London - Day 6

In which a mission is accomplished and a pier is burned.

Today we got up and wanted to head out of the city. We chose Brighton which is an hour train ride away. This was a nice 50’s-esque pier town. It had a labyrinth of street full of quirky stores. It was quite windy and chilly so I bout a new hoodie as I didn’t pack anything with long sleeves!

This became a glorious day when we turned a corner and I accomplished Mission #2: we saw an actual Banksy! This one was even protected with a sheet of Plexiglas. Often if the Banksy is on a side of a building, the owner will actually want to protect it as it draws a lot of people in. In Brighton we saw a a gallery of really cool art and they had some limited prints of Banksy that they were selling for a mere 9000 pounds! The actually told us that awhile ago they sold a Banksy print for 300 pounds and more recently it sold for 103,000 pounds! So you can see why building owners would want to protect an actual Banksy work of art!

That reminds me of a story that Mike told me about Salvador Dali. Apparently he would invite his friends out to dinner at a posh restaurant, eating and drinking whatever they wanted. When the bill came, Dali would write a cheque and then before handing it to the waiter, Dali would make a doodle on the back. The owners were so excited to have an original Dali work of art that they never cashed the cheque, but instead had it framed! Now that’s cool!

We went out on the pier and they have ride and carnival games . We played one game where you drop 10p into the machine and it falls through various spaces and offers some ‘strategy’ through an LCD screen with a matching gem type game. Silly but fun. Throughout the day Mike was playing text tag with Sian (remember her from Day 1?) Seems like there were setting something up for Saturday night...that’s nice! We walked along the beach of the Channel through the cool but strong wind. We saw the old pier that had burned down and then found our way to a restaurant that Mike remembered being good. I hadn’t had fish and chips yet so this was my opportunity. It was tasty.

Speaking of tasty, here's where we got all our hot jellied eels.

That was about it for Brighton and we headed back to good ole Londontown.





Later that night, Chris came over and we played more board games (this time with 3 players!). Un until 2 am! We were staying up until 3:30am because that’s when I had to get a taxi to the airport to get my flight to Greece This is another example of why inexperienced travellers shouldn’t book flights online. I’m sure a travel agent would have noticed how ridiculous that would be. Not only that but it wasn’t even a direct flight. I had to fly to Warsaw, Poland first! I didn’t land until 3pm in Athens. But playing board games with Mike and Chris all night was great fun. We played 3 player Hog the Remote (a Bamboozle Brothers game). I mention this as we had never figure out how to do a 3 player version of this game...but here in London – we figured it out and it was great fun!