A Trip to the Portobello Road Saturday Market

The Portobello Road Market happens every Saturday and stretches for block after block. It's the biggest in London. After the first several blocks of everything from antiques to tourist stuff, it turns into blocks of food. We learned last time what a madhouse it gets to be--solid people as far as you can see. So I went early with another prof who is an expert on pop music and looks for very specific stuff from dealers he has dealt with for years. Besides, this guy knows the bus system way better than I do. The Tube system is a piece of cake--the bus routes scare me.

See, this is good--early--not so many people. I know, you think it looks crowded, but not so. Wait until about 11:00. Trying to come back up the street from the other end where I had bravely gone early meant swimming upstream against all the tardy souls who had slept late at their hotels. I have a deepened appreciation for salmon and their upstream adventures.

These are optical instruments selling for hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds. Portobello Road is also lined with antique, book, and other shops all the time, so you can leap over the stalls in the street and go into them as well. I found a great 18th century engraving there in one of them. Some of these buildings have stalls with individual sellers as well, much like Hazel--except slightly more interesting, to say the least.

The quality and selection of fresh fruit here in England is fantastic. I can go into a market and but strawberries that taste like real strawberries, not those tough, tasteless little golfballs that I get at Kroger. Not only that, but they have two or three different named varieties of strawberries from which to choose. I would have bought exotic breads and lots of fruit from these vendors, but the thought of shopping the rest of the day only to discover when I got back to my lodgings that I had a bag of squashed fruit and flat bread didn't really catch my fancy.

See all the lavender here? It's everywhere, and it's big and lush. They use it for low hedges. I discovered that purple Butterfly Bush grows wild along the railroad tracks. And it grows almost twice as tall as it does at home. The hostas look like shrubs in some of these gardens. I can't stand it; I'm so jealous.

There are all kinds of street performers along the way.

History just sort of oozes out of the walls in London. Places where the famous lived are marked with little round blue plaques on the walls of buildings. I just randomly looked up and noticed this one for for where George Orwell lived--the guy who wrote the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four." I did go on to do some more shopping this same day, including a place called Primark on Oxford Street, which is the street most known for its stores. Primark is sort of reasonable, which accounts for why going there is like the Portobello sardine experience, except indoors.