Saturday 15th July 2023
Another gem of a day. I really go to sleep feeling extremely grateful and appreciative of my life. This morning I woke at 4 and saw the blue light of dawn crack the night sky. There was also an ambulance siren wake up call. I lay quietly, just being there, and loved it. I'd planned to meet my friend at 9.30am so there was no rush to get awake.
However, I ended up rushing out the door because I got lost in cyber space again and I realised too late that I hadn't charged my 'Sim card with local data' phone. The underground train was sweltering and loud so I closed my ears and smiled inwardly at this experience compared to the forest sounds a few days ago on my run. The urban jungle can be harder to navigate with throngs of people and fortunately we seemed to only meet up with the masses a couple of times.
Meeting my Johannesburg friend in London was exciting. She moved here in March this year and it feels surreal that I'm meeting up with all these Saffa friends this side of the equator. She is looking fabulous and the move has done her well. It's daunting moving to such a hectic city on one's own and I'm so proud of Brigitte.
The day saw us stomp over 16km which was fantastic albeit tiring. I don't know how I ever ran marathons. My tummy started playing up early on, but fortunately a very posh hotel security guy let me in to use their bathroom for which I was very grateful and that it settled quickly after this so we could eat yummy pancakes. It was so windy, the hired bikes blew over ( the weather-not me, haha!) We had some stunning quiet pockets of streets too so we had everything today.
There's many highlights from my day but I'm just going to mention three.
The Cross Bones Graveyard, which is a mass Graveyard for the 'unsavoury'. You can read more here, we stumbled onto it.
Then the morphs dotted around London are an excellent way to get youngsters interested in tours. It's like a form of geo caching, so they can track the art on their phones, it highlights causes and showcases artists and generates tourism. Win-win. Not that London needs help to get the masses here... we saw the artist Clarke Reynolds who was extremely gracious in chatting with us and letting us take a photo with him.
Brigitte told me about the chewing gum artist on the Millennium bridge which we had to see. It's amazing and I kept stopping suddenly, when I spotted the art after Brigitte had pointed out how to look for it. Another amazing artist, Ben Wilson, who you can read more on here.
In this day and age, it's hard to be a stand out creative with so much talent everywhere. I love being exposed to seeing it all. And of course, my love for stones and mortar continues to feed my soul.
But I've been resting my soles since I got back at 4, haha. Travelling can be hard work!
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