May 9-11: Camden, Carnaby, Korea

On Saturday morning we became distantly aware of another person moving around in the enormous flat. We eventually found and met Elena the housekeeper, an interesting woman who had been a teacher in her native Romania, but like many Romanians sought a better living in another country. She misses her mother and hopes to return for good some day.

On advice from Amari’s dad, we decided to check out Camden Town for “the vibe”. The clouds were starting to disappear as we stumbled from the tube station into the middle of a fabulously busy / punky / artsy street fair in full swing. There were street vendors selling funky clothes, tons of food stalls, jugglers, stilt walkers, a marching band, a drum circle, hawkers – a broad splash of bright colours and joyful noise. Regent’s Canal, dotted with little patio restaurants, is almost buried in all the activity, or at least until you’re standing on the iron bridge that crosses it. Neon tutus and wildly patterned tights; a man loudly imitating bird calls; T-shirts with Spider Pig, or Darth Vader trimming a topiary Death Star; an excellent busking prog-rock acoustic guitarist sitting on the ground; a handmade sign for “budget combat boots”; bright silk blankets in a dozen different elephant patterns; a former horse hospital converted into a bar (your friends can share a stall) – we loved Camden Town, and would scamper back there in a heartbeat.

Eventually feeling a need to escape the crowds, we made our way to the V&A to see the glass exhibit we had missed on our last visit. It’s an amazing collection of decorative glassware and sculpture covering the entire span of glassmaking history, and displayed with such light and abundance that we felt we were part of the exhibit. We also made a mental note to take a trip to Murano, the glassblower’s island, when we get to Italy next year. Because of the sunny weather (and our penchant for showing up everywhere right at closing time) there were only a few people there, including a young woman who was seated in front of one of the displays and sketching a Bohemian vase. After we were gently turfed out of the V&A, we loped over to Hyde Park and flopped ourselves down on the grass, so as to be more approachable lick-victims to the many passing dogs. We stretched and took some photos of the sky for later conversion into impossible jigsaw puzzles, then made a plan to walk to where some good Indian restaurants were rumoured to be lurking.

Following the horse trail near the edges of the park, we came across the most emotionally moving monument we’d ever seen - a quiet tribute to the millions of animals who have died serving man in warfare. A curved white stone mural depicting an endless line of horses, elephants, camels, and oxen is broken in the middle, where a solemn line of life-sized bronze sculptures – mules, dogs, horses – passes through the wall, all staring silently forward. The only lettering on the memorial is, “They had no choice.” The monument was littered with flowers. Christine and I held one another for a long time, tears running down our cheeks, remembering the selfless love we’ve received from all the animals in our lives.

Making our east from Hyde Park, we passed by the American embassy, encrusted with eagles, stars and stripes, and the Canadian embassy, which stands across the small park separating them, looking like a quaint old hotel where teatime never ends. We passed through an area of smaller high-end clothing stores, and watched some well-dressed Italian looking men loading a fridge through the front door of the Corneliani shop. Hitting Regent Street, we chanced upon the Apple Store, jammed with evening shoppers from all over the world sending emails, Googling restaurants, and doing their personal banking on the hundreds of Mac Books on display. Halleluhia! We got on a machine, transferred some money between accounts (network security not really being an issue for holders of single-digit balances), patronized a cooperative ATM across the street, then zig-zagged around the Carnaby Street area half-looking for Masala Zone, which we’d heard was great. It was touch-and-go, but hunger finally won out over window shopping for shoes, and someone handing out flyers for a nightclub directed us to our restaurant, where we had the best Indian meal we’d ever eaten. Whatever your plans were, go out and have some Indian food tonight. You’ll die happy, a long time from now.

Our Lufthansa flight to Korea (via Frankfurt) turned out to be leaving Heathrow two hours earlier than I had originally thought (dyslexia? what lysdexia?), so we scrambled to pack our things and leave a note for our host, and lugged our suitcases down the street to the very stair-intensive Marble Arch tube station. (A few of the Underground stations are apparently wheelchair-accessible now, which must be a huge relief to those disabled Londoners itching to visit Upney). Our itinerary printout didn’t indicate which of Heathrow’s four terminals was currently hosting Lufthansa, so when Christine spotted an airport information sign across a tube platform our train had briefly stopped at, she ran out of the car, read the sign, and ran back onto the train just as the doors were closing. She’s my hero.

Lufthansa has about five different levels of first class cabin that we budget travellers wade through on our way to the back of the plane. The frontmost cabin features private sleeping space-pods with every imaginable convenience built into them, including drink holders, widescreen TV’s, back massagers, ATM’s, and lighted dancing fountains of Tanqueray. The hop to Frankfurt was comfortably short, and we had what seemed like a generous amount of time to find and board the flight to Seoul. We walked through about 15 kilometers of massively wide, clean, modern and virtually unpopulated corridors to get to our gate area, where we barely had enough time left to buy Europe’s most expensive apple and figure out how to use the pay phones so we could call our moms for Mothers’ Day. We were the last people through the gate and onto the plane, which by the way is a great way to see the smiling faces of all your fellow travellers.

If you ever have a hankering to add some syncopation to your circadian rhythms, a red-eye from Frankfurt to Seoul will do the trick nicely. We did our best to sleep on the plane, but arrived in Seoul on a rainy Monday morning looking and feeling like a couple of zombies. Swine flu being the maladie du jour, we were all made to complete a health questionnaire (“have you had a sore throat in the last six months?”) and have our temperatures taken with those thankfully non-invasive infrared ear-thermometers. We picked up our suitcases, found an ATM, bought a bag of chips, and once again struggled through payphone usage, eventually getting a hold of our friend Brenda. Her instructions: “take a bus to the Hyatt, and I’ll meet you there”. The crazy Korean chapter had begun.