Totality

We had a lazy start to our day, puttering around the house and finally heading out mid-afternoon to a food festival at Spitalfields Market. While some of the stalls at the small festival were already packing up for the day by the time we got there, we sampled some olives (the ones stuffed with lemon were great), tasted black pudding for the first time (pretty good, actually), and were tempted by the assortment of baklava at this booth:

We met some friends at Spitalfields and wandered down to Whitechapel Gallery before heading toward Covent Garden to grab a bite before they headed off to the theatre. Later this evening, we walked around our neighbourhood, looking for a dark spot from which to see and photograph tonight's total lunar eclipse, but with the nearby green spaces locked up for the night, we had to settle for viewing the eclipse from urban, lit vantage points. Along the way, we came across another kind offer in front of a neighbour's house,
as well as another sad vacuum cleaner, once again strewn across the sidewalk. The eclipse had the same effect on Londoners that snow has on Vancouverites: suddenly strangers felt they could talk with each other and the standards of social separation temporarily broke down. We talked briefly with a few people in our neighbourhood about the eclipse and we ended up having a half-hour conversation with a woman who lives almost directly behind our house, at first about the eclipse, but then about Stoke Newington (she's lived in her flat for twelve years and Stoke Newington for about twenty years), London, and life in general. Oh and the eclipse? It was beautiful, with the moon glowing a spectacular red at the height of the event. This photo is of the moon before totality--although the colour was less intense, in a way it was even more interesting to watch the white portion of the moon slowly fade away, to be replaced with that other-worldly red.