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.

We stayed at the St. Martin's Lane Hotel, a very hip (at the time) hotel owned by Ian Schraeger, the inventor and key booster of the hip hotel, for better or worse. I was quite into this type of hotel for a while, but, like most of the market (and Ian himself) have pretty much moved on. The lobby is fun, like in all these places, lots of odd pieces like a giant fishbowl, big gold teeth and a huge chess set, for no particular reason. Disco music everywhere, including the lifts where you're also followed by a big pair of eyes on a tv screen. It also has the Asia de Cuba restaurant usually found in Schraeger's hotels, and a trendy bar. And the staff is very easy on the eyes. As an aside, I like the format and menu of the Asia de Cuba chain, particularly the New York one, but I know a lot of people find it tired and pointlessly fusion-y, so I suspect I'm in the minority here. Anyway, of course you know where this is leading, and that is that the rooms are tiny, nicely decorated, but tiny. It was quite a challenge for two adults with excess amounts of luggage to stay here for a week, but we survived. St. Martin's Lane Hotel-(7), Room-4, Facilities-8, Service-4, Wow-3 (because I'm a sucker for the overdesigned lobby). We didn't take many photos of the lobby because we were pretending to be too cool so we'd fit in, but the photo with Somchai in it was taken in our room, and I think you can see about half the room in the photo.