Neng Myun

Today was the first official day of summer break in London schools, which may be shocking to Vancouverites, since Vancouver students and teachers have been already been on vacation for three weeks, but at least Bob won't have to complain about teaching in July anymore! We decided to start the holiday with a visit to the Courtauld, which I visited for the first time when Bob was still in Vancouver recently.

This 1874 Renoir, La Loge, was Samuel Courtauld's most expensive purchase, made in 1925.
I liked this Camille Pissaro work, Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich (1871),
and The Toll-Gate (c. 1890) by Henri Rousseau:
The rooms in the Courtauld are also lovely, as this ceiling of Apollo and the signs of the zodiac demonstrates.
It wouldn't be the beginning of a holiday without some sort of celebratory meal, and we had exactly the same thing in mind--a trip south to New Malden, for a Korean lunch at the restaurant that had made us so happy at dinner back in March:
Although today was quite a cool day, we were both craving chilled Korean noodles, something that Korean restaurants only serve during the summer, as advertised on this hanging sign in the restaurant:
On many autumn, winter, and spring days in Vancouver, Bob's craved neng myun and found it very exasperating that it's not served year-round in Korean restaurants. He's even stubbornly gone into restaurants and asked if they serve neng myun, while I stand on the February street, shouting, "They won't have it!" and sure enough, he emerges from the restaurant, disappointed. In spite of the cool day, the calendar does say that it's summer, so Bob wasn't disappointed today. Although we both ordered chilled noodles, we each have our favourite. Mine is mool neng myun, chilled noodles in a cold beef broth with vinegar, mustard, radish, cucumber, beef, and egg:
Bob loves bi bim neng myun, which replaces the broth of mool neng myun with a super-spicy red pepper paste sauce (which is way too spicy for me). He loves his neng myun so much that he started eating before I could take this photo. "Messy!" he said after I showed him the photo:
Every time we order one mool and one bi bim neng myun, no matter how clear we make it that Bob is having the bi bim and I'm having the mool, servers in every restaurant always seem to put the bowl of flaming red sauce in front of me and the non-spicy bowl in front of Bob. When we switch them around, we usually get a surprised exclamation and look of apology. Sometimes in the tiny family restaurants, the proprietor will even check up on Bob to make sure he hasn't been killed by the spiciness, and will give him a look of supreme admiration when he survives, or even asks for more of the spicy sauce. Sometimes I don't know how he does it--one mouthful of bi bim neng myun would do me in for sure!

Hampstead Garden Suburb

Sunny days have been rare in London this last little while, and we find that whenever it looks like it's going to stay sunny for more than fifteen minutes, we set out for a walk. Today was such a day, so we headed on a self-guided walk through one of the most unique areas of London, Hampstead Garden Suburb. As the name suggests, Hampstead Garden Suburb is a suburb of London, but not an organically formed extension; rather, it is an excellent example of a "garden city" suburb, with every aspect of the new area planned with the aims of harmony and balance between town and country. Its founder, Henrietta Barnett, sought to create a place where the middle- and working-classes could live together in close proximity to urban London while retaining advantages of the country, with low density, wide, tree-lined streets, greenery (not walls) separating houses, and gardens open to all. Hampstead Garden Suburb is celebrating its centenary this year, and so it's been in the news recently and I was curious to have a look. We started our walk at Golders Green tube, where the nearby "Courage" clocktower dominates the high street.

Once in the suburb, we noticed these two hedgehogs guarding their front door,
and started to get a sense of buildings typical of the area.
This building had a lovely mural above the door
and the streets were very quiet, wide, clean, and full of greenery.
Two nearby squares were equally serene,

and once near the high street,
we popped into M&S to buy a picnic lunch before continuing with the rest of our walk. Many houses had narrow stretches of garden beside them, perpendicular to the sidewalk, giving a sense of calm and relaxation from the street.
Quiet greens popped up now and then
and we were repeatedly struck with a sense of displacement as we wandered on Hampstead Garden Suburb (apparently, the preposition "on" is used when talking about the area). I had to stop at one point to take a photo of this typical streetscape,
because, more than any other place in London, this looks and feels a lot like Vancouver. Even the fact that the dark car in the photo is parked facing the wrong way adds to this perception. The photo above looks like it could be of a street in Vancouver (maybe in Kerrisdale?), with its grassy boulevards, trees planted between the sidewalk and the road, and clean and quiet streets. It didn't feel like London! The suburb's Free Church was begun in 1911, but wasn't completed until the 1960s:
St Jude's church was completed in 1911; this view is from the end of a street leading directly onto the northwest corner of Hampstead Heath.
No. 2 Heathgate, at the end of the road, wouldn't be a bad address,
with the heath just seconds away:
Every time we're on the heath, we are always struck by its beauty.

Toward the end of our walk, I noticed this topiary which hadn't been trimmed in a while:
It looked like a dog to us, but we weren't entirely sure. I liked how it was perched on top of the shrubbery though!

Potter or Pizza?

The rain looked like it might just stay away for a bit today, so we headed south to the Lambeth Country Fair, where we spotted these two interesting cyclists:

We watched some of the dog show, including this demonstration of the early training of this extremely cute recent pound-rescue.
Unlike in Canadian cities, where carnivals like the PNE come to town, occupying one site for more than a month, we're learning that London hosts a seemingly endless number of mini-carnivals on greenspaces all around town, which crop up at the weekend with an astonishing array of rides, food booths, demonstrations, music, and plentiful (weather-permitting) picnicking. Then, come Sunday night, they disappear, only to return to another greenspace with a slightly different feel.
This particular pro-walking advert is on a lot of bus shelters around town, and I really like the simple graphics and its "Why not walk it?" message.
In spite of the advert, we definitely didn't walk home from the country fair (some 13 km south of our flat), opting for the train instead, where we noticed this wind turbine atop this large housing complex
and were treated to a nice view of St. Paul's amongst the cranes and the rail tracks.
The best photo opportunity of the day, though, was pointed out by Bob as we shopped at Sainsbury's this evening:
You may have heard about a little book being released to the public at midnight last night, and today, on its first full day of release, everyone under the age of 20 in London seems to be carrying around a copy of the book. It looks like at least one person changed her/ his mind though, abandoning the book and taking home some pizza instead?

The Body

Only open since June, the Wellcome Collection is a lovely mix of exhibition spaces, library, bookshop, and café where the public is invited to "consider what it means to be human" under the motto "Medicine. Life. Art." An engaging multidisciplinary approach to bringing considerations of medicine and science to the public, the venue is well worth a visit. Their current temporary exhibit on the heart is fascinating, bringing together artistic representations of the heart, scientific samples and images, and discussions of where art and science meet. Their permanent collection is also interesting--for example, consider this book, with its tiny font and repetitive letters seeming like a nightmare of a reading assignment:In fact, it's part of an impressive bookcase containing an almost complete copy of the human genetic sequence.
Nearby are some sheep wool and droppings--not standard exhibition-space fare! Of course, they're not just from any sheep:
Robin Blackledge's Barber DNA had an interesting premise, drawing attention to the origin of the barbershop pole (originally a surgeon's sign of bloodied rags which would eventually become wrapped around their pole with help from the wind) and its resemblance to the DNA helix.
Completely fascinating, almost to the point of being unbelievable, was this display of a "plastinated body slice with a frontal cut."
With bodily fluids replaced with plastics, this image of the human body seems almost like a textbook drawing at first, but its colourful appearance is actually quite jarring once you think about what you're really looking at in that glass case! If all your wanderings through considerations of the human body have made you a bit hungry, the café is light and airy, with many tempting treats as well as an Antony Gormley figure keeping watch from the ceiling,

just in case you forget that you're in a building that's all about the human body!

In Which Bob and Jenny Are Entirely Surrounded by Water

Bob and I met at Baker Street tube station and had some coffee in Marylebone before heading over to Paddington where we took part in another InTransit artist-guided tour, this time on the Grand Union Canal. On our way to the water, we came across this rather galling sight:

Tonight's event, entitled Hints to Travellers, was meant to evoke the experiences and travels of Mary Kingsley on the water in 1895 Africa. The artist putting on the event, Melissa Bliss, read us excerpts from Kingsley's book
of the same name,
enticed us with a spread of food and drink that closely resembled items Kingsley consumed on her journey,
and sought to connect tonight's cruise along the Grand Union Canal with Kingsley's journey of more than a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, the conceit of tonight's event was its least interesting part--it wasn't that Kingsley's journey didn't hold great potential for translating into current-day London, it was that Bliss wasn't dynamic enough to tie together pieces of information in an engaging way. Sadly, she seemed to realise this, and her presentation kind of trailed off at one point, with her saying that she would stop for a while so that we could enjoy the views, and then she never did pick up her narrative again. In spite of the evening's disappointment as an artistic performance, it was still an amazing boat ride down parts of the canal (west of Paddington) that we'd not been on before--not a difficult way to spend a few hours on a lovely evening! Our boat, the Beauchamp, was an electric boat, allowing for many quiet moments along the canal.



We even floated beside the Westway highway, although traffic seemed to be light and we barely heard a thing.
There were some busy pubs and restaurants along the towpath, from which many people waved (two strangers waving at each other, when at least one of you is on the water, are being friendly, but if both of you are on land, then one of you is a bit crazy),
as well as one of the oddest buildings I've ever seen:

Even Spiderman made an appearance!


This particular narrowboat proudly displayed badges from various canals--all ones that the boat has travelled?
We turned around at this point
and headed back to our docking point, with the sun slowly disappearing in the night.






At one point, I noticed that several balloons were floating down the canal, all covered with writing; maybe they were someone's versions of releasing notes in bottles?

In any case, the current was too strong and I couldn't read any of the writing. Even zooming in the photos after I got home kept the messages secret. Not so secret were the many coots' nests we saw along the canal,
and some kind people even ensured that a pair of coots would get a head start on their nestmaking:

This stretch of bushes was very strange,with many sculptures and hand-scrawled plaques just barely visible behind them. As another person on the boat also tried to take photos, we commiserated over the impossibility of getting a good shot and decided that it wasn't entirely a coincidence!

Some art along the canal could only be viewed from the water:

This barge was full of garbage
and, quite fittingly, this piece of art was crafted out of litter!

The tour ended just past 9:00 P.M. and once back on land, we felt very lucky to have spent an idyllic few hours boating down one of London's many canals.