Judie and I had a pretty relaxing weekend. On Friday Night, after my finishing-the-hat day, I met Judie in Shad Thames for dinner. Shad Thames is a beautiful area of renovated warehouses on the River, just East of Tower Bridge. We looked at flats there back in July and the whole area was so lovely that we really thought seriously about living there. But visiting on a Friday night made me realize that we’d made the right choice. There just isn’t that much to do there and that it would have been a real pain for Judie to get to her office. But it sure is pretty.

After doing very little for most of Saturday, we remembered that someone we met at the New Unity Congregation was performing in Soho, so we called over and bought tickets and then went to the West End. The show was called “Vesper Time” and was a one-woman show by Stacy Makishi, a standup comedian/performance artist originally from Hawaii. It was interesting and strange, sometimes moving and often very funny, containing elements of Moby Dick, Demi Moore, the movie Ghost, Tracy Chapman, pop songs, sodomy with God and stories about her life and faith. At one point, I got pulled up on the stage for a portion about her relationship with her father, who had left her family when she was little. (I had an intuition as she started talking about her father that I was going to end up in the show. Well, Judie has been after me to do some theater while I am here.) It was a fun evening. Soho is a madhouse on a Saturday night. Everything just spills out into the streets. We went to a seafood/tapas restaurant at which you are presented with an iPad when you are seated and place your orders by clicking what you want and sending your choice to the kitchen. Someone them brings it out to you (wine and drinks works the same way). So we didn’t really have a waiter. It was a little odd, but it worked pretty well for tapas. The ceviche was very good and they had olive stuffed with tuna and then deep fried.

On Sunday, after church, we went to the Columbia Road Flower Market. It is pretty near to our flat, in an area where I’d never walked. Flower markets are inherently lovely. One of my best memories of my trip around India with James was visiting the flower market in Calcutta, which was incredibly huge and vibrant. The Columbia Road market is only held on Sundays and ends a little after 2:00. We had been told that if you get there near the end, the vendors start reducing their prices to get rid of their flowers. Since we couldn’t make it there until close to 2:00 because we’d gone to church over in Newington Green, we got there at the right time to find out that it was true. The flowers and plants were all very inexpensive and the scene was great. All these guys yelling “Flowers for a Fiver”. The problem was that everyone else seemed to know about the cheap prices at the end of the day and the place was impossibly packed. The flower stalls line both side of a narrow street, with maybe four feet behind them on the sidewalk so you could get into the stores. The result was that there was a pathway up the middle of the street that was no more than  six to seven feet feet wide in some places (maybe even less), down which hundreds of people were jostling, shopping, haggling, taking pictures, lugging plants and looking for bargains. It was pretty crazy, but worth the effort. We ended up buying three bunches of flowers, a heather plant, a lily plant and a cyclamen plant, all for £20. (We also bought a butter dish in one of the stores. Butter doesn’t come in sticks here. So the butter dishes are shaped differently to permit them to hold the larger rectangles of butter.)

Later in the day, we went to the Ace Hotel to see the end of Philippe’s Hip Hatchet tour. He was playing a one-hour set in the lobby (in exchange for a room) and, unlike my prior visit there that I wrote about earlier, not everyone in the lobby was lost to the reality around them, staring into their laptops (although some were). People thought we were Philippe’s parents and gave us seats, which was amusing. We hung around, drinking too much beer and talking to Philippe’s friends after he finished. (Judie tried to go back to the flat to do some work, but Commercial Street was completely closed due to a car accident.) It was nice to spend some time socializing with people.