London: pictures

As promised here are some of the pictures from London. Also, don't forget to check back the previous posts as I loaded pictures there too.The Big Ben and the parliamentary house are worth a visit. You just have to dodge all the tourists.


St Paul's Cathedral.London Bridge. If it's windy, it's actually the worse place to be in London.

It was a nice sort of weekend, we had a great time, bought lots of books and ate like savages... Let's just say that I wont do it again in between moving apaprtments or continents.

London: good food day

I know that I'm 27 and that I should appreciate other things such as the historic importance of London, breathe in the places that inspired so many... however all I can say is that it was a lovely (albeit very cold as you can see from the picture above) sunny day and I ate wonderfully.

Details from Hyde Park and the Albert Hall Memorial.

I know London has a bad reputation for food, that you have to go to foreign restaurants but I think people have been going to the wrong places. In the UK you don't go to a restaurant to have a typical British meal, you go to a pub - a dark, with an ugly carpet, with dark wood furniture one - and you have, for example, a steak pie, shepperd's pie (my favorite), sausage and mash and any dessert with custard. I absolutely love custard. So today for lunch we had a jacket potato in a little stall in Convent Garden (the old market), that's basically a baked potato with topping of your choice and later in the afternoon I had a delicious shepperd's pie and an apple pie with custard. And that was it, I was happy.

Details from Trafalgar Square.

Oh, yes, I bought more books. I tried to resist but the 2666 is 32e in Brussels and here it was 18e...

Tomorrow evening I'll load up the pictures into the posts, so be sure to return to these posts to have a look.

I'll leave you with a bit from The savage detectives:
"I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way. (...) I'm not really sure what visceral realism is. I'm seventeen years old, my name is Juan Garcia Madero, and I'm in my first semester in law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I'm an orphan, and someday I'll be a lawyer. That's what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night. Or anyway for a long time."P.3

Moving and reaching London

For those of you who don't know, I'm currently in London. The fact that I made it here after carrying furniture, books (too many), cds (way too many) and dvds (also too many) from 18h until midnight with - 4 is a true miracle.

It was a sort of Portuguese moving system. We didn't want to pay a moving company so we carried everything ourselves, we yelled a lot of instructions to each other, we ignored a lot of instructions until one bookshelf almost landed on my foot, we stopped to eat for about an hour and after moving some more stuff we were hungry again. What wasn't Portuguese was the weather. Imagine carrying stuff down 3 floors and then reaching the street where it was -4 and cross a busy intersection with your sofa. Or cd shelf. Or playstation. Then you go up 3 floors again and continue. We then proceeded to Leuven where most of my stuff will be kept. Yes, that's right, we had to unpack again and carry again. We went to bed exausted and took a train at 10 am to London.

So far London has not disappointed me but it has not amazed me yet either. I mean, expected facts list:

1. It's raining.
2. I bought books already.
3. Lots of badly dressed people.
4. Things are expensive.
5. The tube is fast, efficient and claustrophobic depending on the hour.

Things I didn't expect:

1. Eurostar's security system and border control.
2. That the cheese would be so heavy here.
3. That I would have a bad meal in Chinatown.
4. Vinagar, salt and melted cheese in top of French fries.
5. Even expecting high prices I was surprised.

Tomorrow I will go to a museum, a park and eat a pie and a dessert with custard in a pub, just not sure which ones yet. Now I will take a shower and read one of my new books in bed, it's called The savage detectives by Roberto Bolano and the first four pages were very promissing.

London calling

Next week I'll be going two days to London. I've been to the UK before but never to London for some strange reason so I'm pretty happy about the prospect. Things seem to be very organized or a just a bit too much. While booking the train ticket we got a choice of 9 different meals: standard, vegan, vegetarian, kosher, non-gluten, halal, low fat, low salt and for people with sugar diseases. I was very impressed. Of course by the time you've selected all your options the price of the ticket has already changed.

If anyone's been to London and wants to share some info, by all means...