London: Food, Friends, and Craft Beer

I went on a ten day trip to London and Spain, and I got back more than a week ago. As soon as I got back I got hit with the worst cold I've had in a long time, and didn't leave the house for almost four days. It was bad. Then yesterday, as I was shaking off the remnants of my cough and stuffy nose, I was riding my bike in the rain, my tires slid on a slippery bunch of tram tracks, and I fell off and busted up my right hand. Sigh. And for a further update on my current woes, it has been downpouring on and off for a week and just above my bedroom ceiling there is a swimming pool, in the form of an ankle-deep flooded terrace, dripping water into my room. Welcome home.

So because typing is a bit difficult and because there is just so much to say, I will try to not say much about my grand excursion out of the Netherlands and instead leave you with photos and the highlights.

Some thoughts on London: it's insanely expensive, like everything looks like New York prices but it's in pounds, so every American has to almost double the value in their head. The food is SO much better than in Rotterdam, especially the international food. London feels like a real city- i.e. I spent a lot of time on trains and walking through long, hot, claustrophobic tunnels to get places, and fought through the crush of humanity on the sidewalk. There are never any street signs when you need them, and when you find them, they often are not very helpful anyway. Don't try to eat (cheaply) where there are hoards of tourists. Camden feels a lot like Williamsburg- entertaining for ten minutes, and then really annoying and overwhelming. Hackney on the other hand feels like the rest of Brooklyn- mildly depressing warehouses and urban, industrial sprawl made more interesting with the addition of artists and their graffiti. The beer is way better, as in they actually have other kinds of beers besides pilsners and Belgians.

So basically, being in London felt a lot like being back in New York but on the wrong side of the road. It was interesting and exhilerating to be a tourist in a city like this, but I realized that in such a large place, with so much time spent travelling, I didn't get to spend as much time wandering and seeing things as I have in smaller cities. Luckily I didn't feel like I needed to see everything I could, and my focus was on spending time with my friends whom I hadn't seen in months.

I took the 8 hour bus from Rotterdam to London on Friday with my roommate Mair, who was going to stay with her cousins and then fly to Iceland for the break. It was great to have company on the long journey and to spend time with her, and I got to meet some of her family when we both slept at her cousin's place in Bethnal Green. They were incredibly welcoming and made us a lovely dinner, and then Saturday morning I left to check into my hostel and meet Linnea.

Linnea is one of my oldest camp friends, we went to Fell session together for three years and then were counselors together for two. She took an even longer busride from St. Ansdrews in Scotland where she is studying abroad. We had a delicious brunch at a Bombay cafe called Dishoom and then she took me around the center of London on a tour of all the sites every tourist has to see. Linnea has done this a million times but enjoys it every time for the beautiful walks through parks in the surrounding areas, so I took photos while we strolled and enjoyed the nice weather.

Buckingham Palace

Freaking scary pelicans in the park

 In the evening after seeing the sights Linnea and I met up with Vicki, another fellow camp counselor and friend who is studying abroad outside of London. We ate dinner at YoSushi, which is a sushi bar with the little plates moving down a conveyor belt in front of you, something I'd never done before, and I was so glad to have good sushi after my experience with cooked mayo tuna sushi in Rotterdam. I also tried sake, which tasted to me a lot like a yeasty mead. I spent more money on one meal than I ever have in my life, but was glad to be with my two camp friends catching up on Quaker gossip and laughing about shared memories from summers before. It was great to get to talk to two people about the things I think about all the time but have to constantly define for people who aren't familiar with Quakerism or summer camp, and I forget how close I can feel to my camp friends even when we haven't seen each other for a year. Also, we can be as touchy and huggy as we want together, something many of us lament is absent from our other friendships.

me and Linnea in front of the London Eye

We said bye to Vicki sadly as she took the train home to Egham and Linnea and I went back to our hostel outside of the city center. The next morning, Sunday, we decided to go to Quaker meeting since we had stumbled upon Westminster Meetinghouse in central London the day before. I had not been to meeting, not even been around any Quakers, since attending Brooklyn Meeting in January, and I was brimming with gratitude and gladness to feel so at home with a bunch of strangers as we sat in silence for an hour. The meeting was a bit smaller and with more older folks than I'm used to for one in a major city, but we were welcomed wholeheartedly as we introduced ourselves with greetings from New England Yearly Meeting, and we even met a member from Massachusetts.

After meeting we met up with Seb, another counselor from Friends Camp who happens to be Welsh and was coming home from a trip. We attempted to find an affordable lunch in the Piccadilly Square area, which was probably a bad idea and the best thing we could find was a kebab place. No matter where I go, there is always cheap Middle Eastern food available at all hours- halal trucks in New York, doner in Rotterdam. It was great to see Seb even for a couple hours before he left on another train home.

After lunch Linnea and I headed to King's Cross to take a photo that is obligatory for all Harry Potter fans visiting London, at the famed Platform 9 and 3/4. We waited in line and she took a picture of me pretending to push half a luggage cart through a wall with a very unconvincing stuffed Hedwig on it. Nevertheless I was enchanted to be in the station that occupied Jo Rowling's imagination as she wrote my favorite childhood books.

The rest of the afternoon we spent wandering around Linnea's old neighborhood, in the Islington/Angel area, and she showed me the house she lived in for part of her freshman year of college. For dinner we went to Hackney to a craft brewery and pizzaria I had found online called Crate, where we ate the best pizza I've had in a long time, with veggies, feta, and bits of lime zest. It was unreal. And then even better, I had an proper IPA (in a properly sized pint glass) from the draft for the first time since I moved here, and it tasted like heaven. I dreamt about that beer and pizza for days afterwards.

The patio of Crate was next to a canal making me feel at home.

Hackney has some great graffiti.

I ended my stay in London by going to bed relatively early, preparing for a brutally early start to the next morning to start the next leg of my journey- to Granada.