How was our holiday? Not long enough

The first few days of our mid-term break were spent in Hastings being completely lazy and not being old and teacherish as planned. Now that we’re back and starting school again tomorrow we are beginning to regret spending a few lazy days in London having a grand ol’ time (well not really but I’ll pretend that we feel bad to make us at least look old and teacherish).

Our time in London was partly spent looking at the markets and we saw Portobello Road (3/4 Closed), Spitalfields Markets (closed), Petticoat Lane Market (closed) and the Brick Lane Markets (yep, you guessed it… CLOSED). The last three we visited on Saturday so I was shocked and disappointed to find they were all locked up shut. But all was not lost as I was really excited to see a real Banksy artwork in Brick Lane. Those of you who don’t know who Banksy is (I won’t go into it here but for information on Banksy click on the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy) but as Mark and I are complete Art Geeks we were really impressed and just a little bit star struck. I’ve now accomplished another of my things off my list of things to see and do in England (No. 17- find Banksy street art).

But I guess the most disappointing market of all was the Portobello Road Markets, I wanted to see this:

Click the link for the full effect:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8804170168873214362&q=portobello+road

And all we saw was this:

Many of you may be thinking “get over it crazy lady” but you just don’t understand how sad and let down I am. When I was growing up one of my favourite movies was ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ and my sisters and I watched this incessantly and knew all the songs. Portobello Road really seemed like this truly magical place and the overpriced, over-hyped reality really made me wish I’d left it in the fantasy world in my head. *singing* Portobello Road, Portobello Road street where the riches of ages are sold, anything and everything a chap could unload is sold by the barrel on Portobello Road… *cry, cry, cry*.

Something I was pleasantly surprised by was the Jack the Ripper tour. This is not actually something I would have voluntarily chosen to subject myself to but it turned out to be really interesting and entertaining (except the bit where a member of the tour fell over and had a seizure on the street). Our guide was this completely insane out of work actor and we saw places in London that we would have never visited (or even thought to prowl through at night). I admit that the highly graphic photos we were shown (just google “Mary Kelly”+ “Jack the Ripper”- ewwwwww) were really completely unnecessary and gross but overall it was one of the best things I’ve done in England so far.

We also met up with Mark’s cousin Roger and his girlfriend Anna and it was so great to catch up with family and speak to some non-scary Australians (our experiences in Edinburgh have scarred me for life). I’m going to tangent badly here now but speaking of scary Australians we met this couple recently from Adelaide who were surprised that Mark and I were from Sydney. The reason why? Well apparently we don’t speak like Sydneysiders, Sydneysiders say things in a Sydney accent like “getting kewl by the pewl”. Uh, hello?

Anyway, all is good as from tomorrow there are only 100 school days left before we leave. Hurrah.