London, Day 5 – Market Day

I found out while hurriedly checking my email and facebook at an internet café that my friend Charlie has been studying in England for this past semester. After a delicious full English Breakfast of beans, bacon, sausage, a egg, a mushroom, toast and tea and a trip to the amazing discout clothing store Primark and cadbury McFlurries (where else in the world could we get those?), we meet up with him at Notting Hill Gate.

It is always interesting to hear about other people’s study abroad programs. Charlie is living with a host family and gets a whole month off to travel but shorter weekends. He also lives near a huge city so he has the benefit of going into London several nights a week to see shows for class or explore the many things that I have to cram into just one week.

With Charlie we went to two different markets, Portabello Road and Camdon Town. Portabello Road was filled with stalls upon stalls of clothes, scarves, jewelry, trinkets, food, and everything else you could imagine.




There was a short Tube ride between the two markets so we stoped at the Paddington stop to buy a Paddington bear along the way. Camdon Town was crazy – a completely different market scene. Camdon Town seemed to be just as much about seeing the people as it was about seeing the market.





We said goodbye to Charlie at the Kings Cross Station after a quick picture for the BDC newsletter. Unfortunately I didn’t realize till later that I should have checked out Platform 9¾ , ah well it will have to happen on my next trip.



Cate and I said goodbye to Laura the next morning as she had to catch her flight back to Boston and we got an early train to the airport unexpectedly meeting up with Stephen and Rachel who had a layover and we ended up catching the same flight back to Weeze. I wore my Joey hat on the walk back to the castle, London will be deeply missed.