For this week's installment of the Curator's Corner, I am going to bore you regale you with tales from my trip to London. I'm glad to be back on this side of the pond, but it was awesome!! I love London because you get the feel of a really cool European city but there's no language barrier. Anywho, here are some highlights.
I'll start with why we ended up there in the first place – the conference. Here I am on the way there.
Here's the Graduate Centre:
Here I am with the very nice panel moderator who was helping me set up my presentation. I have to say, the only reason I posted this pic was so you could see my shoes (Nine West Abalene – I thought these high heeled loafers went well with my J.Crew Professor blazer from a couple seasons ago…was trying to look my most professorial!)
Here I am, doin' my thang. I had no idea that my husband was surreptitiously taking pictures! He said he wanted to capture me presenting but didn't want to distract me, so he was quite sneaky with that iPhone of his.
Here's the title slide my husband made (he layed out the whole presentation and it looked fantastic!):
Now onto the fun stuff – shopping and FOOD!! Later that night we went to Yo! Sushi at the top of Harvey Nic's. It's a super cute conveyer belt sushi place.
Then we celebrated the conference with champagne at the bar at Harvey Nic's (I had the pink champagne):
This is where our hotel was, on Sloane Street – quite nice.
One day we ventured out into Notting Hill, mostly because I wanted to see the biggest London location of my favorite store.
On our last day we visited this private park. Our hotel supplied the key so we were able to get in and enjoy.
We also visited the V & A museum. I will not be recapping that because it was honestly the worst museum experience of my life. Blah.
Anyway, our last activity of the trip was having tea at the Chesterfield Mayfair hotel:
I got some weird flowering tea – it almost looked like a spider!
A couple other things that may or may not be of interest:
1. In addition to the chocolates I got at Harrod's, we also visited the Ladurée there no less than 4 times to get macarons. I think the reason we went back so many times is that we were trying to stick to small quantities, but we would devour them so quickly we'd end up going back for another fix! I do hope we take a trip to NYC soon so I can check out the first U.S. location of this highly addictive store.
2. We visited another great chocolate shop, L'Artisan du Chocolat. I think they and Melt made my favorite chocolates out of all the ones I tried, although William Curley also had some interesting flavors.
3. A note to London souvenir stores: please start selling soccer jerseys for kids younger than 10 years old. I went into at least 5 of these shops and none had a small enough size for my little nephew. 🙁
4. We ate quite a few times at both Pret a Manger and Wagamama, neither of which is readily available in the U.S. for reasons that I cannot fathom. Both have very tasty inexpensive food but Pret is mainly relegated to NYC at the moment (with only a handful of locations in DC and Chicago) and Wagamama's only 3 U.S. locations are in Boston (rumors of one opening in DC have been going on for years.) In my opinion, these delicious chains should be as ubiquitous as Starbucks.
So that about sums it up. I want to go back already!
Have you ever visited London? If so, did you like it and what were your favorite things about it? And if not, do you want to visit?