East End Market Tour

So as each blog post comes with the empty promise of posting more frequently I finally got the chances to sit down and make another one of these. February put the study back in study abroad, but with it brought some really incredible experiences; particularly the IES Scotland trip. Scotland will be getting a video and probably a post or two of its own. Scotland was awesome. This post however comes in response to a comment I received from someone yesterday. This person was describing different study abroad experiences and suggested that it might be tougher to capture "beauty" in London as opposed to a more exotic location. I can totally see where they are coming from, but I realized I'd been sitting on these photos that totally contradicted what they were saying. Is this a beautiful landscape shot? No, wait for Scotland. But these photos are from our tour of the East End Markets as well as Brick Lane. This is a collection of just a fraction of the great street art that I was able to see (note to self go on a tour of Banksy's work). It's worth mentioning that I'm a true believer in market food. It's cheap, tasty and there's lots of it, so I may have an ulterior motive (I think I just found out it’s ulterior and not alterior – guess I don’t use that word much) in advocating the exploration of London's Markets. But when you stop to notice people turning brick walls into art I think you get a whole new appreciation for city-living. Obviously I didn't create any of the art below, just photographed it, and no I don't know who made it or what they named it so the names are all what I've been calling them in my head. 

Side Note: How have bagels not come to the UK yet? Sure people will tell you to go visit the 24 hour beigel shops on Brick Lane but that's like playing the tambourine for someone who has never heard music before. Sure it's "music" but only in the loosest definition of the word. How can parliament govern a country that has no bagels? You just know the royal family has them flown in or they'd quit. More importantly America needs to step up its bagel exportation game. This may seem like a weird point of contention I'm having but in a country that has almost all the same foods as the US it's mind-blowing that you can't get a real bagel. I once googled where to get one in the UK, there were FORUMS of discussion about this and you know what the inevitable conclusion in ALL of them was? "I learned to bake my own." Well that is something I just won't do.