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Published: January 17th 2012
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Mike in Hyde Park
Quite cold out, but still an awesome park. So now we're settling down into life in London, and Mike has survived his first week back at school. It reminds us that we're not really on vacation, and that there is a real purpose as to why we're here.... but we still have the weekends to travel. Mike usually has Fridays and Monday mornings, so we'll have more time to travel, but this weekend he had to go to class on Friday so we stayed local for the weekend. This is fine because there's just so much to see here, that there's never a dull moment!
On Saturday we stuck around London, and spent much of the day in Hyde Park. Because we are missing the accessibility of our beloved Bixi bikes (for those who don't know, they're the bike share program that recently started in Toronto, but can be found all over the world), we used London's version, the Barclay cycle hire, and biked around the perimeter of the park. What a beautiful and huge park. We stopped and had a bite to eat by the lake, and saw the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain. It is a long circular shaped fountain that just runs flat on the grass
from a slightly higher elevation to a lower elevation. There are a few mini rapids in the fountain that are supposed to represent the tumultuous times in her life. After, we walked through Kensington Gardens and found Kensington Palace. We were actually quite suprised how almost ordinary Kensington Palace looked... we were expecting something more regal, but there was a lot of construction going on as they are preparing for Kate and Will to move in, so perhaps the splendour of the palace is just under construction...
Towards the end of the day we found ourselves back in our neighborhood, Camden Town, to explore the market area. Mike hadn't seen it before, but Elysia went earlier in the week with our roommate Nanda (her name is really Martina, but this is what everyone calls her). The market really is something else. We've seen a lot of markets in places all over the world, but this one is quite unique. The market is centered around the Camden Locks, so the buildings are quite old and the setting is very beautiful. Many of the shops in the market continue to these old stable buildings, so there probably is a lot of
history there. You could buy absolutely anything, and the quality looks really good, so you don't see much of those cheap tourist type items. There are a lot of art shops, clothing stalls, food, and there is one store that you could buy anything you see in the Jetsons cartoon (probably). It has to be one of the funniest stores I've ever seen. It's called Cyberdog, and they have the craziest clothes that look like they come right out of the space age. The store iteself has black lighting, so everything is glowing, and they have dancers dancing all day long. We find it hard to imagine how this store (and it's a really big store) can survive, but apparently it does and when we were there it was so incredibly crowded. Didn't see many people buying, but they were definitely looking. For good reason, I'm sure, you can't take any photos in the store.
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