London Markets

On Saturday I rode the train to London where my sister Rachel was doing an internship for a few months.  It was only an hour-long ride from Cambridge, but the British rail service is very expensive!  Rachel met me at the train station with an itinerary of things for us to do.  We started out by going to the famous Borrough Market, an outdoor smorgasbord of delicious things to eat from all over the world.  Lucky for us, they give lots of samples.  This is a picture of assorted baklava at the Greek food stall.  I love baklava!

There were so many fabulous things to try--roasted tomatoes, mushroom pesto, pepper jellies, Turkish delight (we felt like Edmund in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), honey, fig preserves, and Indian curry.  This is a picture of the ostrich meat stand with ostrich burgers and ostrich steaks.  We didn't get a sample there!

A number of people were cooking huge vats of curry, stew, or meat, and you could buy a hot lunch and eat it right there at the market.

From the cement floors and makeshift tents of the Borrough Market, Rachel and I went to Harrod's, an unbelievably expensive department store palace--a place so prohibitively pricey that I think its entire clientele must be tourists who just want to buy a souvenir from London with a Harrod's label on it.  Maybe the queen gets her groceries there.  Or perhaps J.K. Rolling.  But not many other people could afford it!

Here is an example of a typical room in Harrod's.  Don't be deceived by the red "sale" signs you see on the wall.  A sale at Harrod's still makes you choke when you see the price tag.  You certainly pay for the elaborate packing, the artistic wrapping, and the chandelier light illuminating the food products.

Here are some pastries.  There were also quasi-restaurants in some of the rooms, including a dim sum bar.

Here is the fish counter.  They also had caviar you could buy, that is, if you had made a trip to the bank just before and had brought the bills you had withdrawn in a suitcase!

Rachel and I rode an Ancient Egyptian-themed escalator up several flights of stairs and saw a boulder-sized rock crystal that you could purchase as a decoration for your house.  The only thing was that it cost as much as a small house!  Furthermore, you'd practically need a moving van to transport it anywhere.  This chandelier was tens of thousands of pounds.  Rachel and I were wondering how often Harrod's has to make a sale in order to stay in business ... not very often, I think.

After getting some ice cream on crêpes, we went to the British Museum so that I could see a wonderful exhibition there.  It was on devotional art and relics from the Middle Ages.  Sounds like it was designed just for me, doesn't it?  They had wonderful reliquaries in gold, silver, ivory, and wood, as well as a "true image" likeness, a type of portrait that is believed to miraculously capture the exact features of Christ or the Virgin Mary.  I was especially intrigued to see some examples of Anglican relics--fragments of blood-stained cloth and locks of hair belonging to Charles I, the unfortunate seventeenth-century king of England who lost his head.  I was surprised to learn that the Anglican Church had canonized him--the only saint the Church of England has ever canonized, in fact.  However, Queen Victoria later overturned the canonization.

Towards the evening, Rachel and I rode the subway downtown.  Here is a picture of the fabulous Neo-Gothic Parliament building.

And here is one of its towers, proudly waving the British flag.

Big Ben.  You can almost imagine Peter Pan, Wendy, Michael, and John landing on the minute hand as they pause to look out over the city of London before continuing on their flight to Never Never Land.

Rachel and I then walked over to Westminster Abbey so that we could attend evensong.  Usually it costs quite a lot to get into Westminster Abbey, but if you go there for evensong you not only get to hear beautiful music in a reverent worship service, but you also get to see a good amount of the church as you walk to your seat--all for free!

We walked along the imposing buttresses of the north side to reach the west facade.

And here are the towers guarding the western entrance.

People often get Anglicanism confused with Catholicism, and there certainly are a lot of similarities.  The Church of England, however, has its own way of doing things.  I've always been interested by the way it negotiates all the historic Catholic churches, Catholic holy sites, and Catholic traditions that it became heir to after the reformation of Henry VIII.  For instance, saints don't play nearly as big of a role in Anglicanism as they do in Catholicism, but the Church of England has kept up the tradition of decorating the exterior of its churches with saints.  I've noticed, though, that Anglicans often mix together traditional saints with people that have never been canonized as saints, even though they did very great things.  You sometimes find statues of Protestant reformers alongside St. Francis of Assisi--and no pope ever canonized Martin Luther, I'm fairly certain!  Sometimes you even find "saints" who weren't Christian--Mahatma Gandhi, for instance.  Here at Westminster Abbey, I was interested to see Martin Luther King above the door--an inspirational leader and tremendous force for change, but an unusual companion statue for the medieval nun, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, standing beside him.  If I remember right, there was a statue of Albert Schweitzer up there, too.

Evensong was beautiful.  We were sitting not very far from the "poet's corner," where famous poets are buried and memorialized.  After the service, we walked down the aisle where the queen and royal family had been just weeks before for the royal wedding and made our way to another church--the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster.  I got a lamb and mint Cornish pasty on the way.  Westminster Cathedral is a cavernous Neo-Byzantine building, built during the nineteenth-century, I believe.  After Henry VIII abolished the Church of Rome in his realm, there were no high-ranking Catholic leaders in England until the nineteenth century when the Vatican sent Cardinal  Wiseman to England to serve as archbishop of London.  British Anglicans panicked, thinking that the pope was going to try to take over their country, but things have calmed down in the last century and a half, and the Catholics and the Anglicans get along well now.  Mass was going on inside, and so Rachel and I had to move discreetly from chapel to chapel in the side aisles, looking at the sparkling mosaics and not making noise.  We headed back to the train station afterward and rode back to Cambridge together to stay with Diana.