Spitafield etc

There is this wonderful thing called Santacon (www.santacon.com), which we found out about the day after it happened in London. What a bummer as basically it's a bunch of people running around the city (whatever city it happens to be in) in Santa costumes (or Christmas themed costumes). We would have loved to have taken part in that! But, alas...we were uninformed at that point.

So today we decided to get out of the house a little and seek out Christmas themed stuff to do in London. We ended up back in Spitafield's Market where there was an Eco-market going on. It wasn't particularly Christmasy, but we still had fun.

With wrestling masks (they were not, we later found out, part of the Eco-market):

Arty people outside of a coffee shop on Brick Lane:


People selling stuff (anything from very used looking shoes to really tacky vases that look like something Granny would have stored in her garage):


A wall off of Brick Lane:


For lunch we got really cheap and really yummy Ethiopian food. It was also super spicy.


There was also Mexican food, but we didn't have any:


One of the highlights of the day was when we ran across this interactive Christmas card thing. There was a camera that captured your face and superimposed it onto various Christmas characters. I, it turns out, was transformed into a rotund Christmas pudding, which made everyone around us laugh (you can see their reflections laughing in the bottom of the picture).


Jim and I almost always disagree about Normal Foster's architecture. The building that is sprouting out of his head in this picture is called the Gherkin and it is one of the top 100 buildings in the world (according to someone...not me!)

He also did Wembley Stadium (which is ok), the Pompidou in Paris (ugly, says me. Cool, says JIm.) the building formerly known as the Millennium Dome in London (which to me looks like a giant spaceship with cranes sticking out of the top of it. Jim is kind of neutral on that one.) and another industrial looking insurance building in London which we both agree is hideous. And there are more....

We had a great plan to walk home from Spitafield's, but I ran out of steam and we ended up taking the tube back. Before I pooped out, though, we experience the Barbican Centre, which is a gigantic feat in 1970's architecture (and also an arts center).


And this has nothing to do with today, but finally, after two years of sub-par brooms, we finally got one that really works. Hooray for traditional witch brooms!