Bank Holiday Weekend

Easter Weekend is a "Bank Holiday" weekend here (that's what they actually call it, not "Easter Weekend"), and everyone gets Friday and Monday off from work and school. It's a pretty big deal because it's one of the longest vacations of the year, so most Londoners are travelling. That doesn't mean London is empty, of course; there are about a bajillion tourists clogging up the Underground, pushing me and making me want to seriously elbow someone in the face. That almost makes me a Londoner now, huh? That I'm getting annoyed at tourists? OK, no, I guess not... but I like to pretend it does, so give me a break.

Anyway, my friends are all either with visiting parents or travelling (and for a host of uninteresting reasons, I'm not), so this is my solo weekend in the city. I wanted to check out a bunch of neighborhoods and places that I haven't gotten to yet, since this is my second to last weekend. :(

So, the first thing on my itinerary for Friday was the Fashion and Textile Museum. This was the exception to my no-more-museum rule because I thought it would be fun. God, I wish I had stuck to the rule. The "museum" turned out to be a blocky hot pink and orange building with two very small floors displaying the ugliest, most ridiculous clothes I'd ever seen. Good thing it only cost £3 to get in, because I left after literally five minutes. It was still kind of annoying, because the museum isn't exactly close -- it's east, on the other side of the Thames. And, because the TfL (Transportation for London) decides to shut down entire Tube lines or big sections of them for whole days at a time, I had to get off a few stops too early and take a bus the rest of the way. Except the guy working in the Underground and the bus driver misled me, and told me a bus was going somewhere it wasn't, and I realized too late and got off further away than I needed to be. I managed to figure out where to go, though, and walked there with only one stop to ask for directions. Yay, me! And along the way, I ended up seeing the Bank of England, but I didn't take a picture because I didn't know what I was looking at. Oh, well. And there was also a pretty view of Tower Bridge from the bridge I walked across (Southwark Bridge, I think, which is pronounced, oddly enough, "Suthuck").


I decided to take the bus to my next stop so I could see a little bit outside, and on my way to find the bus stop I passed a few streets with funny names, like Ship and Mermaid Row, Crucifix Lane, and Newington Butts. Actually, that last one was a bus stop, but I'm assuming it was a street. I went to Brixton Market (Brixton is a neighborhood) off a recommendation from someone at work, who must have been taking the piss (British slang for "making fun of") because it was gross. There were yucky cheap food stands and it was smelly and there was nothing cute or remotely interesting to buy or look at. Plus, it was raining. So the day was basically a dud.

Then, on the way home, I was really craving a chicken parm sub. There's a sandwich shop around the corner from me (called The Sandwich Shop), so I stopped in to see if they made those. It wasn't on the menu and the guy there didn't know what I was talking about, so I ended up getting a sausage roll (a popular food here; it's sausage usually in a greasy biscuity doughy thing). This morning, I tried to Google where I could get one because the craving didn't go away. On the first results page, one of the links was for something about chicken parm sandwiches in NJ. So I changed the wording to something more generic about Italian sandwiches in London. Again, results about Jersey. Again, for the second time this week, I was faced with the sad fact that I can't get the food I want away from home. I just didn't realize that chicken parm sandwiches (which I rarely even eat) were part of my sheltered (read: lucky) NJ life. No wonder the guy at the sandwich place didn't know what I was talking about.