We stayed with a friend in her wonderful, historic neighborhood - home of Spitalfields Market. A block away was Brick Lane: where the Bangladesh community (a.k.a. "Banglatown") boasts dozens of amazing Indian restaurants...
We spent the first few days poking around some of London's many free museums (yes, New York, they were all free), including the Tate Modern - one of the few renovated industrial era structures that houses an equally inspiring art collection...
While both London's famed British Museum and Natural History Museum were architecturally inspiring, the presentation of loot the empire had acquired over the centuries was disappointing...
All the good booty was next door at the Victoria & Albert - a Royal "cabinet of curiosities" of a museum...
On a smaller scale, the true cabinets of old still exist in the dusty corners of London's scientific institutions, such as the Grant and the Hunterian - lots of bottled and canned creepy crawlies to be had here!
The Bummers didn't just visit dead things on shelves, we also walked and walked and walked... then took a 1/2 hour ride on the London Eye - a gigantic Ferris wheel on the Thames...
In Trafalgar Square (on the way to another museum) we saw this sculpture of a pregnant Alison Lapper, a British artist born with phocomelia...
A Tube ride away was the beautiful Kew Gardens - a 300 acre expanse of formal gardens, wild preserve and home to the world's largest surviving Victorian glass structure, the Temperate House...
We also took a day trip out to Kent to visit another greenery: Sissinghurst Castle Garden. It used to be home to Vita Sackville-West, the aristocratic writer with whom Virginia Woolf had an affair over several years (don't worry - her husband also had extra-marital flings)...
Hands down, one of the best things about London was its delicious array of puddings! Those Brits sure know how to eat dessert. All in all, the trip was "smashing" and made Dan a bit less of a Bummer.
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