New discoveries in London: Serpentine Gallery

It's been a while since I last went to London. Too long, I now discovered.

I don't know if the city has changed, or I have changed, or I have just previously visited the touristy places, but this time I really fell in love with the city.

Exciting art galleries, beautiful people, great street markets, cool cafés, vegetarian food, hipsters creating nice urban activities - oh, I need to go soon again.

One new discovery was the Serpentine Gallery at the Kensington Garden. For fifteen years, they have invited an architect to create a pavilion outside the gallery. In the past, there has been a lot of famous names who have participated, Zaha Hadid, Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Gehry and Ai Weiwei to name but a few.

This time it was a Spanish architect duo selgascano. I let the pictures of the pretty colorful pavilion speak for themselves.

It was perhaps easy to fall in love with London just on this Saturday as the weather was great, hot and sunny. However, the pavilion was more like a greenhouse. Unbearable to stay long inside. But I'm sure that on a typical grey London day, this pavilion will bring a lot of joy to the people visiting it.

Hoarding for autumn

I arrived to England yesterday morning. It was freezing in York. I needed to take a long bath (though I don't complain, there's some luxury into it) in the evening trying to warm up myself. And this despite the fact that the first thing I did in York was to buy an umbrella and a cardigan.

After equipping myself for the British autumn weather (and well, after some conference stuff), I went to discover Marks and Spencer's food department and purchased some nice souvenirs: jam, crumpets, cookies, tea, fudge, and some odd but super delicious Welsh cakes (already gone!). Today I continued with some more cookies and chutney in Bettys, which seems to be the top place to have afternoon tea in York (at least their take-away scones were fantastic). 

Though England is a bit like Switzerland - it doesn't move me much emotionally - I love the grocery stores and the little delis here. I might have even got a bit carried away with my shopping, but after building up this hoard of English goodies, the autumn is very welcome in Helsinki as well. How nice to eat an onion chutney sandwich in a park and watch the leaves fall down from the trees.