In which London is beguiling

On Friday night Andy and I had planned to play table tennis in the park, but the free racquets were gone (read:stolen) It's one of those things where you can do free sports outdoors, which I love, but it's a wee bit unreliable.  With our plans cancelled suddenly we didn't really want to go home on a perfect sunny night so we decided to go back to our wandering ways and see what we could find.

We ended up walking along the canal side, and I was like a child high on sugar, if there were children who were all 'ooooooh' about architecture. The flats by the canal side all the way were so gorgeous and interesting. Lots of different kinds of re-purposed factories, with balconies and people bbqing in the sun. We passed a canal boat bookshop, interesting graffiti and people doing a pottery class outdoors.

 

 

If you follow my blog with some serious dedication you may have seen a blog I wrote some time ago about Hamstead Heath, and then more recently I wrote about visiting Fryent Park - another spot of nature in amongst the metropolis of London. Then, all this. And I've finally realised that I love London.

There. I said it.

It felt scary to admit it after spending so long being all 'I'm a country girl' and 'Ugh, cities' and 'I only live in London because it's where the jobs are'. Please don't hate me for the hypocrisy! London has won me over with its sneaking bewitching ways. I think it was partly going to Japan that did it. You see, when I was in Japan everything was interesting - as you've seen from the blog posts - it was all new. The vending machines, the crossings, the trains, the way the food is served. Ordinary banalities of life were cool, because they were new. And then I thought about how we had barely scratched the surface of all the things to see in Japan in under 3 weeks - so how would you do Britain, and how interesting would Britain be? It's got dales and mountains, Edinburgh and Durham and Cornwall and the Lake District and London. I considered all the interesting things I see just between the train station and my Japanese class. A 15 minute walk that goes past the London Eye, HMS President all painted up cubist style, London Bridge, this weird half finished building with only a front and no floors, this huge grand structure with pillars all the way round, and along the Thames. London just seems so much more fascinating when I really look at it. So I'm going to just keep on exploring.

I love all the glam city workers drinking on the roof next to this unfinished thing. It' just a beautiful contrast.

Starting off the canal side walk it looked more like a sci-fi setting at first.

 

Found a Venezuelan restaurant by the canal.

 

I haven't been carrying my DSLR every day (shock!) but in the last week I've been discovering the joy of taking random snaps of stuff with my phone. I hear this is a thing other people do too? :D  So these are all camera phone pictures, hence the dubious quality.