June

I begin this post on the 3rd of June, a Friday in which after work, I met up with Kristen on Oxford St to go in search of some shopping and possibly some food in Soho. If memory serves, we went to Hummous Brothers again for a healthy hummous meal. I remember being a little apprehensive about that place when we first arrived in London, but I was hooked the minute I first tried it.

The Next day we caught the tube down to St Pauls to visit the Borough Market again. It was a beautiful day and the market was packed with people, as it always is. The market specialises in really good food, with an area set aside for various street food stalls. It's always hard to choose what to pick there as it all looks so good and the queues are often quite long. But always worth the wait and always difficult to know when to stop going back for more. I had a delicious green curry cooked in a large, open paella pan nearly 2 metres across.

After we had our fill, we got on the tube to Earl's Court and walked from there to the Brompton Cemetery. This was our first time visiting an old cemetery, so I wasn't sure what to expect. The thought and planning that went into the old Victorian cemetery differentiates it from any that I've seen before and there is obvious wealth in some of the monuments and tombs around the grave sites. The place also was quite overgrown in areas, but is maintained as a park for the locals. A small number of people were taking the opportunity to sunbathe there, as it was actually quite a bit quieter than the other real parks would have been that day.

The 9th of June we had went down to the road after work and had our favourite Thai for dinner, followed by the creme caramel dessert from Wahaca at Westfield mall. A bit indulgent, but one must do these things. I worked again that weekend, which seems to be too often recently, as we have been a bit short staffed at work. As it is I worked last weekend and I'm working this one too.

Anyway, enough wallowing. On the 14th of June, a Tuesday, I had the day off so I capitalised on this by going down to the UCL in Holborn to check out the Grant Museum of Zoology. It's a remarkably different experience that can hardly be described. Jars and cabinets of hundred of different specimens line the walls of the room, each showing off some weird and wonderful creature either pickled, stuffed or skeletal. I have some pictures around here somewhere.

After that, I skipped on over the road to the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, which is also free and very unassuming. It just holds a few rooms full of Egyptian artefacts. Ancient Egyptian artefacts. Five thousand year old pieces of pottery. Wow. It's not placed there for spectacle like one can see in the British Museum. It's just sitting there waiting to be contemplated at a slow pace and studied by the students at the University.

And then on the 16th, I fled the country.

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