We then walked over to Kensington, and went to my old house in Campden Hill Gardens. Kensington is older than its neighbors and has a more varied housing stock, with a big section consisting of plain Georgian townhouses in a surprising variety of pastel colors, as well as the more typical blocks with Victorian flourishes. I managed to find a street where houses adopted a depressing grey brick aesthetic, but inside it was quintessentially English, tall ceilings, creaky floors, drafty and with terrible plumbing, all decorated in high chintz.

We then had lunch at Kensington Place, one of my favorite London restaurants, quite modern and buzzy with the best scallops in the world.

After we unpacked, by which I mean opened our suitcases, looked around and decided there was no room for us to unpack, then left the suitcases on the bed to be dealt with later, we went downstairs for a surprisingly good breakfast. I say surprisingly because meals at these kinds of hotels always have an edge, which is generally not a good thing for breakfast, but Ian recognizes this and his hotels always have an easygoing breakfast, good music and a pretty traditional menu. We then headed out into the rainy London weather, targeting my old neighborhood of Kensington. First stop was the Saturday Portobello Road market, just north of Kensington in Notting Hill. As usual it was swamped with tourists, but it's a fun place to kill a couple of hours, browsing through the antiques and collectibles stands lining the street for about a mile. While most visitors are antique hunting, Somchai brushed all that aside and ventured to the far end of the market, where they sell vegetables, which he found inexplicably fascinating. Almost everywhere we travel, we end up spending an inordinate amount of time looking at vegetables thanks to Somchai.