Bath Day 1 - Jane Austen's house, Holburne Museum

11/4/2014

Bath

We're in Jane Austen territory! Yay! The whole city seems to be a walking memory of her two years here, which is absolutely lovely. It's like the rest of the world has melted away and you're in Regency England *sigh* I'm floating right now, I'm so happy.

But the day didn't really start out so well...

We got up early today to finish packing because we'd bought way too much stuff in London. The suitcases were having trouble closing and to add to that, the hotel had no elevator. We had to drag the suitcases down 2.5 staircases, then a normally 5 minute walk to King's Cross became 1/2 hour. The luggage was so freakin heavy, we were sweaty, cross with each other...yeah, it was just painful.

Angel: I was very well behaved.

Jen: Relative to our first time in Europe, yes, Baby was very well behaved. She's been amazing this time around, waking up early every day to do laundry in our London hotel (they have a washer and dryer...3 floors down, with no elevator).

We got on the metro at King's Cross to go to Paddington to catch our 12pm train to Bath Spa. Thank God both stations had elevators! The wheel on my suitcase broke down a while back, so it's hard to push. As we got off the metro at Paddington, I was busy trying to yank my suitcase out of the way of people when I heard a man ask Angel if we needed help with our luggage. Angel thanked him and politely declined. I thought his voice was pretty hot, so later on I asked Angel what the man looked like. Baby replied that he's about our age and he looked like he could be an actor in the Book of Mormon we saw last night--most the Caucasian actors in the Book of Mormon are super cute blond, blue-eyed chaps.

When we got into Bath, two more young, strapping British chaps offered to help us with our luggage, and I'm so completely grateful because I fell down the train steps, trying to get one of the damn luggage out of the train. Angel commented that the guys in the UK, France, Germany, and Austria have always been pretty helpful in our journeys to Europe. They've helped lug our luggage up and down stairs, be it in the metro, train station or airport. They totally didn't need to, especially as our suitcases are always near-overweight. C'mon, Asian guys, gotta step up!

Once we got into our hotel, all our frustrations with the luggage melted away. The hotel is super posh, the lobby's gorgeous and the whole town is basically an ode to the Regency era. I could go on and on about the beautiful floral wallpapers, the chandeliers, the gilded mirrors...*sigh*

Our hotel is normally around 250 pounds/night ($400), but in some twist of luck--or perhaps because I booked very early on--I got it for $110/night, including breakfast (it's usually nearly 20 pounds/person). Mom had seen pictures of the hotel and really wanted to stay here, so her excitement bubbled over to me too.

Angel was jumping up and down in excitement by the time we got into our hotel room and grabbed the camera from me to take pictures. She kept saying how much she loves Bath. Oh, cutes.

The shower even has the Roman Baths as a background wallpaper!

Angel really wants the hotel room telephone:

The wallpaper and damask carpet!

Man, if I could only have their wallpaper!

Angel pretty much pushed me out the door because she was so excited to explore Bath. We decided to walk to Jane Austen's house and along the way, we walked by one of the locations used in Persuasion. Totally unexpected, but very welcome sight. We've seen Persuasion probably 50 times and it's just breathtaking to finally see everything in person.

Market hall used in Persuasion set

And the Pump Room! This is where the well-heeled in the Regency era would come to gossip and socialize:

Across the street is Pasty Presto, which, according to their poster, says they've been voted World's Best Cornish pasty. So heck yeah, we had to try one.

Yummy!

Bath Abbey

Pulteney Bridge spanning across the River Avon

Some of the houses in Bath have plaques in front of them, such as this one:

The plaque says that Prince Napolean III once stayed here.

And another very, very special plaque:

OK, so we deliberately sought out her house, but when in Bath...

Jane Austen stayed in this house for 2 years, and she drew from her experience here in her writings. The Pump Room, Assembly Room, "taking the water," all these popped up in her writing.

The Crown Inn has a poster outside telling its history, which we thought was pretty funny (well, perhaps not for the Earl of Essex). There's been a hostel on this land since the 1300s for traveling monks and pilgrims. Later on, the land was granted to Sir Neville by Queen Mary I. One of the last time the land changed hands was when the Earl of Essex owned it. He gave the deed to wealthy MP William Pulteney to settle his card debts of 19,000 pounds. Yikes. Imagine 19,000 pounds in those days! All for a turn of the cards!

Across from Jane Austen's house is the Holburne Museum. Sir William Holburne used to own this building and at one point in time, the building served as the main access point to Sydney Pleasure Gardens behind it. Jane Austen used to frequent the gardens via the Holburne house. 

Nowadays, it's a museum housing Sir Holburne's treasured collection of art, miniatures, porcelain, etc. The admission is free. Angel didn't want to go in, but since it was still early, I persuaded her to go with me.

And she was very glad she did. The 3rd floor has an audioguide about Jane Austen's letter to her sister, Cassandra. In it, she tells of her life living in Bath. And she sounds exactly like us! haha She's rather snarky--she writes about the floral muslin print she saw here, and that she felt her own muslin was much prettier. She's also a bargain hunter! She wrote about a few shops she heard that sold fabric on the cheap, so she promised Cassandra that she'd try to buy a few fabrics for her.

Sir William Holburne enjoyed collecting many, many different things (over 4000 objects!). His older brother was originally set to inherit the baronetcy, but he died in battle, so young William inherited instead. We saw his passport when he went on his Grand Tour and Angel said she wanted that many stamps on her own passport. The thing is, the EU only stamps once per entry/exit instead of individual countries, so sorry, baby.

A few items were fakes. There's a few in Sir Holburne's collection called "Billys and Charleys." There once was a Billy and Charley who would walk up and down the River Thames, scavenging for cast-aside antiques that would wash ashore that they could sell. They quickly learned that it's easier to forge these antiques than it is to keep scavenging, so they set up shop and became very successful as antique dealers. Only problem was, they weren't educated, so many of their "antiques" were not historically accurate. But they made each object look so convincing that many in the nobility couldn't tell the difference. Nowadays, some Billy and Charley objects sell for more than the original!

The piano that Rachmaninov used for concerts is displayed here:

We absolutely love Bath!

Holborne Museum

On our stroll back to our hotel, we saw a Waitrose, so of course, we had to pop in. Graham Norton was in Bath the last week of October! Damn. Though why they still have the promo materials out, no idea.

His quote is soooo Angel:

We bought a trio of sandwiches from Waitrose for our dinner, which we ate in the comforts of our very plush, Egyptian linen bed:

British Free Range Egg salad and watercress--the egg is very tasty!

Prawn and Mayo sandwich

BLT sandwich with British smoked bacon--though Baby says she misses applewood-smoked bacon

Angel was very excited when she was this at Waitrose:

Especially as it's filled with raspberry jam and not strawberry:

Waitrose also sells flapjacks and millionaire shortbread, so we bought a tub of each to try:

Their flapjacks are very fudgy in texture and has a very fresh, milky taste to it, which I thought was very lovely. Angel would have preferred chocolate drizzled on it, but I think that would've ruined the milky flavor.

Their millionaire shortbread isn't as good as Sainsbury's, though. The caramel and shortbread layers are a tad too hard, not like Sainsbury's melt-in-your-mouth goodness.

London Day 5 - Victoria & Albert Museum Wedding Dress Exhibit, Jubilee Market Covent Garden, Seven Dials, Book of Mormon

11/3/2014

Baby was very excited for today, as I had booked tickets to the Victoria and Albert Museum's Wedding Dress exhibit. These are temporary exhibits--we'd come here before for their Hollywood costumes exhibit and the Grace Kelly exhibit. This year, the theme was wedding dresses 1775-2014. Displayed in chronological order, there were gorgeous satin and silk gowns, some in faded white, others in ivories, reds, and flowery patterns, as it was not always the case that white was "traditional."

It wasn't until Queen Victoria wore a white wedding dress when she married Prince Albert that white became en vogue.

Right off that bat, when you enter, you see a very wide ivory dress with panniers from the 1700s. The exhibit explained that before the 19th century, most women chose their wedding dresses with practicality in mind--as in, they'd wear the dress more than once, unlike today, where after you get married, you pack up the dress for moths to eat.

As always with these 1700-1900 dresses, the waists were impossibly small. It seemed they kept getting narrower and narrower. Either the women weren't eating or technology improved with the corset boning? Their shoes were also tiny. I would need the width of two shoes just to stuff my foot inside!

During WWII, when supplies were scarce and fabrics needed to be rationed, women got clever on their wedding clothes. One woman used upholstery material for her dress, as she'd used up her fabric ration coupons and upholstery was not subject to rationing. Some women used parachute silk for their dresses! That's awesome!

Also during WWII, the British fashion industry hoped that the war would reduce Paris's dominance on the international fashion market. Really? That's not very nice. France is getting bombed and you're hoping to take advantage? The Brits didn't get what they hoped for, though. Christian Dior burst on the scene with his "New Look" (aaaah, remember Musee Galliera?) and Paris once again topped the fashion scene. The British government went so far as to condemn the New Look for its extravagant use of fabric, but British women didn't care. They were captivated with Dior.

This isn't the first time the government has intervened on behalf of British merchants. In 1766, the government banned all foreign woven silk (especially French silks) from being imported into the country to protect the British silk industry. In 1699, they outlawed Indian silks from being imported and in 1721, they forbade the use and wear of printed calico. Printed calico was very popular during this time, and was infringing on the silk industry's profits.

Indeed, when Queen Elizabeth got married in the 1940s, she chose to wear only British designers to encourage all women to buy British goods. It's funny, because as we're grocery shopping, we see lots of tags of British-made stuff. British cheddar (fair enough, that's famous), British strawberries, British chicken (hunh? I guess they don't eat Foster Farms here), British fortified wheat flour (now I'm really scratching my head. Is the wheat flour different here?). Very into national pride, these Brits.

There were dresses from prominent British couture designers, such as Charles James, Norman Hartnell, and Isobel. Norman Hartnell designed Queen Elizabeth's wedding dress and headgear. There were dresses from prominent heiresses and socialites on display, such as Margaret Wingham and Baba Beaton. I'd noticed that Baba Beaton was a bridesmaid in Margaret Wingham's wedding, and lo and behold, the next display over is Baba's wedding dress. Her name was catchy, which is why she caught my eye. She commissioned her wedding dress--a very simple silk affair--from Charles James. And then, down in the little corner explanation, it says that she's the sister of Cecil Beaton.

Angel freaked.

If Cecil Beaton's her brother, why didn't he design her wedding dress??? she demanded to know.

I replied, "Maybe she thought he was passe. But I don't think you're passe, so you should get a move on it with my wedding dress. You know, it'll take a lot of hours to sew all the sequins on."

Cecil Beaton is the awesome, awesome designer of all those beautiful My Fair Lady costumes.

In the upstairs gallery, the gowns displayed are contemporary. As in, 1950s onwards. Angel fell in love with an Ian Stuart creation, the Flower Bomb. The picture doesn't really do it justice, as there's so many varying shades of pastels--pinks, purples, whites, silver--and so many different fabrics used for the dress. But V&A doesn't allow photography and they don't allow sketching! That's a new one! No sketching???

We saw Kate Moss's pink and gold sequined wedding dress on display, as well as her husband's tux. Her dress took 701 hours to embroider, the veil took 253 hours to embroider, and all in all there were over 270,000 gold sequins, 120,000 foil paillons, and 2800 pearls used. See, Angel? You really need to get a move on it! The dress ain't gonna sew itself! 253 hours = 8 hours of sewing per day for 30 days. I'm being generous here, I could make you do it in 10 days at 24 hours/day. ;P

Also, Dita von Teese's purple taffeta was there, as well as Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale's wedding garments.

All in all, we spent 3.5 hours in the exhibit, oohing and aahing about every dress. We realized it was pouring outside (it wasn't when we left our hotel this morning). Drat. Hate the rain. Thank God the tube station for the V&A museum is via an underground tunnel, so at least we didn't have to walk this portion in the rain.

We rode to Covent Garden, where I'd read that the Jubilee Market here on Mondays is antiques. The Covent Garden metro station is usually not open on weekends due to engineering works (sounds familiar?). So it was a good thing we booked the V&A tickets for a Monday. On the way out of the station, you have to wait for the elevator, as:

15 floors below ground?? Crazy! Angel joked that she'd make me take the stairs, but ha! The authorities even said don't use the stairs except in case of emergency. Also, when the station is open, it's an exit only station, as in you can't hop on the metro here. The engineering works are supposed to end sometime mid-November, but to me, it seems like they're a long ways off as construction's everywhere.

It seems that a lot of metro stations are getting complete face lifts. Tottenham Court station has blocked off an entire street to renovate. We tried to walk across Charring Cross Road, but nope. All blocked off due to engineering works.

I don't know why we never visited this area during our previous trips to London. Covent Garden is very posh now, with a lot of streets closed off to cars, so pedestrian-only. Back in the 1800s, Covent Garden used to be a pleasure garden area where women plied their trade. You can't even imagine that now, cuz every remnant of that is gone. It's a beautiful outdoors shopping area, provided, of course, that it's not raining.

Christmas tree's up!

Covent Garden market and Jubilee Market are connected, roofed (thank God) market halls. Covent Garden sells primarily food and Jubilee today is antiques. Right when we entered Jubilee, our eyes caught on a gilded brass finger plate that we immediately fell in love with. I've been searching during this whole trip for door handles for our new sewing room and I really, really, really wanted these finger plates. Baby's been very good and behaved so far, as I drag her into antique store after antique store, looking for the perfect door handles.

And Baby loved these finger plates too! I'm sooooo happy! The lady behind the booth said the plates were 19th century gilded brass and that you could clean up the dirty bits with qtips and diluted ammonia. The plates were 25 pounds each. And we needed 4 of them. Yikes. I only had a 20 pound note in my wallet. So we walked across the street to the nearest bank to get cash, came back, and I asked if she'd accept 80 pounds for the 4. Miraculously, she said yes. She completely made my day...and what a day it'd turn out to be, too.

We wanted to take a last gander around Primark so we walked from Covent Garden there. As we were walking, we passed by Seven Dials, which I remembered from reading books as a place of murder and mayhem in the early 19th century. Charles Dickens wrote detailed descriptions of the Seven Dials, and Agatha Christie featured it in one of her novels. At one point in time, it was the most notorious slum in London.

As with Covent Garden, Seven Dials has cleaned up a lot and is very posh now. They have posts with signs of Seven Dials on them:

We went to Primark primarily to ask about the VAT tax refund, as their explanations are really confusing. The clerk said that we could go to the Primark in our last UK location to get all the receipts processed in one go. He said there's a Primark in Edinburgh, so we'll try to get it processed there.

It was early (3pm), so we bought Chicken Tikka Masala and naan and came back to our hotel to eat an early dinner. We had tickets to the Book of Mormon at 7:30pm, so the scheduling today turned out to be great. 

Angel: At first Jen was griping a bit about the tickets costing ~70 pounds, but it turns out she thought we had balcony seats for that price. Ha! We were 2nd row center! And we were really glad that we had "splurged" on the seats, because the actors were all really amazing and it was worth it to see their facial expressions (they were all so animated). The show is about Mormon missionaries who are sent to Uganda to convert the local people to Mormonism, and a lot of the humor pokes fun at religion and race.

Jen: I was very wary going into the show because I'm not a fan of the vulgar humor of South Park. The creators of the Book of Mormon are the same creators as South Park, but Baby really wanted to see this show, so of course, I bought the tickets. The show is AMAZING. Seriously. I haven't been so entertained for a long time. Everyone in the audience was laughing the whole way through and at intermission, Angel said I gained 20 new wrinkles. >.< Mean. 

I loved the actors and what Angel said is true. Our seats were awesome--we were like 8 feet away from them. I could see the actors' spit as they sang, that's how close we were. Elder Price (Billy Harrigan Tighe), Elder Cunningham (A.J. Holmes), Elder McKinley (Stephen Ashfield) were perfectly cast--hell, they are were. 

After the show we wanted to take pictures outside of the theater but found that the police had roped off most of the surrounding streets and were quickly herding people out of the theater. Dude, even the ushers inside the theater were herding us out, their voices kinda panicked. We wondered why there wasn't an encore for the cast, and I think it was because they were notified that something was up and wanted to get everyone out of the theater in a timely manner. So this was the best shot we could do:

It turns out there was a "suspicious vehicle" parked somewhere near the theater that needed to be investigated. While we were glad that the show wasn't stopped mid-way, we also found it a bit odd that there could have been a "suspicious vehicle" (aka potential terrorist threat? bomb?) nearby and the police were mainly preventing people from entering rather than evacuating.

They didn't evacuate all the people eating at restaurants nearby, which was confusing. If this was so important, you'd think they'd notify the diners.

A lot of police cars surrounded the block:

Here's a shot of Jen with the musical's poster in the tube station. We both loved the show a lot and next time we're in London we definitely want to try to win some 20 pound lottery tickets that open up a couple hours before the show (similar to what we did for Wicked when it was in San Francisco).

So that's it for London. :T See you next year, London! I stayed up til like 3am some months ago to buy tickets to Hamlet in fall 2015. Benedict Cumberbatch will be starring in it, so I figured we'd make it a Sherlock trip next year. Visit Trafalgar Square, Baker Street, all the touristy stuff that we didn't have time for this time. We'll probably need a whole week in London.

These tickets were harder to get than the newly released iPhones. I clicked "buy" the second it went on sale and got into the online "queue" (yeah, they have a special system). Once it's your turn, you go in and click the date you want and the seats you want. Well, I clicked every day until I could find a date that still had 2 seats left. Most dates only had 1 seat left. PER SHOWING. Crazy!

I snagged 2 seats, but they aren't even remotely close to each other. Boooo. I paid, left the system, and then thought I'd try to enter again to see if I could find something better (yeah, I tend to second-guess myself). Well, I couldn't get in. There were 20,000 people in line ahead of me by then, though there definitely aren't 20,000 seats left to spare. I counted like only 10 seats available across all the show dates when I left.

I then called Visa Signature's concierge to help me procure better seats, but the guy helping me never heard of the event. After much research on his end, he said he was sorry he couldn't help, but he'd never seen something so hard to get.

Can't wait til fall 2015. Hamlet's my favorite Shakespeare play and moreover, I love you, Benedict Cumberbatch!

London Day 4 - Tower of London Blood Swept Land of Poppies, Petticoat Lane

11/2/2014

While in France, Dad read online (the first thing he does when he gets into the hotel room is boot up the computer to read newspapers online) that the Tower of London would have a ceramic poppy display to commemorate the fallen soldiers of WWI. He suggested we should go, so thanks, Dad, for the tip. If he hadn't read about it, we wouldn't have even known, because there aren't a lot of advertisements in London about it. Every ad we see pertains to West End shows.

We ate a piping hot beef & onion pasty smothered with cheese in the comforts of our hotel room (yay microwave!). Angel got really hot eating it, which was perfect because once we stepped out of the hotel, it was raining and pretty damn cold. From our window, I couldn't tell it was raining. Yes, the ground was wet but we thought the rain had stopped. Nope. Just very invisible rain drops >.<

The Circle line from St. Pancras to Tower Hill is supposed to be a smooth, continuous journey.

That didn't happen.

The tube stopped at Aldgate station (one stop away from Tower Hill). An announcement was made that, due to engineering works, Tower Hill would be closed today. So anyone who wants to go to the Tower of London ON A SUNDAY would need to get out at Aldgate and walk to Tower Hill.

Well, this is a first.

We got out and it seemed everybody was going to Tower of London. The flow of people was like one I've never seen before--I mean, there's tourist flows, and there's tourist flows. This was on a massive scale of exodus. There were signs right out of Aldgate directing you to Tower Hill, but you really didn't need it because you just follow everybody else.

Once there:

Tower of London with ceramic red poppies

Tower Bridge

They really should have made the signs better once you get to Tower of London. We followed everyone else to the front entrance where they sell tickets, but there's 3 Tower workers standing on platforms with bullhorns announcing that if you want to see the poppies, this isn't the place for the greatest view. You need to cross the street and go right. Hunh?

So, like most people, we turned back around, walked the length of the Tower of London to where we started from. I'd seen people going down steps over there when we first got here, but because it wasn't the "front entrance," I just followed everyone else. Turns out, the stairs is the starting point for viewing the red poppies.

The starting point

It was raining pretty hard at this point and most people were soaking wet. A lot of people had ponchos, which we've been eyeing at Primark. We couldn't justify buying it at the time (9 pounds each), but comes in handy here, doesn't it? Everyone was squeezing by each other, but everyone was rather cordial to each other. Hey, everyone's in the same boat, right?

You just have to wait for someone to leave the railing so you can squeeze in to take pictures. People will ask you politely if you're done, so they can take your spot after you leave.

One elderly lady was chatting with her friend and (yes, we eavesdropped--can't help it cuz they were literally 2 inches away from us) she commented that the newspapers had warned people to stay away from the Tower of London this weekend because they anticipated there would be waaaay too many people.

They weren't kidding.

The display is rather magnificent. Angel said it reminds her of Monet, where individually, the flowers (or strokes, in the Monet analogy) don't seem like much. But as a whole, the display is breathtaking.

The red poppy display is by Paul Cummins. It's called "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red."

In total, there are 888,246 poppies covering the lawn of the Tower of London, one for every British military death during WWI.

The last poppy will be "planted" on November 11, 2014.

You can buy a ceramic poppy for 25 pounds each, of which 10% of profits will go to charity.

We got lucky and saw the volunteers installing the individual poppies. They first pound the black stick into the ground, then they attach the red poppy on top.

Even the military joined in to help:

The individual poppies pre-"planting." Because it was raining so heavily (my shoes, socks, jeans and purse got all soaked), the paint on the poppies started bleeding into the white packaging;

Kinda like painting the roses red, no? :)

I really liked how they made the poppies cascade out of a window:

The weather forecast (from 2 different sources: Google and BBC) said that there would be rain overnight, but the rain should stop by 1pm. They were pretty on the mark. By the time we waded out of the Tower of London crowd, it was noon. We originally thought the whole display would take 10 minutes to view, but because of so much foot traffic, we ended up being there for over 2 hours.

From Tower of London to Petticoat Lane is a 5-10 minute walk, and this was our ultimate destination of the day. We bought so many clothes from Petticoat last time, and I love, love, love the jacket I bought from there. The stuff is cheap (relatively) and most of the stalls sell overstock clothes from big name brands, like Zara, Primark, Marks & Spencer.

One stall sold all these pretty dresses for 2 pounds each, because there's a bit something off on each one and the retailers couldn't sell them. But, as Baby is one freakin' awesome seamstress, this stuff is right up her alley. Especially since the price of these fabrics would normally cost an arm and a leg.

Our haul of the day:

So. London on a Sunday night. If you're not into pubs and restaurants, then it's pretty much dead. We were strolling around, la-di-da-ing through Marks & Spencer's food hall. We then went into Primark. Right when we stepped into the store, there was an announcement to please finish your purchases, as the store would be closing in 20 minutes. Say what??? It's not even 6pm yet!

Well, as it turns out, just about every store closes at 6pm on Sunday night. >.< We'd planned to go to Sainsbury's after Primark to get some more curry and those deliciously yummy flapjacks and caramel squares. 

Thank God we bought extra curry yesterday! 

So Sunday night is a very good night to book shows to musicals, operas, ballets and the like, cuz there ain't anything else to do.

It's crazy in the UK, how many pubs are all full of people. Even on Halloween, when we thought people would go to Halloween parties, a lot of people showed up in costumes at the pubs. I do wonder the percentage of Brits' income that goes toward beer per annum?

London Day 3 - Walthamstow Market, Portobello Road

11/1/2014

Walthamstow Market

Angel read online that Walthamstow Market has a lot of fabric shops, so of course this would be a definite stop in our itinerary. What we didn't realize is just how enormous the market was--it spans 1 kilometer on Walthamstow's High Street and is the longest outdoor street market in Europe (I found this out after we got back to the hotel tonight). The market first started in 1885, so you can imagine what a success it is that it's still going on today. There's stalls selling fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, and there's the fabric booths, purse, shoes booths, clothing, jewelry... basically everything, really. There's also quite a few "Poundlands," which is the UK equivalent of a Dollar Store.

We also passed by this store:

Didn't know Andre Agassi was hawking his own health food store now. Angel got a kick out of it. She's been whining about going to Wimbledon for some time now. With more insistence recently, as who knows when Roger Federer will be retiring. I keep telling her she won't survive London in July--it's just too damn hot. But Baby won't listen, and swears she'll be coming next year. Ha Have fun by yourself, toots.

Angel kept an eye out for the Sainsbury's, as a blogger said the fabric booth across from Sainsbury's sells quality fabric for low prices. The girl had brought a pushcart along so she could comfortably store the 30kg+ of fabric she bought. Angel laughed at this, and said there's no way we'd buy that much.

How wrong she was.

My arms are still hurting from lugging all the fabrics home. Well, that and all the Sainsbury's goodies we bought. This Sainsbury's is huge. Like triple the size of our local Sainsbury's.

One fabric shop called Saeem's sells gorgeous damask fabrics for 10 pounds/meter, which ain't bad, considering the US sells damask for a whole lot more. I've been dreaming about silver damask for the new room, and in my mind, there's a very specific sheen I'm going for. Saeem's had this sheen, which got me really excited. Unfortunately, it wasn't the print I was going for ;(

Angel's haul for the day:

Plus some clothes. There's a shop that sells top clothing store brands for cut-rate prices (overstock, I think?). They had Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's, Primark and a bunch of other brands, choose any 3 pieces for 5 pounds or 2 pounds each. Baby found a few cardigans she liked. There was an Atmosphere 100% cashmere sweater there--2 pounds! TWO pounds! But it was too big and the cut wasn't very flattering for us ;(

There weren't that many places near Walthamstow that interested us food-wise. There were a couple of kebab places but we couldn't see the meat, so we weren't tempted. Show us the meat!

As we were walking back toward the Walthamstow Central tube station, we noticed a booth selling raspberries. 2 boxes for 1 pound. Holy crap, that's cheaper than Cali! So we bought 2 and plan to have it for breakfast tomorrow.

After lugging all our stuff home, we went out to Portobello Road. As we walked down the street, Angel spotted this plaque:

Turns out, George Orwell of 1984 fame lived here at one time.

The weather has been absolutely perfect today. Perfect fall weather--the sun is hazy, the leaves are golden, not too hot and not too cold. Dude, California's colder than London now. The only thing is that London's sunset happens around 4:30pm. The picture below was taken at 3:30pm, you can see it's already turning rather dark:

Genius use of Nutella cans! It's a crepe booth, and boy, the line was loooong. There were a lot of crepe booths on Portobello Road. No doner durum though. Boo.

I had wanted to go to Portobello because Saturday's antique day. I had my heart set on purchasing a pair of door handles for the new sewing room. I guess door handles aren't a very popular antique item because out of the hundreds of booths, only 2 stores sold them. Really?! Angel says she thinks it's because people don't tend to take door handles, so they probably all end up in landfills. >.<

We'll probably go to Jubilee Market in Covent Garden on Monday to see their antique selection.

Baby was really hungry by now (shopping's hard!), so we went to one of the crepe booths because they also sell potatoes Breton:

Which is sliced potatoes sauteed with a vat of butter, toss in some bacon, cheese, spices:

We then went to Marks & Spencer, where Baby went coo-coo crazy. She loves the store and was oohing and aahing about every little thing M&S sells. Like these lady bug and strawberry vine paper towels:

Even I got excited by the sparkly gold Christmas tree toilet paper:

Angel has had her eye on this tea biscuit tin since she saw it in M&S Prague. I relented today and said she could buy it, but she knew she wouldn't eat any of the cookies inside.

Angel: I showed remarkable restraint!

I took the picture and said whenever she gets mad, I'll show her the picture of the tin:

I'd signed up for Groupon UK and Groupon France a while back, knowing we'd be coming here sometime in the near future. A month ago, Groupon UK sent a promo email about buy 5 pounds, get 10 pounds at M&S. Of course I jumped on the deal. So we were able to use the gift voucher toward our purchases today. Next time, Angel's gotta sign up. I'm kicking myself I didn't push her to sign up and get the M&S voucher.

We walked on Oxford Street back to our hotel. There's a big ass Disney store on the street with a very cute Olaf display:

It's like a baby unicorn! Muahaha

We'd bought our dinner from Sainsbury's at Walthamstow earlier today. So we got back to the hotel, took a nice hot shower, and had dinner in bed. Dinner was butter chicken:

With naan! It was soooo freakin yummmmmy. I loved the texture of the naan, and the butter chicken was oh-so-buttery-goodness. The chicken was meltingly tender.

At M&S, we noticed a lot of people crowding around one aisle, so we went over to see what it was. Turns out, it's the Reduced for sale aisle. I'm still dreaming of the sandwich we had on Lufthansa, so we got this sandwich (it has arugula in it, Mom! We're eating veges!) for 75 pence:

The bread was very soft and I liked the basil mayo spread:

Look how tender the chicken is!

Angel bought a whole shopping cart full of M&S Viennese jam and cream sandwich biscuits. Primarily because Mom, Dad and Angel all love eating them, and last time, Dad and Angel ended up fighting for them because we didn't buy enough. So Angel wanted to make sure she bought enough so that she could have a stash of her own (she eats really slooooowwww) and our parents could enjoy them too.

Baby also saw this:

She says it tastes much like the jam sandwiches she likes but the cookie's softer, so not quite as enjoyable:

Oh yeah, we also went to Primark today. Again. They stock new things every day, so thought we'd drop by to see the newest selection. Ended up buying something. Again.