18 July 2019
The big park
Regents park is kind of hidden away but absolutely enormous
Today I went to somewhere near Birmingham and back. The original plan was to drive, but upon checking the traffic situation, that changed to train. It was only about an hour on the train to my destination, but a return ticket cost about $170 AUD! Outrageous.
Despite heading to the great unwashed north, I managed not not get stabbed, so now I am a statistical outlier. Also god damn it spellchecker, outlier is a word! AND SPELLCHECKER IS A WORD TOO! The red underline I see when typing this that identifies spelling errors is near on useless.
Anyway, a day on the train and trapped in an office meant I needed over 20k steps this evening, in limited time. To the maps I went, pondering nearby options, there was a huge park, Regents park, very near my hotel. How have I not been there before? It is absolutely enormous. For whatever reason it does not border any main road, you have to go 1 road back to find an entrance.
The park exceeded my expectations, and allowed me to run around and get lots of my steps.
It even had free bathrooms.
After running about aimlessly in the unexpected unseasonal sunshine, it was time to find another healthy dinner, then photograph some garbage, then come back to my hotel and eat some fruit salad. Fairly standard for London.
I must admit, its a bit boring! And thats because there are no contrasts. I know I am working and not on holidays, but when I normally travel I get a day and a night, and I get huge density of people in cities and when hiking I get contrasting absolute isolation. In both London and Paris everything is the most median percentile of everything, at all times.
Regents Park has a whole series of different areas, this is the formal area.
Here is more formal area, that dude up ahead is Japanese and I think he was talking to himself.
The non formal area is a large open grass area that you are allowed to walk on. It felt wrong to walk on grass after getting yelled at by commandos in Paris protecting the grass.
The boat pond. It was very bright this afternoon despite forecast of epic rain.
More pond. You can rent deck chairs by the hour, or buy a season ticket for 120 pounds! BARGAIN.
Blue green algae.
Queen Mary's rose garden. Apparently she still visits once a month to do an inspection.
Dinner was again healthy and vegetarian. The soup is a Thai lentil concoction, the salad is Mexican fiery something with sweet potato. I therefore ate Thaixican.
NON BINARY.
Tonights random street for no apparent reason.
Looks painful.
When you have no bins in your city, you have piles of bags. They make for a beautiful modern art installation on every corner.
This is a university. You are allowed in and can wander about without getting shot at.
And here is where you can line up and pay 5 pounds to appear in a spot where they filmed Harry Potter. Over 100,000 people a day do so, generating half a million pounds of revenue into J K Rowlings wizard empire per day (figures may be completely made up).