Liberty in the UK

OOOO0000ooooo you thought I was going to say anarchy. they have that too.
But the Liberty I speak of is the most heavenly department store I have ever had the pleasure of entering. Bar none.

It is basically a haven of all things beautiful. Fabric. Yarn. Haberdashery. Christmasy things. Furniture. Other homey things. Handbags. Shoes. Paper. Things to color the paper with.

I mean, there is an entire hall (and i say hall in the sense of Vikings-could-have-lunch-here) devoted to scarves.

Go there. I will say no more, except to give you photos. I took only one photo inside, and felt like I was violating a sacred contract.

And the area outside is incredibly cute, and incredibly expensive. It reeeeeeks of money. And at that point, I had a small revelation.

I am not the judge of rich people. I know I'm comparatively rich. But there is something in me that dislikes the facade of perfection there, and elsewhere. It just doesn't jive with me. I like conflict. Personality. Idiosyncracy, a little whiff of anarchy. I thrive on that. Liberty I somewhat exempt from this, because it has oodles of personality and a smidge of dark whimsicalness.

But it's a free market world in London, and if them folks want to buy all that stuff up, I won't stop them. Their life.

And I also encountered a zombie pub crawl. And a troop of about ten men dressed as superheroes. (too much spandex, not enough muscle.)All in Oxford Circus. An apt name. The couple, when I asked for their photo, I couldn't understand a word and was trying to deceipher whether they'd said yes or no....oh WAIT, you are beyond smashed, you're friendly, and YOU WON'T REMEMBER A THING. *snappity snap*
in retrospect, maybe they weren't a couple....

lalalallalaaa
Then to Green Park, and more lessons in capitalism.
In Green Park, there are a bunch of green-and-white striped lawn chairs as you come out of the tube stop. Being tired, I sat down. I was just reflecting on how nice it was of whoever to put those chairs there, when I and two other travellers were informed by a snarky little man in a neon vest that the chairs were not free, they were 50 p.

FAIL. Not on my part. Oh no. An epic, epic fail on the part of the lawn-chair schemer. For all around me, under the cozy gray sky and the towering autumn-clad trees, through all of Green Park, were benches and lovely green grass. And no smirky people charging 50 p.

KEEP YO LAWN CHAIR, BUCKO. Schemes like that only work if I have no other option, and praises be, you haven't monopolized the snuggly vegetation and park benches.

I made some dry, nondescript reply and moved off to freer butt-resting spots.
The other two people did the same. There was no one else sitting.

(i'm sure he probably makes money when the park is more crowded and the weather's warm, but at that moment, it was ludicrous. Laughable. silly.)

Ennyhow. I'm tired. Sometimes I want to be out in this kind of weather, but sometimes all I want is my screen, a book, a project, and the window.

OH HA. the window. Last thing. I was wondering lately why I could hear all the street sounds so crystal clear. Then one day I glanced up at the top of the window frame. There is a clean gap, big enough for me to stick my hand in, between the edge of the frame at the top, and the actual structure of the wall. There is a hole in the wall. I never.

I want soup.
-Lu

it is a SMALL WORLD. and i like libraries.

I am sitting at the moment in the lobby of The British Library, parasitically using the internet. Well, not really.

Also, maybe this happens to other people all the time, but it had never happened to me before. I posted this photo I took in Camden Town on Saturday on Tumblr. I don't usually put the place and day taken, but I did.

And in all the spiderwebbyness of the internets, the girl in the picture found and reblogged it. funny.

anyway. This place is quietly intelligent, worldly-in-a-good way. The tagline is "The world's knowledge" and I guess that's about the best way to sum it up. However, I don't have any proof of my address, so I don't know if I can be a member here. Oh well. Great place for studying.

I promised myself I would not have anything so common as Starbucks in London. But then i was ridiculously thirsty, and I had a vision of a venti chai frappucino made with half-and-half and extra chai and espresso, and brain simultaneously recalled that there was a Starbucks down the street and that was the end of that resolution. They also have these little lollies that I used to beg for every time Mom took us into Starbucks, but I've not seen them in American Starbucks anymore. and then I sat on the curb and drank it and watched Oxford Circus rumble on.

On Friday I went to Regent's Park. At dusk, with the leaves just starting to fall and the gardens still in bloom, I thought I'd walked into an enchanted kingdom or something. The photos won't do it justice, but they're better than nothing.

ah it relaxes me simply to think of it.

oh boy oh boy oy boi.

My nose is running. WELL YA BETTER GO CATCH IT! that's what my dad would say.

The neighborhood where I have corsetry class reminds me a little of Cedar-Riverside. There are a million different cultures. Here's a mural.

Then I biked to Hyde Park. It was the most gorgeous day. Ah to be a seagull with nothing to do but eat fish and chill on the roof-pole.

Here is something I scrawled in my sketchbook while I was there: "What an absolute glory of a day! Perfect sun, tugging breeze, and nowhere on God's green earth I'd rather be than Hyde Park. This will have to be a regular thing. The water is so ridiculously blue. The birdies bathe in it, flapping. People are doing all the things that should be done in a park: kissing, biking, talking, sleepings, sitting waiting, wishing, longboarding. A sanctuary, like a library.
P.S. there's a paddleboat full of French kids who yell like little children whenever the big Canada geese fly near them.

That was on Wednesday.

Today, we went to various things to do with London Fashion Week, namely went to Topshop to hear the cool Charlotte Taylor talk about starting your own line, producing collections, manufacturing, how to find retailers, press, so on, so forth. She has awkwardly adorable prints, one of which she was wearing. She was so kind as to let me take a photo:

there was a cycle race

hhhaha side note i'm now watching some vid about an entire family who plays World of Warcraft....

anyway, after that we went to Somerset House on the Strand, stared at all the expensively dressed people, went and had dinner at some little cafe, sat there till they closed, then went back to Somerset (which is one of the venues for shows during London Fashion Week) and asked to register for the show screenings they do, and found they were about to close, though there were still lots of people there. Then we asked where the bathroom was, and sneeked right past the guard fellows into the bathroom, drank some free champagne, watched a screening of Cassette Playa by Carrie Munden's SS 2012 collection (May I note that though the clothes were very cool, the word intelligent was misspelled on the brochure, and my inner grammar geek giggled) and then went and people-watched in the lobby till they started kicking people out. it was close quarters so I took no photos of all those ridiculously well dressed people, and was wary of asking them as we really didn't have any sort of pass or anything we should have had......but it was a bunch of cool peacocks, believe me.

And it was next to the river and it was preeedddy....

also, here is this very blurry picture illustrating your trend for the day: ombre'd hair. it has the potential to look cool, and the potential to look like you have the longest roots in the world.

und zat, chilllens, is all for today. i have many a thing to do, tomorrow, yea, even tonight.
groodbai.
-Lu