the 70s and also today in the U.S., but it was also a hilarious and provocative critique of the black family sitcom and representations of black people on TV. Overall, we were both laughing the whole time and we got a lot out of it, so it was a good night out! The only qualm we had was that the American accents could have used a little more work 😛
Last Saturday I met my second-cousin Laurie in Camden Town to get lunch and walk around for a bit. We met up and walked into Camden Market where we soon found a little Mexican restaurant called Cafe Chula where we got the best Mexican food that both of us have had while being in London (and she’s been here a lot longer than I have!). I got some great chicken tacos and we both got glasses of some very tart (but delicious) limeade.
After lunch, we walked around the markets a little bit more, although it was a dreary drizzly day so we tried to find the indoor part of the market but eventually just ended up walking to The Regent’s Park which was about ten minutes away. Even though it wasn’t the nicest day, the park was still beautiful and really big! Laurie told me that one nice thing about London is that there are a lot of big parks spread out all over the place so wherever you live, there’s probably a good park nearby. I’ll have to come back in late March and hopefully the gardens will be in bloom! We walked through the park and then found a cafe in the park where we got tea and scones and sat for a while. The scones were really good and were raisin scones sliced in half with jam and creme fraiche sandwiched in between the halves. We then had to leave the park because it closed at 5:00 (early because it gets dark early still) and we headed towards the nearest tube station, which was Baker Street (by 221B- Sherlock Holmes’ residence, where there is a big statue of him as well). It was really nice to see her, since I’ve been away from my family and I haven’t seen her in a while!
Marguerite Goes to London 