Food, drink, culture. repeat.

Recently, my friend Szym… who I met in Australia around 2009, and then later hung out with (and briefly lived with) in Germany, and then visited in Singapore…moved back to the EU.

(Personally, I think he’s following me).

At the start of November, he dropped by for a weekend of London Times.

Which involved us doing a bit of culture, a little bit of fancy beer drinking.

And eating a frankly-heroic amount of food.

We began our first meal Unity Diner, and ended our first evening with me taking Szymon down a frankly suspicious tunnel.

Which did have some very pretty balls at the end:

Not P.

Our second meal snack was a sausage roll from Greggs, which is one of those incredibly important British Institutions.

… then we walked a little bit, past some Old Thing that had Been Preserved but also Moved a Few Hundred Metres Down the Street (one of my favorite things that they like to do in this country)…

…. and ended up in Camden, with some very cheezy Purezza Pizza.

Apparently Camden is the Home Of Vegan Food, so we ended up popping back into the suburb a few times over the weekend.

Szym’s Quattro FormaggiNo (I made up that name, but it’s the perfect name for vegan four cheese pizza and I would like to copyright that name and be paid in cheese and/or cheeze for any usage) was the winner. Mostly due to the vegan blue cheese from Fauxmagerie- which I ended up buying to take home with me.

Our next day began with Word On The Water, a small houseboat that has been converted into a book shop. Szymon bought some books. I resisted buying some books.

We all felt hungry from the experience.

Back in beautiful Camden, we noshed at Temple of Seitan, before zooming across the city to the Natural History Museum:

We were there to check out the Wildlife Photographer of the Year at Natural History Museum, which I’ve only made it to once before, but regret not going to more often.

Some of the photos were surreal, some sublime, and some just plain silly. (You can see a selection here.)

I particularly liked some of the photos of birds (bowerbirds for the win), a photo of ‘floating’ reindeer (against a snowy white background) and shot of blue-green foamy waves retreating from a black beach (that somehow looked like a whale fin).

I also liked that- in comparison the previous time I had visited the show- not all of the photos were accompanied by a blurb that ended with ‘but xyz is now sadly threatened by climate change.’

I get it.

But it was exhausting.

And felt kind of cheap after reading the 100th blurb.

The winning photo was truly excellent….

… and even more impressively, if you zoom way in you can just about catch a representation of Szym and I on our way to our next meal:

Although actually, eating was not what we did next.

But we did go and look at some food.

Or look at some thing that looked like food:

Japan House was hosting a small exhibit called Looks Delicious!, which celebrated the history of Japan’s food replica culture.

This was free to visit, and was pretty excellent, with the only main downside being that I really wanted to eat Japanese food afterwards.

Instead, we went the sibling-owned Jam Delish, for a modern and vegan take on Carribean favourites.

We took a trio of dips with roti, some wild mushroom arancini, a guayenese pepperpot with garlic hard dough bread roll and fried plantain, and curry ‘coat’ with rice and peas, sweet potato and cabbage.

Everything was exceptional, and a great take on food that I tend to think of as leaning quite meaty.

Our morning began with coffee, and led quickly into a procession.

My absolute favourite thing about the UK is the fact that a lot of its culture seems to be 100% Serious and Important and Traditional

(and as such, comes with appropriate Serious, Important, Traditional hats)

But is also 100% Very Very Silly

(See also, the hats).

This recent event that my mum and I attended is a perfect example of this contradictory delight.

Enter, the Lord Mayor’s Show:

^The man in the golden buggy is the new Lord Mayor of the City of London.

This is a tradition that dates back to the 13th century, when the City of London (not to be mistaken with London, the city….), was granted its very own Mayor by King John.

The condition being that any new Mayor should head up the river to Westminister to swear their loyalty to the Crown.

Which Explains this:

(Very Official, Very Brit.)

And also this:

(Behold our Power and Might!!)

But gives less explanation for this:

(??!!??)

And certainly doesn’t add any clarity to this:

A lot of the parade groups were companies from the City of London, which are pretty much banks and financial institutions, thus the desire to seem charming and cute (as opposed to Evil and Oppressive). The Pandas are from the Bank of China, and were very much appreciated by the group of girls in front of us.

The eagles are less clear, but the flowers at least align with the national flowers of the UK (rose for England, daffodil for Wales etc).

We stood and watched for a bit, enjoying the emotional slingshotting between Very Important and Very Very Silly, and I also enjoying eavesdropping on a pretty comical conversation between a very exacerbated dad and his young child (who, according to papa, was ‘choosing to be bored’ by the parade).

Once we were ready to go, it took us about half an hour of walking to work out how to actually get around the parade (despite what the bearhunt book taught me as a child, we did in fact, have to go under it.)

We headed to Hullabaloo for some Vegan Indian, which of course involved taking photos of Szym awkwardly eating Pani puri:

There was a short-but-confusing stop at 15 grams coffee (someone STOLE a coffee!!!), and then we zoomed on back into the city-ish centre-ish to see some more Culture.

Haegue Yang: Leap Year, at the Southbank Centre.

To be honest, this is one where overall, I’m not sure I entirely got it.

There were certainly interesting elements, but also a lot of vertical blinds.

And I’m not sure I ended up feeling very emotionally or creatively connected to the majority of the works.

What stood out to me was a bunch of essays written from both mother and child perspective about the mother coming to live with the child in a foreign country. Which rang very true to some of my experiences with my own parents coming to Germany (and in some cases, completely not understanding that German society is just different from Australian).

I also quite liked the little windmills:

These papercut patterns were truly beautiful (that was something that made me want to try arting it later at home!).

And I also quite liked these cane fellows, which seemed a little bit alive, and which also reminded me a bit of one of my favorite exhibits I’ve ever seen, Maria Abakanowicz.

I appreciated that some of the art had some dynamic elements.

^The crates on the right here were meant to be unpacked and moved around at different stages throughout the ehxibition period.

Although overall it was not as dynamic as I would have thought based on the description of the exhibit.

I did manage to see one of the exhibits being waltzed around the floor as I exited. Which at least explained why it had so many handles on it:

Interesting to see, but not one of my favourites so far.

Queue, venue change:

Our final stop and final meal, just before Szym flew back home, was the Vegan Sunday Roast at LD’s Kitchen.

I’m not a huge Sunday Roast person (I like it, but it feels a bit overrated here), and my ‘pork’ was a little sweeter than I would have liked. But the crispy ‘crackling’ that came with it was exceptional, as were the sides, and there was enough gravy supplied to swim in.

All up, highly successful.

Thanks for the excellent visit Szym.

Seeyainnabit.

A weekend in early November, 2024