London Diaries #5

It's Wednesday night again, which means that we reached the end of my fifth week in London. This is hard to believe, because time passed by so fast, and at the moment the weeks I have left here are less than the ones I have spent in the city by far. But I don't want to let this make me feel nostalgic before it's time to, so I'm going to try and make the most out of the time I have left in the city.

Last Thursday I actually stayed at home to complete a very important task: I finally finished writing the first chapter of my dissertation! It's 33 pages long, and I felt proud that I managed to finish a part of my thesis that required so much work. Now I still have three chapters left, but I feel like I'm one step closer to my goal.

The following day I decided to celebrate this achievement, so, for lunch, I went to the Veg Box Café, which is a vegan café near where I live. I always see it when I take the bus, and I was so excited to finally try it. I ordered the full English breakfast, which is something that I really wanted to try, as it has all the components of the traditional English breakfast, but in a vegan version. It was very very delicious, and I can't wait to come back, because there were so many interesting plates on the menu. 

After lunch, I went for a walk in Regent's Park. I had not yet explored this part, and I found it beautiful, especially because now the leaves on the trees are all yellow and orange, and the roads in the park have a magical autumn vibe. Afterward, I went to visit the British Museum. I think everyone has heard of it, and it's the most famous museum in London, and I too was so excited to finally see it. The museum is enormous, and it takes so much time to visit it, in fact, I still have to come back to see the first floor. I stayed there for more or less three hours, because I really wanted to read all the descriptions, in order to really understand the story behind what was exposed. 

My favorite rooms were the ones dedicated to Africa and Asia, as I never had the chance to visit those continents and it was really interesting to discover a bit about their cultures. I also loved the reading room: it is so majestic, and inside there are the plaques of the writers who used to visit it, among which was the one of Virginia Woolf, my favorite writer of all time. It was such an honor to be able to visit the place where she worked on some of the books that I read.

On Saturday, it was Halloween! I was so excited about this day, because it's my favorite holiday. In Italy, we don't celebrate it much, which is really a pity, so I was super happy to finally be able to experience it for real. In the afternoon, i went to Notting Hill, because I knew I would find Halloween decorations outside the houses of the neighborhood. It was my first time visiting the area, and I think it has become one of my favorites in London. I went to the most significant spots, like the Portobello Road market and The Notting Hill Bookshop, and I took a long stroll around the whole neighborhood in order to see the colorful houses. The sun sets early nowadays, so, as I was walking around, I managed to witness the most beautiful and colorful sunset, which made this experience even more magical.

Afterward, the atmosphere was perfect for Halloween, and, in fact, I started seeing little kids going around in the streets to do trick or treat, and so many people wearing creative costumes. Since I never celebrated it properly, it was really magical to experience something like this, and you could feel the Halloween atmosphere everywhere. I walked for a while and I reached Kensington, where you can find the majority of the decorated houses. It was amazing to see everything they had prepared: there were carved pumpkins everywhere, spiderwebs, big spiders on the walls, witches and ghosts staring at the street from the windows or hanging in the garden. And the streets were so full of people all wearing the most original costumes. I really wished I could have experienced this as a kid, because it seemed so magical, but I was so grateful to be able to even just take a stroll to witness it now. It was getting a little late, so I took the bus to go back home and I celebrated eating some baos that I bought, that were pumpkin shaped. They were so cute and well made, and they were delicious.

(By the way, I didn't insert pictures of the food because there is not much space, but you can see them in another post ( here ) where I talked about the vegan recipes I cooked this week!)

On Sunday I decided to stay at home, I was kinda tired, and I also needed to do the usual things like cleaning the house and doing my laundry, then I kept working on my dissertation and had a few videocalls with my friends and family in Italy.

On Monday it was time to start again with my library visits. In the morning I went to the SOAS library in order to consult a document about ecofeminism in South Korea, which I needed for my dissertation. I spent the whole morning there doing research, and then I came back to write from home in the afternoon.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I actually did the same thing, because on Tuesday I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to come back: instead of going to Bloomsbury to study at the library, I decided to go to a library near where I live, which is the Paddington library (where I hadn't had the chance to go yet), and on the way there I took a stroll following the Regent's Canal and I went to see Little Venice. All the colorful boats and the canal are so beautiful to see, and it's really stunning now that the trees are starting to change their colors, and you can admire all shades of yellow and orange leaves. I suggest you to visit this area if you're in London during autumn, because it's a very beautiful and relaxing stroll, and it makes you feel like you're somewhere magical. I also loved this new library, because it has some tables in front of the windows where you can sit and get a glimpse of what is happening outside when you're studying.

This fifth week ends here, and I'm very happy that I managed to go out more, and visit some museums and neighborhood for the first time. The list of places I still want to go to is long, and I feel like I have less and less time to enjoy the city before going back to Italy, but I will try to balance all my commitments in order to get the most out of the four weeks I have left here.