London in a week

It's funny that I have an attitude towards Central London very similarly to what I have for Times Square- avoid at all costs.  Unlike Times Square though, once I am in Central, I realize it's actually kind of pleasant.

It's rather beautiful in its mesh of old and new, and being huge and sprawling means that tourist are not crowded so densely in a few areas, but spread out over a few miles.  Yes, there are tourist stopping erratically to take selfies every few steps when you hit a big monument, and people with cameras held up on sticks narrating videos while holding up the working masses on Oxford Street (whom I have so far successfully suppressed the urge to punch) and a few drunk party bikes holding up all manner of traffic, but for the most part, you can be in London and feel like people live there and work there, and with a little bit of an impatient pace, you can feel like you are part of that rather than just an observer.  

 It's a real treat for me to have guest in town to show around.  It's the only time I get to see the landmarks and check out what's going on around town.  Otherwise, I stay firmly south of the river, with occasional darts up to Dalston or Angel to meet up with friends and check out places to eat in more vibrant neighborhoods then what's around the flat (I only have the sort of fried chicken joints that indiscriminate drunks tend to frequent, and the bones of countless chickens are discarded along the sidewalks nightly).

Despite the January days being so brief, we hustled and got out of the house early every day, and the timing worked out well: instead of being dog-tired at the end of a long day, we were just moderately beat after a short one.

Besides, winter in London isn't nearly as cold and blustery on the east coast.  It's damp, and frequently grey and featureless, but it's only been icy a few times in the mornings so far, and nary a snowflake to be seen in years in the Southern part of the country.  It's good advice to dress warmly and expect rain, but it's no where near as terrible as it's made to seem, as the locals complain noisily at each drop of a degree on the thermometer.  But ah, green grass!  In January!  It makes things so much less bleak.

A couple things were new to me:  on the way from the Tube to the Tower of London, I happened to glance down and alleyway and spied something interesting, which ended up being a bit of the original Roman wall that surrounded the square mile of the city, now surrounded by hotels and large-scale construction projects, but somehow tucked away and preserved and infrequently noticed.

 The Tower itself is well worth a visit.  I hadn't been since I was first a visitor here in the early aughts,  it being the first castle I had ever had the pleasure of visiting on my first trans-Atlantic voyage.

It's a sprawling complex inside the walls, with lots of towers and odd rooms to explore, and a really hyped exhibit of the Crown Jewels where they plop you onto a moving walkway to spy, keeping the lines industriously moving.  

 It's well worth it to be taken around by a Yeoman.  These guides are funny and knowledgeable, and they get to live in private quarters onsite with their own private pub, and spin colorful dramatic yarns of residents past.  If you are going to be a tourist, then be a tourist!

For over 900 years, the white tower has been a famous landmark, revered and dreaded and the site of unjustly imprisonments and the executions of queens.  

Today, it's a working museum, with loads of military types trotting around with much ceremony.

 You also can't  eat well without stopping into Borough Market.  I like to take people there right before lunch with the thought to pick up ingredients for dinner, and have a good nosh while wandering around.  Cornish pastys, sausage rolls, goat gyros, fresh seafood paella, good crusty bread and oodles of fresh vegetables make this a place I can't afford to eat every day, but it's just fantastic when you have friends in town who aren't opposed to a little fat in their diet.  Even better to introduce them to a perfect Scotch egg.  It's standard pub fare here, but when it's done with a bit of love, it's really fantastic: a hard boiled egg (rid of its shell, of course) that is given a coating of sausage meat before being breaded and deep fried into a golden fatty mass of eggy goodness.  Like the standard bodega egg-on-roll breakfast sandwich in New York, these are as satisfying a gutbomb as any.

 I avoid the market on Saturdays though- it's just impossibly packed, and more people taking pictures of the artfully displayed produce, and very few actually seem to be supporting the vendors.  

The museums are the best attractions in winter, and people are always a bit in awe that they are all 100% free (well, except for exhibits, and those cost a mint) and you can just walk in off the street into the enormous turbine room at the Tate Modern.  Even if you don't really fancy modern art, it's still a site to see: a repurposed power plant, gutted outfitted with galleries and enormous bespoke exhibit spaces.

I've found that a week here will let you scrape the surface a bit: see the main sites, take in some museums and culture, learn to love (or hate) the local beers, sample a good curry and seek out some decent pub grub.  If you have the luxury of spending two weeks in London (you enviable thing!) you can spend more time exploring the sprawling parks and hidden crags of nature if the weather permits, and start to get a feel for how each neighborhood feels like an individual village that just happened to get swallowed into a giant metropolis.

 While it doesn't have the storied romance or beauty of Paris, I really do love it here.

Finding France

I hate to whine, but the food here just isn't as fantastic as it was in France.

I'm talking mostly about fresh fruits and vegetables.  True, it's February, the most dismal month for good fresh food.  If you aren't sick of root vegetables already, you will be in the next couple weeks.  I'm hoping with the looming springtime, things will improve.  The grocery store produce is just icky and sad, and the Saturday street markets that pop up in every neighborhood is only slightly better.

No need for Kale Ladies here, they have already embraced Hipster Lettuce as their own!

The curries are fantastic though.  I've had several that were amazingly good, and some craveable Thai and Japanese as well.  It's much easier to find good ethnic food here than it is in Paris.  I guess that's the effect that happens when your local cuisine isn't always the most appetizing?  Boiled meat, anyone?

Everyone kept telling me, "Borough Market is overpriced; it's for tourist".  I'll agree that it is a bit more expensive to shop there and mobbed on Saturdays, but the quality is miles better than anyplace else.  So stop saying "it's for tourist" because you are basically saying, "only tourist have good taste, we all traditionally eat rubbish".  Not only do they have really great produce, they have some French cheese importers that make it all better, and some prepared foods that are worth the trip to huddle around in a forlorn corner to balance in hand, including some of the best cornish pasties I've ever had.

The adorable pastie lady in Borough Market.  Putting to shame anyone who ever thought Sweeney Todd was #1.

A word about cheese:  Cheddar is great, and I'm quite in love with the crumbly mild tang of Wensleydale, but everything else I've tried so far has been inferior to their counterparts over the channel.  The cheese-mongers, ever so helpful, will doll out samples, saying, "this one is like Camembert, this one is like Beaufort...are you looking for a blue?  because this Stilton is similar to Roquefort".   I've tried some really excellent small producers that are making interesting cheese, and I'll keep you posted when I find something special.  I will keep trying anyway.  Neal's Yard has some excellent cheese- they provide Cheese for one of my favorite restaurants in Paris, Frenchie, including my absolute favorite Isle of Mull Cheddar, which I will subsist on solely if allowed.

Grocery shopping here is kind of an adventure in a bad way.  They just have so much weird, processed, odd foods and sauces, mostly in tins or frozen, totally unappetizing.  I'm going to have to document this next time I go, as some of it is just mystifying.

Mostly, I miss the daily street markets in Paris.  The rapport you have with the sellers and farmers is priceless, and being able to run out and get really fresh lovely produce is something I'll never tire of.  In the past few weeks, I've had more mushy, mealy apples than I care to.  Boo.  You aren't really going to encourage people to eat healthy if you aren't offering them appetizing things.

I never got his real name as he was always "Monsieur Pêche" to me.  He knew how to pick the best peaches, nectarines, clementines and berries for me, and it didn't seemed odd at all that I would seek him out four times a week to get my fix.  He humored my French, and I'd like to think that he misses me.  

Still, they seem to be closeted francophiles here, and I found a French cafe in the Brixton Village Market selling all sorts of goodies, including Sel de Mer butter and a good variety of saucison sec (including donkey!).  I have quickly become a loyal client.

Bottom line:  I will not be starving any time soon.