Walking Tour: Trinity Buoy Wharf to Greenwich
I started a new job on Monday – yes, my days as ‘lady of leisure’ is officially over. That said, being a working lady makes me appreciate the weekend so much more! So Kenz and I took full advantage of the weekend, starting with Dinner for Six Strangers Thursday evening organized by the UC-UK alumni association. Our host, also a 2004 Berkeley alumna now a graduate student at Princeton on gap year in London, invited six strangers over to her flat near Brick Lane for yummy Vietnamese food. We miss Vietnamese food, so much that we made our way up to Hoxton/Shoreditch for a hot bowl of pho at Song Que on Kingsland Road a few weekends ago. It was a great evening reminiscing on wonderful memories of our days at Berkeley, Davis, UCLA, and UCSB.
Inspired from Thursday night’s dinner, we invited our Fulham friends over for lunch on Saturday at our flat. While we have hosted many out-of-town guests (the below post will attest to that), we never had dinner guests or London friends over at our place, which is such a shame since I really enjoying cooking. The other ethnic cuisine we miss here in London is Mexican food. It is certainly gaining popularity over the last few years, as evident with new several Mexican restaurants popping up around town. We needed a Mexican fix, so I made chicken enchiladas for lunch. It was good fun and we look forward to more dinner guests in the coming months!
This afternoon, my planner friend organized an architectural tour of Container City in Trinity Buoy Wharf. The history of the Docklands is quite interesting – I won’t get into details, but the Docklands was one of England’s most prosperous ports, but the area was completely destroyed by successive bombings during World War II. As the name implies, Container City are highly versatile yet affordable accommodation for a range of uses including live-work, artist studios, recording studio, and so forth. And the best part, Container City is built from recycled shipping containers stacked in a ziggurat fashion. The Trinity Buoy Wharf affords some amazing views of O2 and Canary Wharf. Really interesting architectural tour!
Later in the afternoon, we went across the River Thames to leafy Greenwich. I couldn’t ask for a better day to hang out in Greenwich; the weather was amazing! We hiked up to the Royal Observatory where the prime meridian divides the western and eastern hemisphere. From the Royal Observatory is also an excellent vantage point of Canary Wharf and the National Maritime Museum. All in all, it was a great weekend with great company of Californian expats and their British partners. =)
