London
Did a lot of stuff today! It was an awesome, very busy day. First went to the Church of St Dunston in the East, which is an old church that was bombed by the Blitz in WWII and is now a public garden. Afterwards, went to the Charles Dickens Museum, which was very detailed and had a lot of info about Dickens. In my perspective, Dickens wasn’t a bad man, but a lot of the exhibits and posters about Dickens gave me a sense of a man who cared a lot about success, and was trying very hard to maintain it once he was at that level. Whether that be his realization that people really liked Christmas books and milking that through other books and readings and stuff, or getting really mad at his publisher for a couple of small errors, or in the part where he’s talking about the experience where his dad was jailed and no one helped him, saying that as someone who was physically and emotionally weak or something, just seemed like a little bit of a bitch. Still seemed like an interesting person who loved his close ones a lot, and overall was a very worthwhile and positive experience. After that we walked across Covent Garden, including this really good donut place called Doughnut Time where we got this absolutely exceptional doughnut. After that, we had lunch at this really really good pho place called Pho Covent Garden. They had a special spicy pho that was completely vegetarian, had no mushrooms, and had this interesting chicken equivalent that I liked (not as much as I thought I would, but I still liked it). They also gave me a lot of attention, including asking every time they came around how I thought the meal was, and also giving me a bib. It was an interesting experience. After that we walked to the actual Covent Garden, where in the smaller markets Mulan got these cool teapot earrings that change color, and also this ring that I bought for her (more like she wasn’t sure if she would buy it, and I offered to buy it for her because I really wanted her to wear it). Something that was weird there was that in all of the street performances that we saw, young kids were involved for some reason, and they were involving them in all the stunts that they were doing. That just seemed pretty unnecessary to me. Afterwards, we tried to go down to the Hyde Park area, but it was pretty late and we ended up going to Harrod’s instead. That was pretty cool to check out, the absolute pinnacle of capitalism and overindulgence but it was cool to be in that illusion for a while. After that, we didn’t go to Westminster Abbey either, we just ended up walking to Trafalgar Square, through Leicester square, both of which were really cool and visibly cultural centers and melting pots of London in a sense. Climbed up to the main platform with the lions and steps and such and chilled for a while. Then we went to this bookstore, Waterstone’s, where we checked out some books as well as bought some stuff. I bought three of these calendar things where you’re doing one puzzle or one crossroad or something every day, as well as three notebooks that I’m going to bring back to Berkeley and use there. Mulan bought a Sherlock Holmes puzzle book for her sister, as well as an expandable water bottle for me as well as a 100 piece jigsaw puzzle of a map of the British empire. Then we went to Soho, walking through Chinatown which was cool, and we checked out different places, including the Vault, which was this bar hidden behind a bookshelf in a bar. We ended up eating at this pizza place called Pizza Pilgrims, which was absolutely amazing, heavenly delightful pizza. We came back home and chilled pretty much.
uid: 202002080000 tags: #journal #edinburgh