Day 11 - Thrifting & Street Markets: Chelsea’s perfect day
Pretend you’re Chelsea - what would you want to do while on holiday? If you guessed going thrift shopping & buying weird Caribbean food from a street market, you’d be right.
16/11/2023
Another morning of early starts, coffee and work. This is becoming slightly less easy as our jetlag is well and truly gone. No longer are we waking up before our alarm, but still getting up keen for the day ahead!
After work, we caught the bus to Hammersmith, but this time, instead of catching another bus to get us into the city, we hopped off and headed to wander the borough of Hammersmith. Chelsea had heard there are good thrift shops here, as well as seen a couple of other spots we thought we might visit.
Before leaving the bus station, we decided we needed to try Pret Coffee. For those of you who haven’t been to the UK before, Pret A Manger coffee shops are everywhere! And they are always busy! They serve coffee (duh) and also have pre-packaged meals that people on their way to work can grab & go.
After lining up behind about 10 people, we get to the front, Chelsea orders an almond latte, is told they don’t do almond milk, so resorts to a regular milk latte (good for me, as I can’t stand almond milk, so now I can have some too).
Now I’m not saying it’s terrible coffee… but as Mum would say “nfm” (not for me). We miss our Aussie coffee shops!
After leaving the station and seeing a cute Christmas decorative train at the front entrance (it really is cool how much everyone gets into Christmas over here - even the “cool” hipster bars have Christmas lights, baubles or wreaths up), we headed along King St to do some shopping.
We stopped in at Primark (the Big W of England) for some more thermal basics, as well as about 10 thrift shops along the street, where Chelsea picked up 2 new coats (she’s been a bit cold this week with the temp dropping).
After we shopped til we dropped (or until I got sick of it and was in a bad mood haha), we walked back towards the bus station and managed to find ourselves in a pop-up street food market surrounded by about 100 hungry business workers all on their lunchbreak (would you believe not many tourists visit Hammersmith haha).
After scouting out the many options (they all looked so good!), I settled on a mixed box from an Indian Stall, that had 2 curries, rice & an onion bhaji. Chelsea being Chelsea, had to get something weird, so she came away from the market with a Caribbean curried goat, plantain pieces & a fried dumpling (that even after eating it, we didn’t know exactly what it was).
After ordering the food, we realised that there were no seats... anywhere, and it was starting to sprinkle rain. We took shelter on a garden bed edge outside of a large office building and started to dig in. Both meals were sooo good (I think at this point we prefer street food over restaurant food). After scoffing some down,, we packed up the food (yes we even had leftovers), and got on the bus home.
Chels was worn out from her day of shopping, so went off for a nap, and I headed out along Brentford's side of the Thames River to take some photos (in reducing light & slight rain).
After this, we polished off the street food leftovers, wrote one of these blogs, and had another early night (8pm - our early nights are getting a bit later).
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Cheers,
Matt & Chels
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