The Sunny East End

Today we hopped on a bus that we've never taken before, since it appeared to head in the general direction of Victoria Park. We were happy to discover that the route's many turns took us right to our intended destination, Lauriston Road at the top of Victoria Park, where we hadn't yet explored. The area around the central roundabout was filled with nice shops, cafés, and a restaurant that's meant to have some wonderful food (the menu in their window looked very promising indeed). My favourite shop was a secondhand-furniture shop, and as I walked toward one particular piece (sort of a full-height, robin's-egg-blue enamel and rich, textured wood kitchen cabinet, with this great door that folded down to create a serving board), Bob said, "Oh oh, you really like that, don't you? We don't have room for that in our flat." "How do you know I like this?" I asked. "I just know" was his only reply, delivered with a smirk. In fact, I did love it, and wistfully opened and closed the various doors and drawers several times before walking away, lamenting our lack of space. From Lauriston Road, we approached the park to find the ice-cream trucks were very busy on this sunny day. Also busy was this little coot who was tending to her very open nest.Bob's titled this photo The Fight,
and this dog waited patiently by the canal for his owners to return.
We left Victoria Park and walked to the V&A Museum of Childhood to glance at their new exhibit of Picasso drawings,

and although there was a nice shadow-animal display at the museum, it wasn't quite as exciting as last night's! Bob did make an admirable dog though:
We stopped in at the beautiful Bethnal Green library (the glass roof, not visible from the front, is wonderful), which always has the best books. Books weren't enough to keep us going though, and we headed down to Brick Lane for another Beigel Bake treat of salt-beef bagels, along with extra bagels and a loaf of fantastic caraway rye to take home. We wandered in the general direction of Hoxton Square, coming across this typical London sight of weathered brick set against all the money represented by the new building rising in the background. As it says on the posters, London is divided. Closer to Hoxton Square, this sculpture of abandoned subway cars perched over us as a reminder of their old route, now under construction. Hoxton Square is quite a lovely greenspace--this view is from White Cube gallery's upper level overlooking the square:
We also browsed in a nearby teeny-tiny, excellent art bookshop that we remembered enjoying when we visited back in 2005. Like a microcosm of London, the bookshop crams an amazing array of topics, viewpoints, and media onto its mish-mash of shelves, nooks, and floorspace.

Shadows, Spins, and Flips

Today we met at Charing Cross tube station and went to the National Gallery to see two free temporary exhibits. First up was Tim Gardner, a Canadian whose paintings were eerily photograpic, even close-up. Next were Leon Kossoff's drawings of paintings held by the National Gallery. Kossoff's story is an interesting one, with him wandering from Hackney to the National Gallery in 1936, at the age of ten, with no recollection of how he got there. It was the first time he had ever seen a painting and it began his love of art in general, and the National Gallery in particular. From Trafalgar Square, we wandered a bit, stopping for coffee and then trying to decide what to do for dinner. We decided to have a sushi feast, but at London prices and Bob's sushi appetite, that means a buffet of conveyor-belt sushi for us! The place we went to was filling, but nothing special, and of course it made us pine even more for the wonders of Vancouver sushi. A phenomenon that I've not seen anywhere else in the world (and that I hope doesn't leave the confines of crazy London) is the tuna that passed us by in pieces like these on the light-pink plate:It's tuna straight out of a tin--bad, bad, bad! Strangely, proper tuna nigiri and maki made extremely infrequent appearances on the conveyor belt, but there were many plates with good saba and unagi nigiri (two of my favourites), so that helped make up for the lack of tuna. From the sushi parade, we made our way to the V&A for this month's special late night, held on the last Friday of each month. The museum's "Friday late" evenings are themed events, complete with interactive and multimedia activities, as well as music, drinks, and food that turn the whole place into a lively, cheap place to spend a Friday night. This month's theme was animation, and one of the first displays we saw was also perhaps the best: shadow puppets. Now I know you're probably thinking a) that doesn't sound like animation, and b) that doesn't sound too exciting, but consider that when participants placed their hands in front of this light, these were the types of puppets that appeared on the facing screen.

Entitled "Shadow Monsters," Philip Worthington's installation was brilliant fun, and although the monsters have emitted sounds in previous incarnations, that aspect was either turned off tonight, or was drowned out by the music all around us. In any case, I loved watching horns, eyes, spikes, and teeth appear from my hand as I moved it in front of the light. Various displays of animation were set up in different areas of the museum,

and we stopped for a while to listen to Jim Le Fevre explain his "phonographantasmascope," which turned the humble record player into an animation tool, as it spun around a zoetrope to produce simple movements, like those of this hurdler.
Audience members were encouraged to make their own, and round templates and instructions were passed around to those who were interested in trying out their own animation. Elsewhere, animation graduates from a London art school worked on creating a new piece of animation that reflected Raphael--they worked in the V&A from 1:00 P.M. today and screened their piece from 7:00 P.M. on.
Another fun part of the night was the crafty do-it-yourself flipbooks. People really got into the spirit of things and it was fun to watch the finished products on film, which will also be available for online viewing starting from next week. We started working on flipbooks of our own (Bob's features a man whose head gets progressively larger as his body gets progressively smaller, and mine is about the friendship between a bird and a fish), but they are still works-in-progress--speaking of which, if you've gotten used to clicking on photos in this blog to see more detail, you may notice that the enlarged photos are smaller than they used to be. I hope this won't affect your blog-enjoyment, but I just noticed that I'm already halfway through my blogger limit for free photo-storage (in just four months!), so some action had to be taken. :-)

. . . And You Lose Some

Bob and I headed over to Camden tonight for a show by Kieran Hebden, whom we've loved as Four Tet. Unfortunately, the night was all about his new project, which we didn't end up enjoying very much--in fact, we ended up leaving before the show finished.

Ah well, it was a good peek inside a venue that's quite amazing inside, and we're happy to have tickets to see another band there next month. After we left the show, I mentioned to Bob that I kept wishing we were at next month's show while watching tonight's show, and Bob said that had been thinking exactly the same thing!

Skyscrapers and Sheep: London Neighbours

Today I met Bob very close to his school and we went to Mudchute Park and Farm, London's largest urban farm, just one kilometre from the skyscraper warren of Canary Wharf, whose One Canada Square is the tallest inhabited building in the UK. We first passed by the equestrian centre, where we met picture-perfect Angelo,

shy Danny,
Poppy, disinterested Bobby,
Cindy, and her irritable neighbour Naddy, who didn't have any people to bite, so she settled for the nearby reins.
We were lured away from the horses by the most bizarre noises, which sounded like a yelling contest between grumpy old men, sped up to double- or triple-time. The owners of those incredible lungs turned out to be these impossibly cute goats:

Next to the goats was this GIANT rabbit. I had trouble taking a photo that would accurately show the scale of the rabbit, but the creatures in the pen beside the rabbit are quite large guinea pigs, if that helps.
Moving along, we came across some rather crazy-looking chickens
and one angry turkey. Actually, he just looked angry, but we found out that he was just doing his best to look impressive for the nearby female turkey. His head turned bright blue and then bright red and he fanned out his feathers and dragged his wings on the ground, all the while making the most threatening, drumming, robotic noise.
As amazing as we thought he was, the female turkey didn't seem very impressed. Around this time, the farm began to close and some school-aged volunteers went into the pen to herd the chickens and turkeys inside for the night. It was an easy job, except for Mr. Turkey, who refused to go inside, preferring instead to continue his prancing (even though the female turkey was already inside). The boys were clearly afraid of the turkey and half-heartedly tried to corral him without success. Finally a young man appeared, yelling, "Please do not tell me that you are scared of a turkey," to which the three boys immediately replied, "Yes, we are!" The man passed by us, muttering, "I do not get paid enough for this," marched into the cage, picked up the turkey (who immediately deflated his grand display), and tucked him away for the night. The last farm inhabitants we saw were the sheep,
with the buildings of Canary Wharf (including One Canada Square in the middle) silhouetted behind them.
An odd sight, don't you think?

Fountains and Pianos

We visited a church garden today that wasn't just on church grounds; it was in the church itself--well, the ruins of a church, to be more precise. St. Dunstan in the East was damaged in the Great Fire of 1666 and soon repaired, along with the addition of a Christopher-Wren-designed steeple. It was later rebuilt in 1817, retaining Wren's addition, only to be destroyed during air-raid bombing in 1941. The church remained a ruin until 1971, when it was reopened as a park. Making lovely use of an atmospheric space, and with a gurgling fountain that blocks out the nearby urban hum, the park was a nice place for a bit of a rest.


From St. Dunstan, we wandered west, along the Thames for a bit, and then zigzagged up and down tiny streets in the general direction of our 6:00 P.M. destination, Foyles.
Easily the biggest bookshop we've wandered through in London, Foyles has an amazing selection of books, and for all its big-box appearances, remains an independent bookstore on Charing Cross Road, a street known for its bookshops. After a bit of browsing, we heading to the second floor--um, UK first floor--to the café for a free jazz performance by Tom Cawley's Curios. They played a half-hour set of energetic music to the appreciative crowd who had crammed into the café and after it was over we happily found ourselves in the still-warm daylight (it was 18' today) as we made our way home.

Crouch End

It's funny, but the more we see and do in London, the more we realize that there are seemingly endless places to explore in this huge city-have we even begun to make a dent? Today we ended up exploring a neighbourhood close to home, amazed (yet again) that we hadn't been there yet. We walked along part of the Parkland Walk, which makes nice use of an abandoned railway line running through northern London. At times along the way, we saw into people's back gardens,

walked across bridges with views of the streets below,
and had a sense of being removed from the busy city all around us.
It wasn't exactly the Promenade Plantée, but it was still a lovely walk. We returned to the streets to explore the neighbourhood of Crouch End, centred on its clock tower:
Crouch End had the nice feeling of a village, albeit a village with an astronomical number of places to eat treats (lots of French and Italian shops) and drink strong coffee! Since we were neither hungry nor thirsty, we resisted all the smells and sights and just wandered the high streets. Before we left the area, I stopped at the library to sign up for a Haringey (the borough just north of ours) library card and check out a few books. The library was in an odd location, almost hidden behind the town hall, with this sculpture obscuring the window that revealed the building to be a library.
We walked through nearby Priory Park, whose "Philosophers' Garden" was adorned with three cute mushroom sculptures.

Although we wanted to visit two other green spaces in the area, we ended up getting a bit lost since we only had our mini A-Z mapbook with us and we had wandered off the map! It all worked out fine though, since now we know we'd like to return to the area and we can save those parks (along with a Crouch End coffee stop) for another outing.

British Summer Time

Today we moved our clocks ahead one hour, so we're officially on "British Summer Time," even though it's of course not summer yet. Still, it's very nice to know that it won't be dark until after 7:30 P.M. from now on--it's very strange to think that when we arrived in London back in December, it was pitch black by 3:30 P.M. Many attractions around town have later closing times beginning in April, so that'll make it even easier to have London adventures during the week. Today's destination, Kenwood House, still had the off-season closing time of 4:00 P.M., but we arrived with plenty of time to look around the expansive house and grounds.

The adjoining coach house contains a lovely restaurant, with ample outdoor seating, so we ate a yummy lunch sitting in the sunshine, enjoying the spring day.
We wandered quite a bit around the grounds of Kenwood House, which include manicured tunnel-like paths,
and plenty of open space.

We continued our walk in Hampstead Heath, wandering through parts of the park that we'd not yet visited,
including Parliament Hill, one of the highest points in the park and a popular kite-flying area.

The reputedly fantastic views from the hill were a bit obscured today, but it was still very nice to be on the heath on a warm day, instead of the cold, rainy days that coincided with our previous visits. Here's hoping that spring has really sprung!