En route to Leipzig – Day Two!

We’re actually in Leipzig now, but I added a bunch of pictures from our last day in London to the earlier gallery:

We hit Camden market, Covent Garden and had dinner on Brick Lane. Camden is basically a weird mix of scenes out of Blade Runner and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, with the left-overs of the punk and cyber-punk sub-cultures trying to make a buck off of tourists in the streets. We mostly went to let the ladies shop, but Jeff and Paul wound up spending far more than anyone else buying boots.

We got to Covent Garden a bit too late, but we managed to catch the gents working at the GW shop there just before they left for the day and they were nice enough to let us come in and fuss about for a while. It’s a great little shop, lovingly referred to as a “Hobbit Hole” by one of the staff.

Dinner on Brick Lane was something Aubrey had championed after hearing tales of it from Paul and Kate. It’s basically two city blocks full of curry houses. Each restaurant has a doorman of sorts who sits out on the street and tries to convince people to come into the restaurant. By “convince”, I mean “bribe”. They’ll walk up and start offering you things like free bottles of wine or rounds of drinks or appetizers. If you stop and haggle, you can get them to up the freebies, throw in crazy discounts, etc. Paul was awesome at it, but it seemed to make Jeff VERY nervous. I thought it was a hoot when we’d get two guys playing off of each other, basically smack-talking neighboring vendors (“HIS restaurant is empty for a reason, you know.”) and trying to outbid them for your patronage.

After dinner, we headed back to the Miller’s for drinks and candle-light chilling. Then we enjoyed three hours of sleep before heading to the airport this morning.

Now, it’s nap-time.

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