DISCOVERING BOROUGH MARKET
The morning started with a delicious and tasty bacon sarnie for breaky (sandwhich for breakfast) which did very little for eliminating the ‘heavy head’ I was feeling due to being made to drink so much beer the night before. We were up and were about to have a full day.

We went initially to Borough Market. I recognized it from research I did when working on the HCMA architects website as we liked the images they had taken as it did a good job showing people interacting with the building and enjoying their purchases from the market.

The market was amazing, great produce, wonderful variety. They had these huge woks serving up six different paellas and curries – the smell was so enticing. They served beer and wine, small specialty bottles from around the world. The place I enjoyed the most and decided to sample was Pie Minister. When I initially read this I thought it was a cool name to have a Minister of the pie. Then afterwards I realized it was also a play on the word ‘Prime Minister’ and as this is the capital where the Prime Minister resides I thought the name was extra clever and witty. In their words “We make great British food taste lovely. We use the best free range British meat from places we know and trust”. I tried the Matador pie (Beef steak, chorizo, olives, tomato, sherry and butter beans in lovely pastry) which was surprising (as I am not a huge pie lover) good, tasty, filling and ‘lovely’.

Their marketing materials are also very strong. They have a loyalty card (known as VIP cards in the UK) where if you buy eight pies you get the ninth one free. But they call it a V.I.PIE card. Their marketing is fun, playful and utilizes intelligent, beautiful imagery and design layout.

We ate our food in the courtyard of a local church with many other folk on their lunch break. It was an extremely sunny day and everyone was out to enjoy it. There was a fantastic community feel to everyone enjoying the outside together, especially in a city as large and sometimes as grumpy as London.

SAATCHI AND SAATCHI
After the market we went to the Saatchi and Saatchi gallery. I remember 13 years ago when I fist moved to London I visited the Saatchi gallery. At that time it was a relatively a small gallery (compared to its current location) and was hidden away. It was rumored that they didn’t even care to be found easily which was reflected in that they never advertised and there was no signage outside the gallery. In fact, all there was, was a door with the street number above it and you then entered an empty brick courtyard. It wasn’t until you adventured in a little and turned the corner that you discovered there was a door to the actual gallery.

Well times have certainly changed. The building is in prestigious Sloan Square neighborhood and is in a very beautiful building. The interior was incredible, white walls, lots of open space and incredible 2 feet wide floorboards by Dinesen. The actual work was OK. Like any modern art exhibit I find some of it incredible and some just confuses the hell out of me how it can be called art.

THE LONG WALK
We  walked for hours that day and ended up at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park after talking a short detour to show my cousins the Royal College of Art where I did my MA. We went there looking for the 7/7 exhibition/installation but were told it was at the other end of the park. After what seemed like a long haul of a walk (as our whole bodies were aching at this point) we reached the installation. In summary, imagine several concrete sticks coming out of the ground. David, my cousin, who is a Northern lad said in a very inquisitive (with maybe a little hint of sarcasm) “is this what we have been looking for, for the last hour”? Yes it was. The installation is a memorial to the 52 Londoners who lost their life in the July 7 bombings.

HOT TUB TIME
Later that night David left to return home and Vicki and I went to her private gym. I was shocked when I asked her how much her membership was, it was 900 pounds a month ($1,500). I was like ‘wow’, it was nice, and good for her for having the cash to afford it. Anyways, as I was leaving the changing rooms to the hot tub area I saw a guy getting changed and he was wearing old torn and tattered grey boxer shorts. I thought, wow, if he can afford 900 quid a month on membership, he can  certainly afford to buy new undies. It was only later when I was sharing this observation with Vicki that I discovered that there was a slight miss-understanding, and she told me it was only 90 pound a month, not 900. I still think the guy should buy a new pair of boxers though.

My favourite part was the lockers,- they were modern and made from dark wood on the outside but bright orange on the inside. If a locker can be sexy, then these were supermodels. They also had an air extractor in them, removing any nasty gym -like stench which I thought was a great idea.

ROAD CONFUSION
As most people know, cars travel on the ‘correct’ side of the road in the UK and although I have been here for a while now it is still confusing me. I keep walking out into the road and almost getting hit by cars coming in the ‘wrong’ direction to what I am used to. Also, in Vancouver cars will stop for you as the pedestrians have the right of way. I think legally it is the same in the UK but traffic definitely seems to forget this law and will ‘run your ass over’ if you are silly enough to forget. As cars drive on different sides of the road all over the world I think it will be safer when we go traveling to just presume that ‘all’ cars will run you over and they can come from any direction, so play it safe. That said, I know this now but it’s still taking a little time to shake my habits of road crossing from Vancouver.

DO WE OR DON’T WE
On a very different note, I have been feeling the itch for the last little while to move back to London to live for a while. Part of this trip is to assess if this is just me missing the place and my mates, or whether it would practically be such a good move. One big area is things to do in the city and would we take advantage of them. I was talking to my cousin the other day and she was saying that she wishes there were beaches in London, how sweet it would be to go there after work. I informed her that there are beaches surrounding the whole of Vancouver. When she enquired how often we went (which is maybe only a few times a year) she was shocked and questioned why. I explained on a regular night, once I get home from work, have dinner, spend a little time with Helena before going to bed, put Helena to bed, clean up the kitchen from dinner and make lunches for the next day, there isn’t that much time left to do anything before hitting the bed ourselves.

Based on this conversation I wonder if we would suddenly do more and see more if we lived in London or any other city in the world. Unless we change our patterns, like we go to the beach after work for example and have a pic-nic there etc then probably not.

Also if we compare what we earn in Vancouver it is less than London, but rent and house prices are quite a bit more, so financially I wonder if we would be in a better place?

Ahhhhhh, more fodder to chew on I guess.

SEE IMAGES ON FLICKR:
part 1, part 2, part 3 & part 4

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