London: Day 3

We thought it’d be a good idea to wake up early today and get a nice head start on things. That is, until we woke up at 10:45. Oops. We’ll just blame that on the adrenaline rush and all the traveling that we’ve been doing these last few days. Well, once we finally got out of the flat, we took our daily stroll on the path to the tube...

This time we headed down to Spitalfields to check out the market. Eric’s mom told us about some of the oldest cheese that goes on sale there. We were ready to find it. It took a long time to find the market itself. We kept getting turned around and distracted by all the cool buildings and tiny streets. 

Eric was really excited because he was finding a lot of the sites that were mentioned in a graphic novel he read a while ago about Jack  The Ripper (From Hell).
Eric: “Hey Genell! There’s the White Chapel! That was in my book.”
Genell: “Cool, what happened there? A murder or something?”
Eric: “I don’t know. But it was in my book!”
Genell: “Okay!”
Eventually we found the market. 

It had a lot of clothes like the Camden market did but also some jewelry and lots of cafes. We couldn’t find any cheese, though. We stopped at Leon’s for some lunch and asked the busboy there if he knew anything about it. Apparently, that cheese is sold at the market on Sundays. Shucks. Maybe next time. From there we headed north to Finsley Park for a rock gym set inside a castle. Our friends, Christa and Tim, bought us the admission tickets as part of our wedding gift. It was pretty amazing. Here’s the outside.

The inside was pretty large, 3 floors of climbing walls, but pretty indiscernible as a castle. We paid for bouldering passes (climbing without a harness no more than 10’ from the ground) so we wouldn’t have to deal with belay tests and such if we had done top roping. However, since bouldering is a little more risky in terms of hard falls, we kept it really safe and conservative on our climbs. I didn’t touch anything higher than a V0 (which is beginner). Eric was a little more “wild” by keeping it under V3’s. We didn’t want to risk any sprained ankles on this early leg of our trip.

 

 Here’s a video of Eric nailing a V2 just before we left.

We headed home to get ready for dinner. Here are some shots along our walk back from the tube.

 

More pictures of the flat. Here’s the front of the whole building. 

 

The steps up.

 

And the door to the flat.

I really liked staying there. I think we both did. It really gave us a great feel for the local life. Not too touristy at all.
Eric’s Aunt Betty and Uncle Donny bought us our Fancy Dinner In London from our Honeyfund (which is quite fitting since Betty’s a culinary genius herself). Eric and I really enjoy watching Kitchen Nightmares as well as Top Chef; each with Gordon Ramsay who’s from the UK. So we figured it’d be fitting to go to one of his restaurants. We found one in Camden Town called York & Albany. Fancy dinner it was. They came out with some expensive bottled water and bread...

 

For starters we split chorizo and broad beans...

 

I got the tagliatelle pasta with crab for a main...

 

And Eric got the salmon ravioli...

Both were delicious. The restaurant was very nice inside and we got a great corner table...

 

For dessert, we split some creme brulee with apricots and ice cream. Soooo good.

 

We headed back to the flat, fat and happy. Our train leaving London the next morning was bright and early so we stayed in and packed up all our things. Just before bed we watched the most recent episode of Breaking Bad. Pretty intense!!