Sunday, November 15, 2020

Not much to do

There isn't really much to blog about these days. The UK implemented a second national lockdown, which isn't really a full lockdown but just a partial one. Unlike before, schools are still open, and people can still go to work if they feel that staying at home is affecting their mental health. For me, personally, my life hasn't been affected too much. Without working right now, I stay at home normally anyway, and I just go for walks in the morning and can still get my groceries. Parks are still open as well as several street markets, so it's not like there is nothing to do.

One thing that has made life here much more pleasant and manageable has been the delivery of our sea shipment from Canada. We had artwork for the bare and large walls, books to read as I had run out of stuff to read that I brought in my suitcase, and additional kitchen items from our pantry as well as all my baking equipment and spices. All those things have made a huge difference to being more comfortable at home and having many more cooking options. But what has made it more comfortable for going out was the bulk of our clothing! We had vacated our house at the end of June and did not imagine it would take us two months to get to England. We also didn't expect that our sea shipment would arrive two months after we did, so all I had brought were a couple of light summer cardigans along with a summer wardrobe and a couple of pairs of jeans. The fall weather here is crisp enough, and I didn't want to go out and buy a bunch of clothes when I know I have enough clothes coming! It was a long wait, but thankfully, we were able to get our stuff delivered the day before the lockdown began.

The delivery also included our bikes, so we've been on a couple of bike rides since getting them, and it has been really nice to cycle around central London. The city has set up what are called Cycle Superhighways, which are well-marked bike lanes. It makes cycling around safer and easier, especially as we are getting used to cycling on the other side of the road and learning the hand signalling system here, which is different from what's used at home. Anyway, I believe these cycle highways are at least 100km or 200km worth of cycling pathways, or at least the plan is to make then encompass that much. We're looking forward to cycling more to commute around town as well. It will save us money on public transportation and save us time instead of walking--and keep us healthier by lowering our exposure to the Covid, not just the gaining the health benefits of physical activity itself. 


I mentioned that street markets are still open, and as a result, we decided to check one a couple of them out today. We went to Brick Lane and Spitalfields, taking the bus so that we could sightsee in the city along the way--and also it's only one bus as opposed to two trains, again, limiting our exposure to germs and what not. We were mainly looking for street food for lunch, and we found a good selection of it around both markets. It's a really neat place for people-watching. There is pretty much any form of expression here so that you never have to feel like you stick out in terms of fashion, as I've learned. We saw a couple where the man had female gender expression and his partner was a woman with male gender expression, to an older man wearing a 70s vibe tracksuit and do-rag even though he's not black, to people with lots of interesting styles of apparel. The streets themselves are colourful with lots of graffiti but also some street art.


In addition, there are street signs in Bengali. I didn't get a sign of one of the older ones in metal, just one that is painted or printed. In any case, I was confused about why this is, and I came across this blog by a group of history students at the University of London who discuss the background. Apparently Bengalis have been migrating to London since the early 1600s, and while it's not mentioned as to why this is, we did notice that the area looks like it was historically designated as an area for textiles creation, and upon further research, it seems that Spitalfields was specifically known for its silk. I came across another blog that talks about the silk industry in Spitalfields, and according to it, one of of the photos I took of what I thought were just pretty apartments are actually the former houses of the master weavers that are now worth millions of pounds. Who knew! Well, what I wanted to say, before I went off on a seeming tangent about textiles, is that perhaps Bengalis migrated to work in the textiles industry. Today, they are more well known for their cottons, but maybe they have always been involved in textiles of every kind, and at the time, under the beginnings of British colonisation, they might have been provided easy passage to England as cheap labourers for the silk or general textiles industry. Now that I think about it, I suddenly recall learning about a huge population of people specifically from Sylhet, Bangladesh in the UK. In a previous post from my blog when I travelled to Bangladesh, I had noticed that there were tons of Bangla people on the flight with British accents and was wondering why they were travelling to Sylhet, not thinking at the time to just do a Google search for this info. People have been coming from Sylhet to the UK for a few hundred years, as it turns out, and the largest influx from that city was in the 1970s. 

As for food, there were many Asian options. Spitalfields had options for Indian food, but Brick Lane had more East Asian foods as well as Mexican options. In fact, the signs for leaving Brick Lane are in Italian and Spanish, in addition to English. I'm not sure how authentic the Mexican places are, but I plan to go back sometime to check them out. I had Tibetan food, which is also Nepali food, a type of dumpling called momos. I haven't met a dumpling yet I didn't like--except perhaps for the sweet bean steamed dumplings, mainly because I don't like the texture. Anyway, these momos were much better than the ones I tried back in Edmonton: these ones were topped with soya sauce, vinegar, fried onions, green onions, and momo sauce, which is some kind of chili sauce with rye seeds in them.


The flavours were delicious and so addicting. I want to eat those all the time now!

Well, for not being able to do much, this is a surprisingly long post, but it's fun to explore locally, and there is a lot of history here to learn about and share. 

On an unrelated note, I wanted to mention an additional, perhaps London culture, note about Christmas trees. I rarely seen conifers in England. I've only spotted one in Battersea Park, and I assume that because probably mostly contains trees that were deliberately planted, that one was not natural to the area. However, someone is growing pine trees or some type of evergreen to be used as Christmas trees. They were actually kind of cute, like Charlie Brown Christmas trees! They were selling them in the grocery store in the plant section--they're so small that there is space to sell them indoors like that. Given the space that most people would have in a small apartment or old-school small house that isn't open concept, you'd be hard pressed to find space to put up a large Christmas tree, so these ones just make sense. It just looks so odd when we're used to seeing much larger trees at home! We're thinking possibly getting one later in the year as we would have space for a small one. It would definitely make things look so festive around our place!