June 8th 2012

I was reading a local paper when I saw that there was going to be a biscuit festival in the centre of town. A whole festival for biscuits. AMAZING.

It was held at the Brunswick Shopping Centre, which is almost directly opposite Russell Square station. When we got there, two very excited people called Gary Baldi and Connie Crumbs were dragging people up on stage for contests to win biscuits.

In the adverts I'd seen for the festival it promised...well, a lot more than it delivered. I imagine that because it was a Friday it wasn't as busy as it would be on the Saturday. However, there was a biscuit decorating stand...

Garry had a vanilla biscuit smeared with red wine buttercream and sprinkled with nuts, meringues and a dollop of caramel.

Mine was far simpler — a lemon biscuit with vanilla buttercream and caramel. It looks a bit like an egg here.

They were, admittedly, very nice biscuits but there wasn't a great deal to keep us occupied here so we went for a wander. And that's how we ended up at Camden Lock.

This is a 30 minute walk or a 10 minute bus ride from our house and it is, quite frankly, amazing.

It's a total labyrinth of stalls selling everything from food to clothes to toiletries to stationery to artwork to second hand books to vintage items, all in some really quite beautiful settings.

I couldn't take many photos inside here as many of the stalls have "No photograph" signs on them, but it used to be a stables and each stables is made into a little stall selling beautiful things. It's incredible.

The only problem is I am really, really not cool enough for Camden Lock. I'm going to have to come back with several more piercings before I feel like I fit in...

There will almost certainly be another post on Camden Lock at some point. I just didn't have enough time to see it all and I missed so much out — I think it needs a whole day devoted to it.

How to get there

The British Museum

Okay, okay. We do want to get to know London properly, i.e. see all the lovely little hideaway places, and not just live on the beaten track. However, we haven't done many touristy things in London before so we want to make sure that we get the best of both worlds. And today was most definitely a touristy day.

Does the British Museum need an introduction? Probably not, but just in case — it's considered to be one of the world's greatest museums for history and culture. It has about eight million things in its permanent collection and is generally a bit fantastic.

I don't need to say much more about it, so here's a selection of the photos we took today.

World's oldest recorded porn

Such a beautiful room

No idea what this is, but I like it

The ceiling is amazing

Garry

Discobolus

Me

Statue on the stairs

Model of Olympia

The place was so big we couldn't see everything — definitely worth a few trips.

East-Street Restaurant

We hadn't been in London more than an hour before a text from Ashley popped up on my phone, asking if I'd like to go for pad Thai with her and her boyfriend that night. Ashley is one of my favourite people in the whole entire world, so I wasn't exactly going to say no...

That's how we found ourselves at East-Street, which is a three minutes walk from Tottenham Court Road tube station. It was absolutely tiddling down with rain, as this cheery photo of Garry will attest to.

But once inside it was warm, cosy, and smelt amazing. On their website they say that their "menu is composed from the best street food and signature dishes from across East Asia" and above each item on their menu it tells you whether the dish is from Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam or Korea.

Ashley and Jack both had Pad Thai — the little bit I tasted was gorgeous. Garry had a chicken Khao Pad, which is wok-fried rice with mushroom, beans, pineapple, basil and peanuts and looked like this:

But mine was my favourite. Chicken Abodo — Chicken breast in a peppercorns, garlic and bay leaf sauce with fried sweet potato. Yum.

As first nights go, this one was pretty wonderful. Thanks to Ashley for suggesting it x