Welcome to London

I was shocked to find that the Dallas airport had a most magnificent blue glass sculpture in my departure terminal. Imagine rings of concave glass panels of varying heights and tints arranged sort of like an onion blossom, but with room in between layers for children to noisily run in circles to the center. My departure was pleasant, even if the flight itself wasn't particularly.

Arielle met me at the station and kindly escorted me back to her 4th floor flat. After a refreshing shower I felt more like a person and was ready to face the significant amount of day left before I could sleep, which I was looking forward to, because naturally, sleeping on the plane was unsuccessful. Arielle's neighborhood isn't exactly ghetto, she says everyone is well-behaved, but there are English versions of housing projects and lots of graffiti. The graffiti is of varying qualities, but there is a particularly lovely collection to be seen on a walk down the canal near the flat.The big mural says "Killing yourself in a bid to get free." The letters of FREE are filled in with lovely patterns as well as coloring.

We were on our way to a lovely, but kinda hipster, little cafe where my coffee was pretty and my bacon sammich was huge.
Creep powerbox huh?
And then there was lots of lounging about and getting to know the area better. ...And eating of A Roast. I learned that A Roast refers to more than a particular hunk of beef. It included semi-fried potatoes and parsnips, as well as boiled vegetables and a proper Yorkshire pudding, which is just a puffy cup-like egg bread thing meant to sop up gravy. Oh and the roast itself can be any kind of beast you like.
This is a sundial outside the Tower Hill tube station. Its base is surrounded by a brass depiction of the history of the city of London in brief. Significant things such as populations, wars, and of course plague, are the most frequently included bits. The city of London was struck by plague many times so the eerie skulls appear quite a lot.

The laptop is running out of juice and I'd best go to bed anyways, if I'm going to make a reasonable start tomorrow. There are lots of other things from today, mostly architectural, since I spent the day wandering around just looking.